I hasten to point out that things occurred in the order listed. Normally prison comes somewhere after the Pub!
Tuesday afternoon at WCDM started with the plenary session, Don Forgeron talking about how we need to adapt our approaches to deal with climate change. Again food for thought about taking different approaches to mitigation of the risk – and the challenge that the climate change threat will be a game changer for emergency management practitioners.
Certainly will be – and for more than the immediate responders. Take a look at this post about the floods in Queensland, Australia, earlier this year – flooding with potential to impact the world price of coal.
On to Tim Armit’s session. “Manchester United – A City Wide Crisis Exercise“. As I noted in the morning’s post, I ran into Tim earlier in the day and discovered we shared some similar irreverent views on a number BC/Risk practices. As a result was looking forward to hear what he had to say.
Tim ran an exercise (a test if you prefer) across a number of the larger entities located in the Manchester CBD area. The objective was to discover (more precisely to have the participants discover) that their various plans would conflict with one another and contribute to the problem rather than the solution.
No surprises there, I find the same thing occurs within the organisation when all they have is bottom-up planning.
But it is not about me, so back to Tim.
Using a power outage scenario, rather than a terrorist/mass casualty one, he was able to quickly highlight the disconnects between the expectations of the consumers of certain services and the response/recovery times of the the providers of those services (Police in this case). He also highlighted what it means to empty all the buildings in the area, not just one!
As the only people with generators were a couple of local pubs, not surprise where you would expect the employees to go.
One of the more interesting challenges was what to do when authorities were forced to evacuate a prison that is also in the CBD area? It seems there plan is to simply let them go – which I suspect would be a large shock to the locals.
Very entertaining stuff, and ground breaking in terms of having organisations confront the limitations of not actually understanding the environment they operate in.
After checking there were no prisons in the vicinity, I headed out to meet up with Alex Fullick at a local pub. Alex is a BC specialist based in Guelph, Canada – and the author of several books and Stoneroad’s Blog, which is regularly referenced on this site.
I met him briefly at WCDM last year, but he got very sick after the Sunday evening reception and had to skip the rest of the conference – including his own presentation. We exchange blog comments regularly, so took the opportunity to catch up in the real world.
Alex is a prolific writer, something I envy, and has just returned from the TIEMS Conference in Romania were he presented two papers. He is also a paper reviewer for TIEMS conferences and is developing a BCM training program.
He also has a day job, so was good to find time grab a beer. My apologies to the Earthquake panel for skipping your session.
A day of real world activities ended with the BCI Canada Chapter AGM and drinks at another nearby bar. I must confess that I skipped the AGM part. Nice way to relax and chat to the local and overseas BCI folks – and convert Helen Simm from a virtual to real contact.
Thanks to Jayne Howe and the local crew for the invite, and for letting me win the door prize!
In the small world category I was chatting to a Twitter contact Luke Simpson from industry journal Continuity Insights at the BCI event. As it turns out, Luke (no relation), is US-based but hails from Melbourne and, of course, was desperate for somebody to talk intelligently about Australian Rules Football with.
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