The simple truth is no two disasters are exactly alike.

What can you do to make sure you don’t get blindsided if a crisis erupts? Have a detailed disaster response plan in place. Chances are, when you evaluate how your business handled a crisis in the past, there may be “holes” in the disaster management plan.

Crisis management is never easy, but having he right steps in place will help you better respond to unexpected disasters.

Each hour of every day, we rely on a complex and vast network of engineers, drillers, truckers, tankers and pipelines to keep the ebb and flow of daily work moving. A weak link anywhere in the chain can spell disaster for the industry and disrupt production both upstream and downstream. The loss of life on Deepwater Horizon underscores the vital importance to evaluate preparedness planning and response capabilities.

When a crisis hits, companies that come through it with the least amount of damage are often those that didn’t underestimate the damage from a worst-case scenario.

Leadership counts
What can you learn from other companies as to how you should and should not respond to a crisis? For starters, an operation needs to act fast and emphatically in times of a disaster. That starts with effective leadership at the top.

The CEO, company owner and senior managers need to have solid knowledge of how their company operates. They need to know how to reassure their employees and the general public that they are in charge and the company is in control of the disaster.

Any manager who has been under fire during a devastating event can tell you that staying calm and in control is easier said than done. But if those in charge don’t take command quickly and efficiently, the very existence of the company may be at stake.

Evaluate, implement
Not only is it important to have a solid disaster plan ready to roll out at the onset of an emergency, it’s also crucial that top management be thoroughly familiar with it. Stakes are high so it is not enough to just rely on decades of experience. Disasters test a company’s chain-of-command, their employees’ expertise, the communications channels and access to equipment.

Figure out how you want to prioritize potential problems. Think of it this way: a formal disaster system is much like an emergency room triage. The most time sensitive, life-or-death situations have to be put at the top of the triage. Periodically review how you’ll handle the worst-case scenarios down the line.

Key emergency plans have essentially two stages: evaluation and implementation. The first stage is where an assessment is made on the significance of the disruption or disaster. Formal notifications may need to be made to outside organizations, utility companies orgovernment channels. Depending on the scope of the problem, your disaster team may need to implement crisis management procedures immediately.

The accuracy of evaluation will help all those down the line respond to the problem with the right actions and tools.

Planned proactivity
After key managers evaluate the situation, your disaster team should coordinate its response through internal and external channels of communication. This is where well planned advance action can save lives.

In emergencies, it is important to be proactive (versus reactive) about disaster planning. Proactive companies recognize that a major calamity can strike any business with little warning.

One key element of an effective crisis team is making sure everyone understands their role during an impending emergency.

It is important to have several overlapping teams in place ready to respond. Redundancies help ensure that no aspect of the action plans are left behind, in the unlikely scenario of key members of the disaster management team unable to respond you need to have in place additional teams ready to implement the plans. Your crisis management flowchart should be updated to reflect an accurate representation of the team’s roles.

Two types of crisis
In general, there are two types of crisis in the oil and gas industry. Both reflect the need to have a comprehensive disaster plan in place. The plan must be thorough, dynamic, and easily adaptable to the crisis at hand so management can quickly respond to the unexpected.

The first type of crisis is often called a smoldering crisis. This calamity slowly develops over a period of weeks or months. There is sometimes a tendency to not sound the alarm and enact the emergency plan before a full crisis has arrived, but if that course is action is taken, production may be jeopardized.

The second type of devastating event is more often catastrophic. It may be instantaneous like an explosion or fire. This kind of disaster disrupts the normal communications systems, and day-to-day operations. An instant crisis requires that your team is  well trained and educated. When those pieces are in place, you may ultimately save lives.

Safety is knowledge
The smaller the organization the more damaging a crisis may be to its operation. Typically, smaller operations have fewer resources, fewer opportunities to fill in gaps in work, and less financial resources. This should not be an excuse for an unsafe operation.

Disaster planning takes hard work, time and leadership. Successful disaster planning and implementation was on display in 2005. That year the Gulf of Mexico saw two devastating hurricanes in direct path of major offshore production. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita tested the oil and gas industry with winds gusts over 200 mph.

If you don’t have someone who can explain your situation eloquently and expertly you may be looking at a public relations crisis.

But disaster teams successfully responded and were able to safely evacuate workers from more than 3,000 offshore platforms without incident or injury thanks to a good plan and quality management.
There’s another thing to consider when your management team is updating its response plan. If the “face” of your company, the CEO, board chairman, operations owner or president, isn’t skilled at handling a public relations fallout in light of a disaster, hire someone to train senior managers for this role.

Not everyone is skilled at speaking to the press or may be comfortable talking about a disaster that your company is involved in. But if you don’t have someone who can explain your situation eloquently and expertly you may be looking at a public relations crisis along with the other real-time disaster you’re dealing with.

When faced with cameras, microphones and inquisitive reporters, too many companies tend to duck questions or act as if the situation isn’t the rest of the world’s business. That might not be the posture you ultimately want to assume as it may come back to haunt you.

Just like company leaders need crisis management skills, so too is it necessary to have crisis communications know-how.

Don’t just try to fix the problem if the disaster raises a lot of questions. Learn how to achieve your own company’s goals but without destroying the company reputation that you’ve worked so hard to help build.