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Crisis Connections

With good planning, Web and mobile technologies can help find and inform employees in the event of a disaster. A global company shows how.

By Susannah Patton

August 01, 2006 — CSO —

On the morning of July 7, 2005, Kenneth McCrae left his hotel in central London and headed for Baker Street Underground station. It was a warm day and he remembers looking longingly across the street at the green grass and trees in Regent's Park before heading down to catch his train. G McCrae boarded at 8:42 a.m. along with the millions who jam the city's famous subway system each day. On a whim, he decided to take the Metropolitan line instead of the Circle line. It turned out to be a good choice. G At 8:50, a series of powerful bombs exploded underground, and one of those seriously damaged a train on the Circle line, just two trains ahead of McCrae. Above ground, another blast would rip apart a bus in Tavistock Square nearly an hour later.

Meanwhile, McCrae and his fellow passengers sat in the dark, silently, for 20 minutes. It wasn't until they left the train, filed down the dark tracks and walked up the stairs into the daylight at King's Cross station that they realized something very, very bad had happened.

The terrorist bombings in London that day killed 56 people, wounded 700, crippled lines of communication and effectively shut down one of the world's largest cities. As sirens blared, McCrae, managing director of real estate management company Gale Global Facilities UK, a division of Gale Global Facility Services, pulled out his BlackBerry and called his boss in New Jersey. "My immediate thought was, 'how lucky have I been?'" says McCrae, who splits his time between his home in Scotland and a hotel in London. "Then I knew I had to get in touch with the home office. I had to somehow check on the safety of colleagues in London."

Even though much of the area's phone and cellular networks were quickly overwhelmed, McCrae was able to reach New Jersey as well as a colleague in Toulouse, France, who went immediately to the company's intranet site to open an "incident report," which would soon chronicle the day's events and help account for the location and safety of Gale GFS employees in the London region. McCrae used his BlackBerry to communicate with his colleagues in London, around Europe and in the United States. Within 90 minutes, Gale was able to account for all 80 of its London-based employees. The company's Incident Reporting System, or IRS, which sends out e-mail alerts to the cell phones, BlackBerrys, pagers and laptops of those concerned and also informs employees via a sort of Web chat room on their home-built company portal, helped spread the news of the unfolding crisis. And because of it, Gale GFS never stopped operating.