The National Fire Protection Association says that you have less than two minutes to escape your house if it catches fire. Could you make it? Could Grandma?
On a larger scale, natural disasters killed 10,655 people in 2009 — and that was a good year. There have been approximately 392 natural disasters every year since 2000. Then there is always war. To stay safe and ensure your business survives, you have to plan it that way.
So said two experts in survivability and recovery at the Homeland Security for Networked Industries (HSNI) Conference last week in Washington, D.C. Jake MacLeod, vice president of the government solutions business at Powerwave Technologies, and Tanya Lin-Jones, manager of operations for the Emergency Response Team at Sprint, reminded the audience of the efficacy of planning and preparedness in their session on the Emergency Management Lifecycle.
Planning Your Recovery
MacLeod recalled his mission to rebuild the telecom infrastructure in Baghdad in 2003 after the Gulf War while at Bechtel Corp. He was tasked with the design and replacement of 12 wire centers (equivalent to 240,000 POTS lines) and was given 120 days to complete the job.
In what MacLeod calls a sanitized version of his briefing to the Pentagon, he said the most important part of any recovery mission is planning, particularly when your mission is on hostile, foreign soil. And when a company makes a proposal to take on such a mission, based on the best information available at the time, it can be sure of one thing: “The initial assumptions in your proposal will change, guaranteed, after you’ve done your ground-level assessment," MacLeod said.
That ground-level assessment is the single most important part of any disaster recovery process, he said. Before you touch anything, you do a GLA and you document everything. Here’s one reason why.
‘When we were setting up camp right in front of Uday’s [Hussein] palace – which we didn’t ask permission to do – we found four underground bunkers that still had food and gas masks and also live ammunition. So you have to figure out what to do with live ammunition; you can’t let people walk around it. And you don’t go into the bunkers because they’re booby-trapped.
And since you are doing business in an unstable foreign country, you obtain authorization prior to executing anything. “If you execute prior to authorization, you’re doing it for free," MacLeod said. “So unless you just like benevolent work, make sure you get full authorization on the plans you are developing."
With that GLA, you can develop a plan for getting the work done. But that plan includes much more than steps for fixing or replacing equipment. MacLeod’s team staged in Kuwait and took military planes in country where they slept on Sadaam’s palace floor for a week. But before that they needed to have life support systems in place.
