Ian Bell, Vice President of Engineering and Facilities at RS Group emphasises the importance of having a plan to deal with major incidents. “It is absolutely essential, if for nothing else, to give some structure early on,” he says.
“Because in the melee of something having just happened, people tend to be like headless chickens, it is a natural reaction and a plan is something to anchor on.”
It’s essential to keep your plan clear and straightforward, he says. “Where a lot of companies go wrong is trying to over-engineer the plans. They make them too specific to individual scenarios and hope that it gives every answer. The trouble is, every scenario is different.”
A survival toolbox
A fire in the staff kitchen is very different from a major fire that destroys the roof of the factory, he adds. Rather than categorising risks under broad headings, it makes more sense to build what he calls a toolbox of actions and responses.
“Give yourself software contingencies or additional equipment that you can roll out,” he says. “Create a communication plan so you can keep people informed and identify an emergency team structure to coordinate your response.
“Don’t link your tools to specific scenarios because you’ll need to evaluate your situation and then go to your toolbox and roll them out. But make sure any of the tools you come up with actually work in the real world.”
When disaster strikes, Bell says the first step is to secure what has survived the incident and get a clear picture of how things stand. “In this situation the immediate desire is to start fixing things, but what we need to do is secure and understand it,” he adds.
Gary Harvey, Head of UK Field Services at RS, says site design is critical to surviving an incident. “While many businesses have a business interruption procedure – and that’s very useful and really important – it hasn’t often been considered when designing a site in order to prevent some of these things from happening,” he says.
“It’s important but I think the majority of manufacturing industries, frankly, don’t take it seriously . And they think, sometimes correctly, that the problems they’re going to get are so rare that it’s not worth investing in.”