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BCP & Emergency Management Exercises">It’s Only Ridiculous Until You Experience The Real Deal: BCP & Emergency Management Exercises

Design­ing and under­tak­ing exer­cises are crit­i­cal to the devel­op­ment and val­i­da­tion of busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity plans and emer­gency man­age­ment plans. They are also crit­i­cal to the train­ing & famil­iar­iza­tion that your organization’s peo­ple will need in order to respond as effec­tively as pos­si­ble when the time comes. Yet, exer­cises often aren’t taken seri­ously by man­age­ment or by par­tic­i­pants. Think of the most basic form of exer­cise in the field: fire drills. Do peo­ple take them seri­ously? Usu­ally not. Would they take it more seri­ously if you told them that some­times evac­u­a­tions are not just for fires but also for bomb threats or other inci­dents out­side the build­ing but close enough to be threats? Usu­ally not.

The most com­mon reac­tion to exer­cises is, “Yeah, but this is just a fic­ti­tious sce­nario. It won’t really happen.”

Imag­ine design­ing a busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity exer­cise or an emer­gency man­age­ment exer­cise that included all of the fol­low­ing ele­ments as injects or scenarios:

• earth­quake
• tor­nado
• power out­age
• chem­i­cal spill
• dis­ease outbreak
• riots with tear­gas deployed

You prob­a­bly wouldn’t be taken very seri­ously. Yet, that was pre­cisely the list of sce­nar­ios that my orga­ni­za­tion saw last week dur­ing our acti­va­tion for the G8 & G20 Sum­mits in Toronto.

We first acti­vated and staffed up our Emer­gency Oper­a­tions Cen­tre on Mon­day June 21 because police intel­li­gence had told us to expect protests to start by then. Noth­ing hap­pened. The next day, still noth­ing hap­pened. The third day, still nada.  Thurs­day, how­ever, brought us an earth­quake dur­ing the day and a tor­nado dur­ing the evening.  As a result of the tor­nado, some key facil­i­ties lost power and had to run on backup gen­er­a­tors. A sec­ond gen­er­a­tor had to be shipped in and hooked up at 4am in the morn­ing, but still some ser­vices were knocked out for the next day.  On Fri­day, there was a high­way inci­dent that involved a chem­i­cal spill and some of our folks have respon­si­bil­i­ties in such instances. Plus, there were reports of pos­si­ble dis­ease out­breaks in some of our areas of respon­si­bil­ity. By Sat­ur­day, there were riots in the city and police deployed tear­gas near our facilities.

I had actu­ally designed and con­ducted an exer­cise with our peo­ple about a month prior.  I had delib­er­ately loaded on a num­ber of dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios includ­ing chem­i­cal spills, dis­ease out­breaks, and denial of access to facil­i­ties.  There were other sce­nar­ios that pro­duced mass casu­al­ties or which led to ser­vice degra­da­tion or dis­rup­tion. I wanted to stress the sys­tem a lit­tle and see how well our plans, processes and pro­ce­dures would hold up. They held up well, but I got feed­back telling me I may have been a lit­tle excessive.

Peo­ple sang a dif­fer­ent tune after this past week, though. They told me that the exer­cise was good prepa­ra­tion for the real deal because the real deal stressed the sys­tem just as badly as the exer­cise had, but it was for real.

I have per­son­ally been in a build­ing that had a major fire rag­ing on one of its floors. In fact, I came close to dying from smoke inhala­tion in the evac­u­a­tion stair­well that evening. I know from first­hand expe­ri­ence that fire drills need to be taken seri­ously — lives can depend on them.

I have been through an emer­gency oper­a­tions cen­tre acti­va­tion where we had to coor­di­nate ele­ments to respond to all 6 of the sce­nar­ios I’ve listed above. Not just one of them, but all of them, and within the span of about 3 days. I know from first­hand expe­ri­ence that exer­cises that stress the sys­tem need to be taken seri­ously — things can be just as bad or worse when they really happen.

The It-Can’t-Happen-Here men­tal­ity is dan­ger­ous, par­tic­u­larly in the fields of busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity and emer­gency man­age­ment. How­ever absurd it sounds, I assure you there is a pos­si­bil­ity it can hap­pen. There’s a chance that absolutely noth­ing will hap­pen and you will have been over-prepared. If that’s what hap­pens, so be it. Yet, it would be (to put it lightly) very bad to be under­pre­pared if some­thing bad hap­pens — or sev­eral dif­fer­ent bad things happen.

Would you be taken seri­ously if you sug­gested that your orga­ni­za­tion would expe­ri­ence an earth­quake, have to deal with the effects of a tor­nado and its resul­tant power out­ages, respond to a chem­i­cal spill, respond to mul­ti­ple pos­si­ble dis­ease out­breaks, and deal with riot­ing in the city with police deploy­ing tear gas right near your facil­i­ties? If you think that you wouldn’t be, con­sider what my orga­ni­za­tion went through dur­ing the G8/G20 Sum­mits last week.

Some­thing like that only seems ridicu­lous until you’ve been through the real deal and seen it happen.