Most industrial parks don’t include SCUBA divers in their recovery plans. But car companies and a shoe maker in Thailand – but nowhere near the ocean – had to hire divers to retrieve hard-to-replace moulds from submerged factories in November. “No one thought about such a worst-case scenario”, said one company president. “In future we will need to reconsider the flood risk.”

They sure will. Three (3) major rivers – the Chao Phraya, Lopburi and Pa Sak – converge around the industrial estates in Ayutthaya. But companies obviously decided that tax incentives and the proximity of suppliers outweighed the risks of catastrophic flooding. Or maybe they just skipped a risk assessment entirely.

Supply chain resilience strategy: don’t build a shoe-, car- or disk drive factory in a floodplain. Some companies may even avoid Thailand. Impact: if one Japanese multinational were to choose, say, Vietnam or Myanmar for its next factory, others would follow, beginning a chain of falling dominoes for Thailand – eventually. Prime Minister Shinawatra’s crisis management effort is just beginning.

• In addition to flooding and storms, risks in Asia include volcanoes, earthquakes and volcanoes with earthquakes – not generally worries in Europe or North America.

Is sexual abuse an organizational resilience issue?

It is for Pennsylvania State University, a large, multi-campus public university (“college”) of 44,000 thousand students in the eastern United States. It could be at any organization – not just a school – if one of that organization’s employees were accused of abusing vulnerable individuals, especially children. Sexual abuse of children is a “significant public health problem” in many parts of the world, including the United States.

College (university) sports are a billion-dollar business in the U.S., a source of weekend pride and prejudice for millions of Americans. The top thirty (30) college sports programs alone raked in $5 billion in revenue last year (the 2010-2011 season). Penn State’s football team generated $73 million for the school, and they don’t even pay their players.  So the business impact of losing the trust of a campus, a community or a country because of criminal sexual conduct is enormous.

If you were a trustee of an educational institution at which lurid charges of sexual abuse by an employee had publicly exploded onto every screen in the land, you’d have a right to expect the school’s administrators to have a crisis management plan, and to brief you about it.    The trustees of Penn State have hired a public relations agency, Omnicom Group’s Ketchum agency, to advise them about crisis management.  Read more... (2929 words, 1 image, estimated 11:43 mins reading time)

International Humanitarian Assistance Symposium

Dave Parsons and Jason Kelly

Most industry conferences don’t have a “Survivor Reception”, but there will be one at International Humanitarian Assistance Symposium (IHAS), 7-8 June 2012 in Miami (USA). In fact, one day is just panels of disaster survivors, including 9/11 New York and Pan Am Flight 103, and TWA Flight 800. IHAS is organized by the Family Assistance Foundation (FAF); FAF board member Jeff Morgan was Manager of Emergency Response & Contingency Planning at Delta Airlines. Check out the sponsors (bottom of the home page). A whole conference on private sector humanitarian assistance in the cruise, energy, manufacturing, retail and transportation businesses is new in organizational resilience. IHAS is affordable, too: USD 350 for two days, and even less if you register now. Miami in June? Just like a Singapore monsoon . . .

I learned about IHAS from Jeff Morgan at the Association of Asia Pacific Airlines (AAPA) Emergency Management (EM) conference in Kuala Lumpur in September 2011.

I was on a panel at AAPA EM with Dave Parsons and Jason Kelly answering the question, Are Crisis Leaders Born or Made? Our answer: both: about1/3 born, 2/3′s made. See our slides on SlideShare. We were moderated by Cathay Pacific Airways‘ Crisis Response Manager, Carrie Shiu.

The International Disaster Conference and Exposition (IDCE2012), to be held January 17-19, 2012, at the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, will bring together emergency management, homeland security and disaster industry professionals from the public and private sectors around the world to share lessons learned and forward thinking regarding the policies, procedures and best practices shaping disaster preparation, response and recovery, loss mitigation, business continuity and more. Conference speakers, exhibitors and attendees will share the latest knowledge, technologies and techniques toward the common goal of minimizing the loss of life and property in future catastrophic events.

Industry professionals can review the entire IDCE2012 program and register to attend at the IDCE website: www.internationaldisasterconference.com. To receive news on the latest developments with IDCE2012 via email, click on the “Keep up . . . join the IDCE mailing list” button on the website’s home page.

I think of organizational resilience as a chain that links security, emergency management (EM), disaster recovery, business continuity management (BCM) and crisis management. A resilient organization deploys appropriate security, has an I.T. disaster recovery plan, exercises its business continuity plan and has a separate crisis management plan.

But most organizations do not make emergency management plans, in my experience. Emergency management in the private sector is the weakest link in the resilience chain. That may be because there are substantial differences between emergency management (EM) and business continuity management (BCM) in scope, scale and skills.

Scope
One difference between EM and BCM is methodological: in any disaster, emergency management (actually, emergency response) comes before business continuity management. Emergency response precedes disaster recovery, crisis management and business continuity. When the fire alarm starts ringing, when your building starts shaking, when water begins to cover your shoes, it’s an “emergency”. It’s more than an incident, but not yet a catastrophe. There is immediate danger to life and health (IDLH) in an emergency that differentiates it from a “crisis”.  Read more... (2070 words, 0 images, estimated 8:17 mins reading time)

There is no more important long-term challenge in protecting businesses, homes and lives than bridging the knowledge gaps between what I call the “resilience professions”: business continuity, disaster response, disaster recovery, emergency management, crisis management, risk management and security. Asia is about to host the first conference I’ve seen to take on that challenge explicitly.

The 2008 International Disaster Management Conference on Public Private Partnership will bring together for the first time in Asia both public- and private-sector professionals in disaster, emergency and business continuity management as both presenters and attendees. The conference is on April 16 & 17 in Delhi, India and is endorsed by India’s National Disaster Management Authority.

In one conference you’ll be able to hear and meet senior executives from, for example, the Red Cross/Red Crescent Society, the British Standards Institute, India’s Oil Industry Safety Directorate, the Micro-Insurance Academy, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry, the US Agency for International Development International Resources Group – and the Mumbai airport. There are about twenty (20) presentations, plus India’s normal introduction and thank-you rituals.

The conference is organized by volunteers at Responsenet, an initiative of the Aidmatrix Foundation, a non-governmental organization (NGO) supported by high-tech companies. Some financial support for the conference has been given by the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM), GeoHazards International, Tata Indicom and Sphere India. Last year’s conference organized by Responsenet on supply chain for disasters drew 120 people.  Read more... (676 words, 0 images, estimated 2:42 mins reading time)

The World Conference on Disaster Management (WCDM) is the leading global gathering for emergency professionals from the public and private sectors. The speakers are from all over the world. The networking opportunities are tremendous; 1,800 attendees are expected next year. And Toronto is a spectacular place to visit in the summer.

The theme of the 18^th WCDM from June 15-18, 2008 is “Resiliency – Individual, Community and Business.” If you live in Asia, and you work in emergency response or management, business continuity, risk management, security, disaster recovery or crisis management, WCDM is an opportunity to share what you’ve learned by making a presentation.

Submit your presentation idea by December 2, 2007. You can submit your proposal online: write up to 250 words to describe your presentation, then click on “Call For Papers.”

I receive email warnings from the U.S. National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Pacific Tsunami Warning Center about earthquakes that might cause tsunami events in the Pacific Rim. The service is fast, free and helpful to emergency response authorities.

Just since late July I’ve received alerts for several earthquakes: two in the South Pacific, two in the Aleutian Islands (Alaska), the big one off the coast of Peru. The PTWC warnings are text-based so they can be received on the lowest common technology denominator, I suppose. The alerts contain no HTML links to the PTWC web site where you could see maps showing the locations of earthquakes.

So I can find it hard to place an event’s latitude and longitude in my mind – “2.7 NORTH 127.5 EAST”, for example. Most people can picture “the coast of Peru,” but I must admit I’m a bit hazy about “North Moluccan Sea.”

Where is that, anyway?

You can find out quickly and simply, and in stunning detail, in Google Earth. Download and install Google Earth (15 megabytes) onto your computer. It’s free. And sign up to receive the PTWC alerts by email. They’re free. too. Then wait for an alert message to show up in your mailbox.

Inside each alert you’ll find data for these parameters:  Read more... (479 words, 0 images, estimated 1:55 mins reading time)

Here’s an amusing 30-second television advertisement from Fidelity Investments that illuminates the benefits of contingency planning.  The spot originally ran in the United States; it’s posted on YouTube.

The premise: your investment is safe because Fidelity has a recovery plan for electric power failures.

This may be the first TV spot in the world for the benefits of business continuity planning. It’s certainly the first one I’ve ever seen, and I’ll bet it’s the first that reached a mass audience in America.

Contingency planning must be ‘ready for prime time’ if the largest mutual fund company in the United States thinks its advertising can compete with ads for beer, babes and burgers by showing investors it can keep the lights on when other companies can’t.

This is no small-change decision: advertising on “Desperate Housewives,” for example, costs USD $394,000 per minute.

Think of the future possibilities: in only 24 hours, intrepid CTU agent Jack Bauer develops a BCP to save the civilization as we know it…

Too far-fetched? Not in Hollywood…

Ladies and gentlemen, start your Tivo‘s.

I think it disgraceful that a nation that spends USD $275 million per day on rebuilding Iraq cannot clean and paint a dozen, life-saving fire stations in New Orleans in the year-and-a-half since Hurricane Katrina.

So in April I volunteered with Continuity Cares to assist for a day in repair and rehabilitation in America’s home of gumbo, jazz, Fat Tuesday – and oil refining.

Continuity Cares is the public-spirit inspiration of Bob Nakao of Continuity Insights – a controlled-circulation magazine and a genuinely-useful annual BCP conference that I attended a few days earlier – with the sponsorship of French bank BNP Paribas North America and the Sheraton New Orleans hotel.

With about 20 other people, I spent an afternoon at the District 4 firehouse in the Read Boulevard East neighborhood.  Here’s a short slide show (17 photos).

We scraped, sanded and painted the entire inside of the building, helping its firefighters whose “station” has been a trailer since August, 2005. Many of them have been living in trailers, too, because their homes were destroyed.

The firefighter in this picture shows how high the flood waters rose outside the firehouse. Inside, the water was eighteen inches (45 cm) deep – for days.

This is only the twelfth (12^th) of New Orleans’ twenty-five (25) fire stations to be repaired. Half of the city’s stations are still unusable.  Read more... (564 words, 1 image, estimated 2:15 mins reading time)