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A THOUSAND QUESTIONS How well prepared is your company for a natural disaster? How quickly could you get your operations up and running after the storm or other event hits? How about your vendors and suppliers? Emergency contingency plans (aside from vessel emergencies where oil has entered the water ? that merits its own article and won?t be covered here) can start with a streamlined communications process. For emergencies ashore, how are you set up to handle business if the of ce is no longer accessible? Having people work from home can be an effective plan, but have you considered how communications will work? If internet and cell phone service is not available, have you thought about other ways to communicate with your eet? How about getting word to the critical vendors you use? How are they set up to handle such a crisis themselves? Have you established a protocol to pass word when the of ce is back up and running and when operations can return to normal? When conducting an audit of an of ce?s management system I often ask these questions of the executive staff and of the lower level administrative staff to see how well they are complying with the International Safety Management (ISM) code requirement for emergency preparedness and response. Often, plans account for all sorts of disasters that could occur on the vessels and include check lists and drills. Sometimes however, less thought is given to how well the of ce will respond to an emergency. I will normally ask what would happen in the event of a re. Where does the of ce staff muster? What if there is an earthquake? These are the same types of questions I ask while on board a vessel. The company obviously expects its crews to hold drills as appropriate, so it should also hold emergency drills in the of ce. Drills need to test any communication protocol, ensuring phone numbers are correct before an actual emergency occurs. Key people will be assigned duties within a contingency plan. Are they still at the company, and if so, are they still in the same role? All too often, I will nd the plan has not been updated since ?so-and-so? got promoted. Testing the contingency plan at least once a year is a good start toward ensuring key information stays up-to-date. IDENTIFYING ? AND CORRECTING ? SINGLE POINT FAILURES Emergency communications protocol should focus on removing single point failures. I worked aboard a ship which had duplicate systems for many things, however one critical piece of equipment in the vessel?s engine control room relied on a single uninterrupted power supply (UPS). This power supply had no inspection or maintenance requirement in the vessel?s planned maintenance program. Had the vessel lost power and this UPS failed, we would have also lost the ability to restart equipment using automation. Classi cation societies are watching closely for this type of single point failure. Finding single point failures in your plan isn?t necessarily rocket science. If your emergency contingency plan relies on mobile phone service, do you address what to do if cell service is unavailable? Do you have a way to power mobile phones if electricity is out, such as a hand crank charger? If your mobile phone is no longer working but you have (minimal) access to a land line, you can call your mobile phone and update the message to indicate the situation and when you expect to be able to answer calls. (This tip would have been very handy to one crew person I had who ended up in jail. The jailors took his cell phone, but allowed him one call. Unfortunately, all the ship numbers were in his mobile phone. If he had called himself and changed the message to indicate his circumstance, his time in the pokey could have been greatly reduced, but I digress.) COMMUNICATIONS ARE NOT THE ONLY THING REQUIRING BACK UP?I came across another single point failure recently when I was asked to attend a vessel during its initial ISM ABS (external) audit. The vessel?s rst internal audit went well and the report included an ?atta-boy? to the Second Mate for squared away les and recordkeeping. The rst question the ABS surveyor asked the Second Mate during the external audit was to explain how the Coast Pilot, Sailing Directions, and similar pubs were kept up to date. The Second Mate explained the great system they had in which all publications were electronic and all were updated automatically each time the vessel received its weekly updates. However, the program to view and apply the updates, and the publications themselves, were stored on only one computer. Earlier, I had asked the Second Mate if the program was installed on any other computer on the vessel ? like the Master?s of ce, for example. The Second Mate replied that you didn?t need to do that, as this was navigational information you?d only use on the bridge. Of course, during the external audit, the ABS surveyor asked to see the great system about which the Second Mate spoke. Unfortunately, the computer Communications & Single Point Failures: What?s Your Back-up Plan? By Katharine SweeneySAFETYCOLUMN22 MNJanuary 2013 MN Jan2013 Layout 18-31.indd 22MN Jan2013 Layout 18-31.indd 221/2/2013 2:23:02 PM1/2/2013 2:23:02 PM
