Author: Lucien Canton
Disaster Mythology in Maryland
I just received an interesting note from my friend and colleague, Rocky Lopes. It seems that the recent 3.6 earthquake in Maryland rattled a bit more than windows. Here in California, we use 5.0 earthquakes to stir our coffee, so a 3.6 would probably not be noticed in most places. However, Maryland rarely gets earthquakes, so this one got their attention. Unfortunately, according to Rocky, a lot of the information and comments making the rounds after the temblor were based on what we call disaster mythology – something very akin to folklore. These included things like the old "stand in the door" response. On the plus side, Rocky was asked to appear on a local news show and did his best to correct some of the misinformation.
There are a couple of lessons here. The first is that we truly have to be all-hazards in our planning. As we do our risk analysis, we should plan not only for the most likely event but for other possible events as well and that planning should include pre-scripted public safety announcements. Secondly, in this age of rapid communications, we need to get our message out to the public almost immediately. We can't afford to wait and then try to counter rumors and old folk tales.
Does foreseeability equal responsibility? Another lesson from BP.
Here's another for the "you can't make this stuff up" category.
One of the basics of liability is the concept that if an event is foreseeable, you need to have at least considered it in your planning. This usually comes down to proving whether or not an event was foreseeable, a question usually decided by a jury. To prove foreseeability, attorneys will usually go after things like company memos, emails between executives, studies and so forth.
So let's suppose you're sitting on a jury deciding whether BP's oil spill was foreseeable. BP, of course, is arguing that it was not. Then the plaintiff's attorney trots out the following:
Yes, there it is – a 30 year old board game from BP where four players compete to be the first to make the big bucks. One of the hazards is: "Blow-out! Rig damaged. Oil slick cleanup costs. Pay $1 million."
Thanks to the good people at The Consumerist for brightening my morning. You can find more photos of the game at BoardGameGeek.
There are two lessons here for us. As I have said repeatedly, there really is nothing new under the sun. Any disaster you can come up with has happened at some point in history (okay, you wise guys, maybe not extraterrestrial invasion, unless you're fan of Erich von Daniken), so everything really is foreseeable. Secondly, the Internet never, ever forgets!
So how do you vote, Juror Number Five?
BP’s Crisis Communications Strategy
There's been an interesting development in the ongoing oil spill saga. BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg has replaced CEO Tony Hayward as the person in charge of the oil spill cleanup with Managing Director Robert Dudley. Ostensibly, the change is being brought about by Hayward's rather abysmal handling of public relations and demonstrates decisive leadership by Svanberg.
However, this move is right out of the crisis communications handbook. It axiomatic that you never use your top person as your spokesperson in a crisis. This allows for plausible deniability if your initial message goes south and allows your top person to step in and "resolve" the crisis.
While there is no question that Hayward has committed some serious gaffes, one has to wonder why. BP certainly can afford to hire the very best crisis management consultants and for a crisis of this magnitude, it is inconceivable that they haven't. Yet it seems that Hayward has not had access to competent crisis communications advice.
Even someone new to the concept of crisis communications could have suggested that denying your responsibility for the oil spill in a Congressional hearing is a non-starter. I'm willing to believe that Hayward really didn't know about the bad decisions surrounding the spill. After all, it's good management to delegate decisions to the lowest level. However, when you're the CEO, you're responsible for those decisions.
And what about the yacht race vacation in the middle of the crisis? Certainly, Hayward is not really essential to day-to-day operations and is entitled to some time off. But again, even a crisis communications neophyte could explain the importance of symbolism and sending the wrong message.
So one has to wonder – has BP been using a very subtle strategy all along or are they really inept at crisis communications?
You Can Run But You Can’t Hide: Another Lesson From the Gulf Spill
My good friend, Art Taber, sent me a link to BP'sRegional Oil Spill Response Plan – Gulf of Mexico dated June 30, 2009. Although Art is not an emergency manager, he took the time to read the 583 page document and offered the following observations:
- In a section titled “Sensitive Biological & Human-Use Resources,” the plan lists “seals, sea otters and walruses” as animals that could be impacted by a Gulf of Mexico spill;
- It lists a Japanese home shopping website as the link to one of its "primary equipment providers for BP in the Gulf of Mexico Region [for] rapid deployment of spill response resources on a 24 hour, 7 days a week basis". While I can't read Japanese, it does seem to me that: http://www.msrc.com/Equipment.htm is not a purveyor of oil-spill related cleanup supplies or heavy equipment;
- It directs BP media spokespeople to never make "promises that property, ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal." {Like the statements that their CEO has been making?};
- It contains no information about tracking sub-surface oil plumes from deep water blowouts such as those now billowing from the damaged oil well that the Deepwater Horizon was drilling before it exploded on April 20. {Like those plumes that BP denies are occurring?};
- It includes no information about currents, tides, prevailing winds, possible hurricanes or other oceanographic or meteorological conditions, even though such data are essential for effective oil spill response;
- It contains no information about preventing disease transmission (such as viruses or bacteria) to captured animals in rehabilitation facilities, which was identified as a serious risk after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989;
- In the chapter on "Worst Case Discharge" offers assurances that within hours of any incident, regardless of size, "personnel, equipment, and materials in sufficient quantities and recovery capacity to respond effectively to oil spills from the facilities and leases covered by this plan, including the worst case discharge scenarios" will be deployed.
Whether Art's observations are accurate is not the point. What is important is that in this day and age, your plans are readily accessible to informed and involved citizens like my friend Art and you will be held accountable for their contents in the court of public opinion. And before you use this as an argument that your plans should notbe posted on the Internet, remember that these plans must be provided to a private citizen if you're a government agency under the Freedom of Information Act or during pre-trial discovery in a lawsuit if you're a private organization. Regardless, electronic media files are still easier to leak to the media than hard copies were in the days of the Pentagon Papers. Sooner or later, the public is going to get to read them.
So what's the solution? Do I really need to spell it out? Stop writing plans merely to meet requirements and start writing plans that really address the problems they were intended to solve. Want it simpler? Do the right thing.
Learning from Catastrophe?
A recent op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle by Ian Mitroff dealt with lessons that we should be learning from the recent oil spill in the Gulf. Mitroff is a professor at Alliant University in San Francisco and a senior investigator in the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at UC Berkeley. He makes four very salient points:
- preparedness before the event is essential in reducing the impact of the event,
- your record of past performance is readily available making it futile to try to reduce liability by pleading ignorance or unforseeability,
- mitigation is cost effective – it's cheaper than paying damages in most cases. and
- it's pointless to try to blame others when you are responsible for your failures
Part of my frustration is that this is the same message we've been trying to communicate for years as emergency managers but our leaders are still not getting it. Part of the reason is that deep down in the hidden recesses of their hearts, most people really don't believe a disaster will happen; that if it occurs, it won't happen to them; or if it does happen to them, it won't be that bad. That's human nature.
However, when you're in a position of responsibility with the lives and livelihood of others depending on you, it might just be in your own best interests to listen to your advisors and do something about mitigation and preparedness before something bad happens. It's cheaper and better than trying to explain to the public and your shareholders after the event why you didn't do spend a few dollars to prevent a catastrophic loss.
Worst Case Scenarios
One of the recurring questions in emergency management involves how we use risk assessments in planning. On the one hand, we need to focus on objective risk – risk that is most likely to occur and is credible. On the other hand, we understand that we are frequently dealing with events that fall into the high impact, low frequency category and there is little evidence on which to base a true risk analysis.
I've argued elsewhere that the "gloom and doom" approach doesn't sell to senior executives. I've also argued against scenario-based planning except in specific cases. However, I've never been able to articulate just what I felt was wrong with worst case scenarios. Thankfully, Bruce Schneier has done so in a recent blog titled Worst Case Thinking, an article that should be required reading for emergency managers.
Schneier makes four excellent points about worst-case scenarios:
- They focus on extreme but improbable risks and do not do a good job of assessing outcomes.
- They are based on flawed logic, assuming that is necessary to prove the scenario impossible.
- They can be used to support any position or its opposite.
- They validate ignorance by focusing on the unknown rather than on what is known.
Worst-case scenarios play on our fears and force us to make bad decisions. One can also argue that relying on a worst-case scenario is easier than making hard decisions that carry a certain amount of risk. We have a tendency to act as if the worst-case scenario is the most likely scenario and therefore we hesitate to act or, as has become the case over the last few years, to over-react.
It's worth remembering that use of risk management is one of the Principles of Emergency Management.
Power Point – Too much of a good thing?
At the invitation of a colleague, I spent this morning at an emergency management "summit". Unfortunately, as someone with aspirations of being a professional speaker, I have the tendency to not only listen to what is being said but how it is being said as well. The messages presented by the speakers were good and they seemed to be competent in their subject areas. However, in every case, they sadly diffused their message by misusing PowerPoint.
It was the classic "death by PowerPoint" syndrome. There were too many slides for the time alloted, too much information on slides, minuscule point sizes on the text – just about every mistake that you can make in a PowerPoint presentation, including reading the slides to the audience.
I might have shrugged it off, but this evening I received an email from my friend Hal Weston about a New York Times article called We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint. In the article, reporter Elisabeth Bumiller discusses how senior military leaders are becoming disenchanted with PowerPoint, finding that it, "stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making."
This is not a new idea. Many years ago I was fortunate to attend one of Edward Tufte's seminarson presenting data and information and he made the same observation about Power Point as well as presenting some very compelling evidence of how PowerPoint has led to some pretty spectacular failures. His essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within should be required reading for anyone thinking of using PowerPoint.
So what's my point? As a speaker, I use PowerPoint and there are certainly situations where it is both expected by the audience and useful in conveying themes. But PowerPoint does not convey data well nor does it help communicate complex situations or ideas. Used incorrectly, it can diffuse the impact of your presentation, something I found out the hard way recently when my slides were converted from PowerPoint 2007 to an early version and I failed to double check them before the presentation. So use PowerPoint sparingly, use it wisely, and remember that the audience came for you, not your slides!
Oil Explosion in the Gulf Offers Case Study for Emergency Managers
One of the things that we have trouble dealing with as emergency managers is the slow-onset incident. This is an event that starts out so slow that no one takes it seriously until it's too late. In fairness, they're not always easy to spot and we have a built-in tendency to normalize events, so it's easy to identify the problems after the fact but hard to anticipate them during the incident.
There's a good case study playing out in the Gulf of Mexico. It hasn't got a whole lot of media play, but on Tuesday a deep-water drilling rig, the Deepwater Horizon, exploded and caught fire, killing 11 workers and injuring many others. Yesterday, it collapsed and sank. The rig is (or was) located 50 miles from New Orleans and produced over 300K gallons of crude oil a day from the seabed located 5000 feet below.
So imagine for a moment a leak that could not be capped, sending over 300K gallons of crude oil a day towards the US coastline. Did anyone consider this scenario when they heard the rig had exploded? How many days has it taken to realize and react to the potential threat?
Fortunately, the Coast Guard is reporting that oil does not appear to be leaking from the well head and the weather forecast is keeping the spill from the coast, at least for the time being. There's a lot of clean up underway for the fuel oil on the platform and the crude spilled during the explosion and fire.
Two thoughts to take away from this:
1. It's not really over yet. That's the bad thing about slow-onset events. It's easy to ignore them, particularly if you're afraid of crying. "Wolf!"
2. This is a great opportunity to activate emergency operations centers in potentially affected communities and states to develop contingency plans. Even if they are never needed, this is an opportunity to train on a real potential crisis, not just a fictional scenario. And speaking of scenarios, this is one that could be translated to other locations.