Emergency response planning

ISO14001, as part of the 'do' part of the standard, requires an organization to identify all the environmental emergencies that its operations could cause and put into place plans to respond to each of these. Depending on what you do or what you store on site there may be incidents that could happen which would be regarded as an emergency. For example, if your organization stores large quantities of oil or diesel on site, a big spill could cause a lot of local pollution. The standard asks that your organisation identify all the possible environmental emergencies that could happen on site and plan how to deal with them if they ever happen.

This is obviously an excellent idea. The standard requires that you spend time preparing and thinking about what you would do whilst you are calm, rather than making decisions whilst everyone is panicking. Your plan should tell you exactly what to do in all the possible emergencies, include the equipment you need (which you should get immediately) and should include appropriate contact details so you don’t have to waste time looking up this information.

In some emergencies, letting you neighbours know what is happening means that you don’t harm anyone off-site. You should occasionally practice your environmental emergency response to make sure that everyone knows what to do. An example would be doing a practice spill using water to see whether you could deal with this if it was diesel that had spilled. After a test you might change your plan to make it work better.

Should you actually have an emergency you should put your plan into operation. If you have done a good job the plan should enable you to quickly contain and deal with your potential pollution and once it has been properly dealt with the standard also requires that you find the root cause and make sure that this type of incident could never happen again. If your plan does not work as you had hoped you need to learn from its failure and improve it. Obviously.

So that is the theory. You may have noticed we have had a number of emergencies recently. One where the emergency response plan worked well and the other where it obviously hasn't. The first is the emergency that arose with the eruption of the volcano in Iceland. Once the threat became obvious all flights that might be affected by the ash cloud were cancelled. This stranded people across Europe, which is never ideal, but avoided any aeroplane falling out of the sky. There have been complaints of over caution but I would always rather that the precautionary principle was used. I never want to be in a plane that is taking a chance with my safety.

I have already mentioned the other emergency in this blog. That is the emergency arising on the BP oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico which is currently spilling unimaginably vast quantities of oil into the sea, devastating the area around the rig and potentially causing ecological and financial damage over much of the gulf coast and beyond as the gulf stream spreads the slick. This is an example of an ineffective response plan. There seem to have been many things that went wrong but this is almost always the case with emergencies. Generally when only one thing goes wrong the effect can be contained. There have been reports of safety precautions being value engineered out and, although having the secondary precautions might not have changed anything, having designed them out to save money has been a strategic failure of the company.

More concerning though, is the report here that despite having filed a response plan, the actual response has been a failure, and what containment has been accomplished has been put in place by the US Navy rather than BP. The other issue raised is that this is the second time that BP has been responsible for an emergency response plan that has failed in a similar way. It's been 20 years since the Exxon Valdez but those are not lessons that should have been forgotten.

No organisation wants to find itself in the deep trouble that BP is currently experiencing. An emergency response plan that is regularly tested and maintained should help towards ensuring that if the worst should happen you are not seen as having been negligent, responsible for huge clean-up costs and with your reputation for environmental responsibility in tatters. When it all goes wrong, cost savings based on the assumption that everything will go to plan are seen to be misguided.In BP's case it won't just be the company paying the cost of their error but the wildlife and economies in the way of their mess.