“Every person who prepares is one less person who panics in a crisis” — Mike Adamson
Being located in the Pacific Typhoon Belt, the Philippines is one of the most typhoon-prone countries in the world. With an average of 20 tropical cyclones entering its Philippine Area of Responsibility (PAR) very year with the 8-9 making landfall, gravely impacting the country is terms of lives lost, property damaged, crops wasted & infrastructure beyond repair.
Last month, typhoon Emong’s published damage assessment inflicted on Pampanga was 224 barangays flooded across 18 LGUs, affecting 160,891 families or 527,648 individuals with 3,787 individuals displaced & temporarily sheltered in evacuation centers. Meantime, impact on agriculture was more or less P 470.1 million in crop damage & P 39.1 million in livestock losses. Damage to structure was quite significant estimated to be around P 170 million, primarily collapsed dike pavements and slope protections.
When classes & work was suspended, I saw on local TV and social media posts, at the height of the typhoon, local executives conducting an emergency meeting & calamity assessment, while others went about distributing relief goods to affected constituents in behalf of the Dept. of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).
In one of the meetings I watched, it took almost 30 minutes to introduce participants to the supposed “emergency meeting” before an array of ppt presentations, data & pictures that were reel time situation reports. I begun to wonder if such was necessary or was immediate action on the ground in the heat of the moment better.
In another televised briefing, town mayors took turns in giving reports & damage assessment in their respective areas. DPWH were officials at the receiving end of questions, remarks and borderline blame for easily damaged engineering interventions &/or incomplete flood mitigation projects. All the discussion that took quite some time. I felt that attendees from concerned government agencies, who were waiting patiently & listening intently to the discussions, must’ve been raring to roll up their sleeves and wet their feet, to do their jobs as the downpour became even more heavy as the day wore on & the flood water kept rising.
To an ordinary citizen like me, curious on what is happening, what I watched was just a repeat of watched last year…the floodings, the damage to crops, businesses, homes & infrastructure. LGUs alternately raising howls and complaints about the floodings in their AORs, highlighting the sad plight of their evacuees, asking concerned government agencies what went wrong, how this could’ve been prevented and somebody will have to bear the brunt of blame.
In the private sector, to address readiness for “events”, we use Business Continuity Management (BCM). BCM is the management process that ensures that an organization, during calamities or any disruptions, natural or man-made, will be able to continue operating during & after such events. It also teaches how to be able to correctly identify risk, its impact & how to mitigate losses and recover from such disastrous events while helping those affected to stay safe, recover & resume as it was before the disastrous event.
BCM integrates the disciplines of Emergency Response, Crisis Management, Disaster Recovery (facility, materials, technology etc) and business continuity by implementing thoroughly studied, discussed & pre-approved Business Continuity Plans (BCPs).
BCPs are powerful tools in disaster preparedness and response that go beyond mere compliance checklists but are rather collective strategies embedded in organizational culture.
The strategic integration of BCP with Disaster Preparedness is enhanced through the effective risk-based planning. BCPs in all areas are accomplished, assessed, tested & implemented by all department heads & their teams members in their respective areas of responsibilities.
Doing a risk assessment is the first step. Being able to clearly identify top threats to the stability & continuity of the business like natural disasters, cyberattacks, and supply chain issues is helpful.
A thorough risk assessment and Business Impact Analysis (BIA) allows organizations to identify critical functions, their vulnerabilities and severeness of its impact to the business.
In the Japanese company & American company that I worked for, being both from manufacturing, continuous operations the most vulnerable. Ensuring the steady supply of electricity & possible disruption of the supply chain due to natural calamities such as typhoons & eventually floodings had the highest chances of happening. Such events affect the availability of parts & at times ample supply of labor as well.
To prepare us for such events, emergency response procedures for evacuations, lockdowns, etc were envisioned, documented & simulated. We identified & established evacuation routes, assembly points for employees and HQ key team members where key persons meet to regroup & make urgent decisions such as cancellations, closures or resume operations based on pre-set parameters that determines highest risk, mitigate them to lower risk to consider life, property & enterprise.
Equally important is tackling “Recovery Strategies” and the Recovery Timme Objective (RTO) which are the agreed plans on how to restore critical functions and needed data within a reasonable timeline set.
During & after each incident, crisis communication is also very important. A singular line of communication & source of information with the use of approved templates and channels for internal and external messaging stabilizes the situation not to mention it calms the nerves.
Defining recovery objectives will establish clear Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) for each critical function that could be affected by events.
Add to this is the annual testing & updating of business continuity procedures through desktop reviews, actual drills, validation and/or revisions to help keep plans relevant, truly helpful & a tuned to the current situation.
Role clarity & proper delegation means assigning responsibilities to specific personnel and backups, ensuring accountability and swift activation during crises so that even if any of the department heads or leaders are rendered incapacitated or indisposed, everything will continue moving towards pre set actions.
Of course regular drills & simulations through the conduct of tabletop exercises and/or full-scale drills to test response capabilities and identify gaps. This forms part preparations by training for contingencies. This ensures that employees understand their roles and can act confidently during emergencies. Consistent post-incident reviews will help refine the plans by incorporating lessons learned into future iterations.
Lastly, there should also be stakeholder engagement that involve suppliers, customers, and local agencies in planning and exercises to build a resilient ecosystem because they should be also in synch with efforts to restore, recover & resume operations after any incident.
This I guess is the reason why private organizations or enterprises do not need long meetings to make necessary decisions or take actions to mitigate situations & make adjustments to ensure the safety of its employees, minimize the impact of disruptions, the continuity of operations, sans finger pointing or blame shaming.
As to the local scene, it really makes me wonder why we have never been ready, never learned from past events or being prepared for the same weather disturbance that predictably will almost always consistently hit us from last week of May to first week of October because this is when nearly 70% of all typhoons develop.
The convergence of these unfortunate events was immortalized during the President’s SONA…“MAHIYA NAMAN KAYO” dare. A few days later, this was followed by the identification of top flood control project contractors, the actual inspection of projects implemented & completed (supposedly). The tsunami of disgust expressed by the Chief Executive & by the citizenry was all too obvious.
Weeks later, in a more than an hour privilege speech of the crusading Senator Ping Lacson, he exposed the “standard for sub standard“ & “resurrected ghosts projects”. I guess, the business continuity procedure (BCP) that was given attention & focus was another type of business, which we can amply call “monkey business”.
GOOD MORNING HARDWORKING PEOPLE!For comments & suggestions, you may email author [email protected] & follow in Facebook Herrie Raymond Rivera.