Surviving Ike: Lessons Learned at Texas Health Care Company

Ike presented many com­panies with the ultimate test of their previous busi­ness continuity planning efforts. A health care company — responsible for managing cancer treat­ment centers through the US with offices in north Houston and a distribution center in Dallas — had cre­ated a business continuity program, with this author’s consulting firm, Avalution, that would allow the com­pany to continue providing support to critical medi­cal practices throughout a hurricane such as Ike. The company also wanted to be able to provide local crisis management and recovery abilities.

The plan, created for the practice groups, emphasized communications, including a virtual PBX environment to maintain critical published numbers and a remotely established 800 number for message dissemination. A secure web page, part of the remote plan host­ing system, was also established to post detailed information.

During the hurricane and the period immediately after, the relocated PBX, information line and web messages worked flawlessly and kept the remote practice groups informed and operating on a consistent basis. Local emergency communications, however, proved more difficult.

Recovery plans relied on the ability of the crisis management team to com­municate via cellular phones, satellite phones and email. During recovery, cel­lular service proved to be unreliable. Service was limited prior to the storm due to governmental priority for use of the systems as well as after the storm when infrastructure damage and power outages made conditions even worse for wireless communication.

In a post-event de-brief, the client identified two potential additions to the communications strategy, as well as a fallback to help address these problems:

• add non-PBX hard-line phones at both the primary and EOC locations, as they proved to be more reliable and provided an additional channel
• add SMS messaging to the outgo­ing message strategy, as SMS uses much less bandwidth and time than voice communications and increases the odds that the message will get through.
• as a final communications fallback, the company suggested establish­ing a specific time to convene at a pre-established EOC if all communi­cations fail.

The impact analysis and detailed plans, combined with the availability of those plans through a hosted repository, allowed management to implement an effective recovery in the aftermath of the storm.

The client said that knowing who had to be up and going first was very impor­tant. The client’s first building was up and running within 36 hours of the storm with critical staff engaged. The second building was operational within 96 hours of Ike’s passing.

Another critical lesson learned, from a departmental recovery perspective, involved employee availability in the aftermath of a major regional event. Though power to the company’s facili­ties was restored in a short period of time, mainly due to being located in close proximity to the airport, many employees’ homes in other areas of Houston were without power for more than a week – creating a major chal­lenge in filling recovery teams.

Additionally, many employees had left the area prior to the storm and were unwilling or unable to return quick­ly; even those who remained in the area were not immediately available, as many were understandably more con­cerned with the welfare of their family than reporting to work.

The company identified potential opportunities for strategy enhancements that included:

• Using company facilities for daytime family support, providing resources that would create an incentive for employees to report to work
• Establishing recovery work sites out of the hurricane area that include provisions for housing displaced families, reducing the number of key employees who will become unavail­able because they had to relocate their families, often to relatives in distant locations
• Evaluating the need to establish permanently staffed second loca­tions as a solution for functions (if any) that have been identified as too time sensitive to tolerate 24 – 36 hours of downtime

Overall, while Hurricane Ike did not create catastrophic damage to the com­pany’s facilities, it did create significant stress on the infrastructure in the Hous­ton area. In doing so it brought two of the major components of a successful recovery, communications and people, to the forefront.

The event highlighted limitations to current technology solutions and the need to look outside of company activi­ties to understand and plan for potential human and technological impacts of a greater regional event.