In Depth

Extreme Emergency Management

By CSO Contributor

December 11, 2007 — CSO —

For most of us in business and government, 9/11 was dramatic not just for the enormity of the acts committed against innocent civilians, but for the reality check it brought to our inconsistent application of emergency management. No doubt, there were some pioneers out there pushing their organizations to embrace comprehensive evacuation plans, bomb threat responses, suspicious package protocols and even weather-related disaster preparedness. But despite the first attacks on the World Trade Center buildings in 1993, the development of these types of plans was erratic. In fact, even in my organization, which is based in New York City, the charge by senior management to develop these plans was agreed to only reluctantly in the months leading up to 9/11.

I was in my office that morning six years ago. During a regular call my wife explained that some type of aircraft had flown into one of the World Trade Center towers and that she was watching Good Morning America to get updates. I advised our senior management team appropriately but cautiously. I found it hard to believe that someone could have crashed a plane mistakenly into one of the towers on such a beautiful day. On my second call home my fears were confirmed, as my wife explained in horror that the television had broadcast the story of a second plane crashing into the other tower.

What happened in the hours succeeding that call became the foundation for many of the emergency response efforts embraced by our company. We had no comprehensive emergency response plan and no predetermined managerial hierarchy to make decisions during a crisis. As a result, we had no formal means to communicate our company’s plan for maintaining operations that day or in the days that followed. Frankly, we looked disorganized as departments made decisions independently from other departments, sending some people home and creating confusion. While I commend our senior management team for the steps it took that day and after, its most important decision during the morass of that day was to call for the immediate development of an emergency response plan.

Opportunities and Obstacles

With every call to action, and specifically with respect to emergency response management, there are opportunities and traps. The obvious opportunity enabled security to assume responsibility and develop an emergency response plan. In cases where a plan already existed, security transitioned it into a living document, dealing with the modern challenges of moving employees to safety, either through evacuation from a facility or through “invacuation”—moving employees to an internal safe zone away from an external threat. Security was also motivated to expand the application of emergency response to address other events that could disrupt business, such as suspicious packages (particularly after the anthrax issues), civil disorder and incidents involving industry-specific hazardous material. One aspect of emergency response that our organization addressed was power outages. At the time, a protocol to address power outages was considered extreme by some of the company’s management team until the August 2003 blackout occurred in New York City.