There are already lessons to be learned in the wake of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Judging from the reports in the media, British Petroleum has made numerous mistakes, omissions, and errors in judgment, both before and after the oil rig explosion, some of which could have been avoided by making pre-disaster plans. That is, looking at what COULD happen, preventing it if possible, but if it’s not possible, determining how best to manage and mitigate the situation.
There are parallels in the wildfire and emergency management world. We used to call them pre-attack plans, or pre-incident plans, or, my least favorite term, “pre-plan”. Is not every plan a pre-plan?
These wildfire pre-attack plans for specific areas frequently include, for example, the following: roads and their condition, traffic plan, communications, vegetation type, vegetation age, fuel breaks, fire history, average weather conditions by month during fire season, data layers for fire modeling, private land issues, structures and the degree to which they could be defended, water sources, Incident Command Post locations, staging areas, dozer unloading sites, helibase and helispot sites, infrastructure available…..and other factors.
Another example in the incident management world is the ICS-215A form, the Incident Action Plan Safety Analysis, or the Lookouts, Communications, Escape routes, Safety zones (LCES) Analysis of Tactical Applications. This form, completed during the planning for each operational period, forces you to consider what COULD go wrong from a safety point of view, and identify how to mitigate each potential threat.
I wonder if BP did anything similar before the well exploded and killed 11 workers?
Sometimes there is resistance to pre-incident planning as detailed in the excerpt below. But from my own experience, I am reminded of an example.
I was considering the lessons learned from a large fire we had in a national park where we had no formal pre-incident plan. The Type 2 Incident Management Team was told to set up their Incident Command Post in the “boneyard”, basically a junk yard. The boneyard had no facilities or infrastructure of any kind and occasionally buffalo wandered through, freaking out the workers and causing a safety issue.
I began the process of developing a pre-incident plan, and one of the first issues I took on was where to have an ICP during the next fire. At a staff meeting, I brought up the topic and suggested some possible locations. But the Chief Ranger said that no, we should not select a preferred location for an ICP, because he didn’t want to be “locked in” to a specific location, or even a list of possible locations.
Here is an excerpt from an article at The Daily Beast that looks at the issue of pre-incident planning in the corporate world. It is written by Eric Dezenhall.
…In the wake of the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe, the question of why companies aren’t better prepared for crises merits a brutally frank discussion. Here is what I told the B-school students:
A corporation is not a singular entity with one heart and brain; it is a collection of individuals motivated by short-term personal self-interest, the first and foremost of which is job advancement and preservation. When it comes to crisis management, these individuals fall prey to what psychologists call “the apathy of crowds,” the passive assumption that someone else, somewhere, has things covered.
This lethal misassumption is exacerbated by a free-floating sense that a crisis is an abstraction, a vague, external and remote possibility that befalls Others, in the same way that tornadoes appear to make beelines for communities that are alien to many of us.
The aversion to making plans is not altogether illogical. Plans often do crumble when confronted by force majeure, but it doesn’t excuse the insidious short-term mindset that pervades in corporations.
Almost no one in a corporation views it as being in his personal self-interest to invest his time, energy and finite budget in crisis management planning beyond a perfunctory gesture. After all, no one ever became CEO by being perceived to have been responsible for averting a scenario that never actually happened—and wasn’t supposed to.
My experience has been that the very same companies that spend hundreds of millions, and even billions, on advertising throw a fit when they receive a $50,000 bill for crisis communications services. The reason for this is that the executives from whose budget these funds are drawn don’t feel they have anything tangible to show for it and, in a sense, they are right. A client once asked me what she got for her money after we did scenario planning, and I answered, “Nothing. And that’s what you want—for nothing to happen.” Tough sell.
You think BP is messing up… look at what’s going on in CA with the interaction between USGS and CALTECH.
The feds haven’t been very great lately managing any programs for community and environment safety. (Preparedness, mitigation, or response.)
Folks will look back upon this period thinking… Yeah… it “shoulda been” obvious and easy to correct…. all in 20/20 hindsight without any active foresight or oversight.
Folks need to start stepping up and speaking up when they see problems.
JMHO.
Nice article.
This one is going to be one “for the books” — I have friends in the industry down there who have always *hated* working for BP even if it was just a brief interaction, like Gordon said above “normalization of deviance” sums up what they’ve always said about BP.
I think you’ll also find “Crew Resource Management” issues come up. Folks who should have had the authority to act independently in an emergency didn’t, and there were delays both contacting the top guys who had to give the orders, as well as the normal overwhelming of those few persons in a situation like this.
I occasionaly teach disaster planning at a local university to business mamagment majors.
I stress to them the importances of planning, preperation and pratice for disasters. One is to tell them that an ounce of prevetion is worth a pound of cure and second, a working, current disaster plan will get them up and running before anyone else hence a bigger profit.
Speaking of disaster plans it’s now hurricane season and our home plan has been discussed with the family, assignments made, resources gathered and equipment checked. We learned the hard way in 1992 with Hurricane Andrew.
I agree. The BP experience reads like Dianne Vaughn’s book about the
shuttle Challenger launch decision. ‘Normalization of deviance’ anyone?
Excellent article. This BP disaster is a great example of what happends when companies do not follow HRO principles; a recent NYT article referenced BP officials exempting procedures for the deep well process that were outside their own safety standards, pushing the envelope because the assumption was that the blowout preventer would stop any massive leak. I’ve been on fires where the ignition specialist might be a bit more aggressive because a Type 6 was on the line; effectively becoming less safe because the safety equipment was there, not thinking that the engine might fail, someone gets hurt, etc. You have to assume the worst….