By Ola Sage, President & CEO, e-Management
It’s about 1:40 p.m. on Tuesday, August 23rd. I’m sitting at my desk eating my delicious homemade lunch of Moroccan style salmon with veggies while I’m squeezing in a quick meeting with my executive assistant before my 2:00 p.m. meeting starts. She steps out of my office for a moment to pick something up from her desk. She returns, takes a seat and is about to begin speaking when in walks the CFO. As he’s walking in, I feel my chair vibrating. I look up and he’s vibrating too! “What is that?” I ask out loud. My brain is trying to catch up with what is happening. I look out the window and see the building moving. The fog begins to clear. As my mind clicks, the CFO yells “Earthquake, everybody out!”
The National Cathedral staff took this picture showing proof of the power of the quake the shook most of the East Coast earlier this week. e-Management’s Silver Spring headquarters were undamaged; but the event taught us ways to improve our COOP plan. What did you learn from the earthquake?
I jump up from my desk, plate in hand and run down the hall (honestly, I don’t remember what happened to my executive assistant… I vaguely remember seeing someone that looked like her whoosh by). As I reach the door to the hallway, I remember I’ve left my purse and cell phone in my office. I run back (really, I did) grab my purse, phone and a bottle of water (who knows, I might need it) and rush back down the hall.
As we make our way down 11 flights of stairs, some people are talking, but generally it is quiet. No one appears to be panicking. As I approach the 8th floor, I realize I’m still carrying my plate with Moroccan salmon. “What was I thinking?” But it’s too late; there are no garbage cans in the stairwells.
Communications down…
About 7 minutes later I’m outside the building. I finish my lunch (yes, I really did) while I start to look for our employees. And yeah, what about that COOP (Continuity of Operations) plan? I try calling our CIO to see if he’s had a chance to send out an SMS message to the whole company about what happened (we’ve actually had two successful test runs using our SMS solution for emergency communications). No luck, all the mobile phone lines are out. When I finally locate him on the other side of the building, he informs me that he is unable to access the SMS server from his Blackberry. Really! So what good is a service if you can’t get to it when you need to?
Ten minutes later…
Building management informs us that we have to move a way from the building as no one is certain what has just happened. Great, I think. We know what to do. It’s in our COOP plan. We have an agreement with a local restaurant that if we are forced to leave our building due to an emergency for an extended period of time, we can use their site as our short term gathering place. Oh, one little problem though, we put the agreement in place several months ago and updated our COOP plan, but just hadn’t gotten around to formally letting everyone know.
Plan B…
So now, we resort to the “find a person, tell a person” technique, asking employees to tell their colleagues to meet us at the local restaurant. It works and we all end up in the same place. Amazing! For the next hour we’re on our cell phones texting our families, colleagues, and friends. Thankfully everyone is okay, including my quite shaken executive assistant.
The building management informs us that they do not recommend returning to the building until they are sure there is no structural damage. No problem! We’re going home.
Reflections…
As I drive home, I think to myself, after all the work we did planning and documenting our COOP plan, why didn’t everything work out the way it should have?
We hope there won’t be a next time, but we’re not waiting. We’re grateful we had the opportunity to learn the lessons we did and we’re making the changes we need NOW.
So…
How did your COOP plan work for you during the unprecedented earthquake that rattled the eastern part of the US this week? What did you learn and what will you do differently? What will you tell generations to come about the earthquake of Summer 2011?
). To Doozie’s credit, their website was full of information; we also decided to purchase some of their pre-publishing services (I’ll call them Service A and Service B).