Tall Stories One

Submitted by Continuity Forum on Tue, 2005-01-18 19:19.Tall Stories

Category Business Continuity Articles - Crisis Management and BCM

Tall Stories from Peter Power

What the future may hold?!

The year is 2007...

Inside 10 Downing Street on the eve of the Labour Party conference, Prime Minister Peter Hain has just been on the telephone to Sir Alistair Campbell who was speaking from his office at the BBC TV Centre London.

Dianne Abbott, Minister for Resilience, comes in. “Well Dianne, I have to say something tomorrow about the proposed Business Continuity tax, but I will be in for a rough time from Lord Paxman when he interviews me later. Jeremy can be such a brute. Any ideas?” The Minister thinks for a moment, wishing that this night will be the turn of Westminster for the rolling blackout schedule to keep the National Grid from collapsing (instead it is the turn of her constituency, 20 miles away) “I think I have an idea Prime Minister. Do you remember the days before we made Alistair Director General and Tony Blair had not yet been Beatified? BC was just the flip side of Anno Domini or so we thought. I think we can still use the religious theme and get people to cough up money just as they would in a collection box”. Peter Hain looks out of his bullet proof window and peers down on an empty Downing Street. “I think that’s it. We can build up the theme that protecting organisations from suicide bombers and so on is a divine task where only those who comply will have ever lasting business - and nothing is free these days.” Could it happen I ask myself?

Although 2007 is just a year away I have long since resisted the temptation to second guess where this country and its government, are heading in a world of ever increasing threats and risks and it really would not surprise me if somehow the hand of divine intervention was invoked to get more people thinking about Business Continuity. Every poll I read about how many organisations apply BC tells me that we have some way to go and tragically we only start to get there when some catastrophe has given UK inc. a wake up call and who knows what aspiring Minister in 2003 will rise to the top in a few years - and desperate to balance the books will tax anything that will bring in some revenue? Not only that, but the suggestion that we could see a rolling schedule of electricity blackouts is not quite as daft as it sounds. Michael Hunt, marketing director at fast growing power generation firm Turbo Genset said after the London Blackout on 28 August that “localised blackouts are likely to become more commonplace given the growing demands on a creaking local grid network”.

However, it was to the other side of the Atlantic recently where we saw a real power failure and where drastic continuity measures are now being taken to spread the load. Take this report from the US:

“When California's power supply dips, the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), who manages the state's power grid, notifies the California utilities that there must be a load reduction on the creaking state-wide power system. The individual utilities then determine how the load reduction will be accomplished. Usually, it's done by blacking out certain blocks in their area for hours at a time”. Not entirely unconnected was a curious article in the Toronto Star newspaper a few days after the US / Canada failure:

"When the power went off and the federal government was fumbling for answers in the dark, the man at the epicentre of Canada's emergency operations was canoeing on the lakes and out of contact. The largest blackout in history was three days old by the time James Harlick heard about it. In a comedy of communications errors the Critical Infrastructure Protection and Emergency Preparedness (OCIPEP) this week optimistically misstated by two days when Harlick (the boss) returned to work and now claim he is still out of reach on holiday..."

Investigations are continuing to determine how OCIPEP apparently misled the Prime Minister's Office's and then Defence Minister John McCallum on the blackout's cause….and equally tough questions are being asked about OCIPEP's own preparedness: why phones didn't work, backup power failed in key government buildings, and essential staff ended up on the street.

Out of that complex mess, the Harlick incident is emerging as an unwanted reminder that small personal errors often contribute to larger systemic failures”.
The last line really says it all. Small personal errors do indeed lead to larger failures and I am reminded that a well known colleague in the BC business, Jeff Charlton, told me a true story the other day about strolling into a second hand shop in Hastings and with not much else to do, looked around the various odds and ends on sale. There on a shelf was a small missile (about 3’ long) that appeared to still have a front and rear end, but showed signs of having been fired in some past training exercise or whatever. Not exactly an everyday shop item and therefore even more curious. The shop owner asserted that any explosive or rocket propellant had long since been burnt up or had been removed and here was a perfectly inert / safe piece of militaria that might easily enlighten an otherwise flagging barmitzvah, provide a handy table leg, cricket stump or artificial limb etc. £20 was dully exchanged and off Jeff went swinging his new purchase as he walked down the high street.

However, some time later and after much passing round of the little rocket, curiosity got the better of him and he decided to look a little closer at the business end of his perfectly safe missile, only to find that the explosive was far from removed. It appeared to be still in place and ready to go.

I suspect this might have had the effect of an unscheduled laxative for Jeff who rather bravely, dashed off to some foreign field near the M.25 to burry the weapon out of harms way while he called the police. Unfortunately, the boys in blue did not exactly award any medals and instead berated him in no uncertain terms for carrying round a dangerous missile! If anyone can beat that for an after dinner story, I’m sure Jeff would like to know.

People do indeed do curious things and some of use might have noticed a report the other day in the Daily Telegraph about a young man who set a new swimming record. Not one that I had heard of before. Philip John managed to swim for 120 yards through a peat bog. Even more bizarre, this all took place at the ‘World Bog Snorkelling Championships’ in Wales where Philip (in one minute 35 seconds) beat the previous best time by four seconds. He said later that “being an international swimmer helps, although you can see through the water in a swimming pool and you aren’t as smelly when you come out”. Now there’s a young man with a future in Business Continuity...