Maritime Salvage: Disaster Response Lessons from Real Life, Sort of…
There are a few stories that I often tell when the subject of leadership in disasters is discussed. I figured I’d put them down on paper so I can stop repeating myself.
It was pre OPA90, a single-skin tanker had run over a rock in the Port of New Jersey. It put a hole in the bottom, and heavy fuel oil was draining out the bottom and would do so until the oil head level in the tank would equalize with the waterline. The tanker would hit bottom at low tide, but the hole was small, and quick action would reduce oil in the harbor. Moreover, it is important to create a water seal in the bottom of a busted tank. People showed up quickly to help. A tank cleaning company, both famous and infamous, showed up, opened the tank dome, dumped in a pump, and started an over-the-top transfer to other tanks and a barge that pulled up.
- About an hour into the process, we were making further plans in the wheelhouse when a high-ranking representative of the NJ DEP showed up and loudly proclaimed, “I am in charge now, and nothing happens until I say so.”
The tank cleaning company team leader raised his handheld VHF and said, “Stop the pumps.”
Next the DEP rep said, “So what are you going to do?”
And the tank cleaning company team leader said, “I thought you were going to F@$*ing tell us.” General laughter, the DEP rep slinked away and was never heard from again.
There is so much to learn from this short story. You cannot be a leader if you don’t know what is going on. Also, in a technical setting, bravado will always end up in humiliation.
There are leaders who may show up without knowing what is going on, but the first thing you do is nicely ask for an update. This DEP guy did none of that. I wonder if he learned his lesson.
Next, I will shift forward in time a few years and I will be more specific since it played out in public. This story relates to BP’s Deepwater Horizon blowout. There was a lot going on, but one news bit that showed up was a university professor who had done his own calculations on BP’s estimates of the amount of oil that spewed from the wellhead and came up with a larger number. The reporters checked with BP and BP said that their estimate was correct and therefore the professor’s estimate was wrong. A great way to create an enemy.
BP’s disaster response was wobbly at best, but when I read that, I had full confirmation that BP knew nothing of disaster management. This was one of the few items that could be effectively put to bed and would remove one distraction in a disaster that had too many already.
Instead of insisting that the professor was wrong, the correct solution would be for BP to tell the reporter, “We appreciate the effort this professor has put in and will put him in touch with our technical team so we can compare numbers. Can you please provide me with his contact information?”
A BP rep could then contact this professor and ask him to come to the team tech center. If BP really wanted to show off, they could even provide him with a plane ticket or even a private jet.
The professor would be flattered and have no reason to badmouth BP. Once the professor presented his data, one of three things could happen. BP was right and the professor was wrong, and now BP knows how to defeat the professor’s argument if he insists on further promoting it.
If the professor was right, BP now has the option to publish an update and publicly thank the professor or, let me be cynical for a moment, buy his silence. Regardless, BP now has more data and therefore can more effectively lead the disaster response.
Or they were both not sure what the real amount was, and BP can ask the professor to work with them in refining the data. The interesting part is that by inviting the professor to participate, BP removed external distractive noise in their disaster response and probably gained an ally.
And in disaster response, two things count more than anything else: control of the data and reduction of distracting noise. This generally occurs when the responders take a cooperative approach and minimize adversity.
One may ask, "Why did you see that so clearly whereas BP did not?" Well, generally you see those things when you have made the same mistake yourself before. But here I did not; I discovered this approach in an oil spill training exercise during QI training at Massachusetts Maritime Academy in the mid-1990s.
I was assigned the operations desk in the exercise. The spill notice came in, and we needed data. I opened the Area Response Plan, and it listed three helicopter operators for the area. I called the first operator (one of the game actors). He decided to give me a hard time and told me his field was fogged in. I was ready to hang up but then quickly asked for his rates. He said something like $1000 per hour and $100 per hour for standby, and he had two helicopters. I said, "Put me on standby for both your helicopters." I then called the second operator, who had one helicopter and could fly.
I was ready to go to the field (a computer simulator) when I decided to call the third operator. He also had one helicopter, and I also put it on standby. For $400 per hour, I now controlled all the helicopters in the area. I don’t know why I did it, but it seemed like a good deal. I could always drop the standbys in the next few hours. I took my first flight and started a response approach when I was called by a wildlife official game actor. He noted that the oil was drifting to a nesting area. By then it was time to take another flight, and I asked the wildlife official to join me to point out exactly what he needed. At that cooperative level, I killed (or actually saved) two birds with one stone. Moreover, once reporters called, I could control their helicopter rides at will and embed them in the effort to make sure I reduced distractions and kept control of the data.
What is most interesting is that I learned that tactical nugget in training and not by embarrassing myself in the field. There is a wide variety in the quality of these exercises. Unfortunately, only the best exercises are those where new approaches are discovered, and quite frankly, we need more of them.
For every column I write MREN will make a donation to a charity of my choice. For this column I nominate Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Their QI training program was the gold standard in disaster response training.
