Oil Spill Moves Toyota From Spotlight
FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF ED DEVLIN
At the recent DRJ conference in Orlando one of my friends said, “Why don’t you present a crisis manage- ment case study using the Toyota accelerator crisis?” I thought that it was a good idea. I responded favorably, but with a caveat – only if no other “major” disaster/crisis
occurred that would supersede Toyota.
While I concentrated on reading as much information about
Toyota as I could, and there was a lot of new information about
Toyota, I couldn’t avoid reading about other incidents that were
n;Floods – April flooding in the northeast U.S.; May flooding in
Tennessee and Kentucky.
During the Tennessee flood, the Cumberland River, which winds through the heart
of Nashville, spilled over its banks as the city received more than 13 inches of rain
over the weekend. The flash floods were blamed in the deaths of more than 20
people in Tennessee. The Country Music Hall of Fame has closed. The Gaylord
Entertainment CEO said, “it would be at least three months before the massive
entertainment complex that also includes the Opryland Hotel and the Opry Mills
Mall has guests again.”
n;Tornadoes – At the time this article is being written, at least 232
incidents have been confirmed as tornadoes, of the 390 reported
in the US. The strongest of the confirmed tornadoes (F- 4) struck
Mississippi and Alabama on April 24 and Oklahoma on May 10.
n;Earthquakes – April has been an active month for quakes around
the world. April 4 – a 7.2-magnitude quake struck in Baja, Calif.;
April 6 – a quake struck Indonesia’s northwest island of Sumatra,
prompting a brief tsunami warning and sending residents rushing
for higher ground; April 11 – a 7.1-magnitude quake struck off the
Solomon Islands. April 11 – a 6.2-magnitude quake struck near
Grenada, Spain. April 13 – a 7.1-magnitude quake struck the edge
of the Tibetan plateau in western China’s mountainous Qinghai
area.
n;Volcano – eruption of the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano in Iceland. It
produced a huge cloud of volcanic ash that billowed all the way
to the European continent. Airlines, fearing the invisible cloud’s
microscopic particles could clog up airplane engines, canceled
flights. It was the world’s biggest flight disruption since the days
following Sept. 11, 2001, and the cost to airlines was huge.
A recent incident has taken the spotlight off Toyota. On April
20, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, approximately 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, exploded and collapsed
two days later. The result of the collapse has been the continuous
flow of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. An underground leak
is expelling an estimated 5,000 gallons of crude oil per hour. The
solution to sealing the leak had not been found as we went to
press. Which of the three companies involved in the Deepwater
Horizon is directly responsible? The CEOs of BP Oil, Transocean,
and Halliburton recently testified before Congress to explain how
this occurred and who is to blame. The CEOs said it wasn’t their
fault; it was the other company’s fault.
Each of the CEOs should have recognized some of the tenants
of “Murphy’s Law” when they did their risk analysis and business impact analysis. I ask you to select the following “Murphy’s
Laws” that best fits this crisis:
1) “If it can go wrong, it will.”
2) “If anything just cannot go wrong, it will anyway.”
3) “If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that
will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong.”
4) “If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which
something can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way,
unprepared for, will promptly develop.”
Didn’t each of these companies have a detailed prevention and
emergency response plan? If they did, why didn’t it work?
Many experts believe the government regulators are as
guilty as BP Oil-Transocean-Halliburton. The federal agency
with oversight of offshore drilling did not require BP to file
a “scenario for potential blowout,” referring to the sudden
release of oil from a well. How can our government officials
who have the responsibility for oversight of offshore drilling
allow BP or anyone to drill 5,000 feet below the ocean – if
they don’t know how to fix a leak if it should occur? Perhaps
they were “regulating” the same way the SEC regulators were
regulating.
An April 24 report “Securities and Exchange Commission
at Work” slammed senior agency staffers at the SEC
claiming they spent hours surfing pornographic Web sites on
government-issued computers, while they were supposed to
be policing the nation’s financial system.
An attempt to explode a bomb in Times Square took the
spotlight off Toyota. A crude car bomb of propane, gasoline
and fireworks was discovered in a smoking Nissan Pathfinder
in the heart of Times Square on Saturday evening, April 24.
Although the device had apparently started to detonate, fortunately, there was no explosion. Federal and city authorities
did a phenomenal job identifying a suspect, making an arrest
late Monday night before he was able to fly out of the country.
The bomber, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American citizen, was
nabbed at Kennedy Airport as he tried to escape on a plane
destined for Dubai.
Both stories are still evolving, and new data is forthcoming every day. It would be too soon to do a case study on them.
Perhaps we all can do a case study on both incidents before the
next issue.
By ED DEVLIN, CBCP
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Ed Devlin, CBCP, has provided business recovery planning consulting services since 1973
when he co-founded Devlin Associates. Since then, Devlin has assisted more than 300
companies in the writing of their business recovery plans and has made more than 800
seminars and presentations worldwide.
