When the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in 2010, the big oil companies in the Gulf of Mexico all had government-approved spill response plans. Several of those plans listed walruses. Walruses haven’t lived in the Gulf for millions of years.
Some of the plans also named an expert to call who had died years earlier. The government approved them anyway.
I’ve worked on hundreds of emergency response plans in more than 30 years. Most of them look alike. Same front pages, same sections, same diagrams. Companies share them, copy them, and borrow from each other, so they all end up looking the same.
Here is what I’ve seen in real responses. The team rarely opens the plan in the first hours. Someone grabs a checklist. A few days in, when things settle down a bit, the plan comes off the shelf.
A researcher named Lee Clarke has a name for plans like that. He calls them “fantasy documents.” They don’t really work. They show that an organization is doing something about being ready.
I don’t think that’s fair to every plan. But there is a real problem behind it.
Look at what the rules ask for. Do you have a plan? Does it cover the right topics? Almost nobody asks the next question: can the people who have to use it actually do what it says?
That is the difference between what and how. A plan can list every task and still not help anyone do them.
Asiana Airlines learned that after its 2013 crash in San Francisco. It had a family assistance plan on file with the U.S. government. In practice, it took two full days to reach even three-quarters of the families, and some families waited five days. The fine was $500,000.
The plan existed. What was missing was the ability to carry it out.
So what does help? Disasters from Piper Alpha to Grenfell Tower have taught us a lot. The lessons are not complicated, but they are easy to skip, and most plans don’t mention them at all.
I wrote the full version on Substack. It covers where emergency plans came from (all the way back to ancient Rome), what the research says about why they fail, why even audits can miss the problem, and what really improves a response.
Read the full piece on Substack →
Jeff Morgan is the founder of Aviem International, a global emergency response firm that helps companies prepare for and respond to mass casualty events.