have as much of – or, in some cases,
more of – an impact than the actual
event that caused the issue”.
He gives the example of Cyclone
Fani, which caused over a million
people to be evacuated in India in
May following extensive warning by
the government using its recently
implemented public warning system.
According to official estimates, 64
people lost their lives; however, during
the 1999 cyclone which hit the same
area, 9,658 people were killed. Mouline
says that during the recovery the
authorities sent messages targeted at
farmers and with differing messages
based on whether the recipients were
in cities or out in the countryside
– “letting people know what to do
to avoid malaria and dengue fever
and how to handle livestock. These
were very targeted messages that
have nothing to do with the actual
immediate physical danger to physical
things or people during the cyclone
itself, because if you can’t deal with
the issues around diseases or ultimately
the care and feeding of livestock and
other animals during the recovery, the
consequences could be far worse than
the cyclone’s immediate impact.”
Going back to first principles,
Mouline says that “communication
is key across every stage of a critical
event” – the warning, risk assessment,
response, management, resolution and
recovery – and that “communication
with all stakeholders whoever and
wherever they happen to be is also
incredibly key”.
No Sharpies required
To make all this a bit more tangible,
I recently was shown some of the
capabilities of Everbridge’s Critical
Event Management (CEM) Platform
in conjunction with its Visual
Command Centre (VCC) software –
the latter has been recently introduced
to the European market – by Scott
Morrison, VP of product marketing,
and Greg Mummah, its product
marketing manager. CEM is intended
to address organisations’ need for a
single operating picture when dealing
with an event or incident, replace
a fragmented/siloed approach and
remove the need for employees to
collate all the information together to
create actionable intelligence. Mummah
says the system is designed to warn
organisations whenever an event has the
potential to adversely affect one of their
assets or something else that they care
about, such as their supply chain.
He runs me through a scenario
in which a hurricane is approaching
the US. “The first thing we’re letting
you know is that you have assets that
are in the potential risk radius of this
particular event,” he says, before he
shows me a map that gives the expected
path of the hurricane and indicates that
the hypothetical customer’s equally
hypothetical assets in Charlotte are
going to be hit by it in the next 24
hours, and that if it keeps to its current
track it could impact those in Atlanta.
Mummah adds that one of the
platform’s capabilities allows the user,
in the case of a critical event, to activate
a predefined crisis management plan
tailored to the type of event in question.
That then brings up a list of appropriate
(and, again, predefined) tasks; for
example, pushing instructions to staff
on how to deal with the incident, or
simply telling personnel who can’t
assist in dealing with it to stay at home,
which can be launched individually
“as you see fit”. These can be used, for
example, to provide employees with
details about the emergency, along
with any supporting documentation –
from a hazardous materials datasheet
to evacuation plans. It also features an
encrypted messaging (both text and
images) mobile app.
Returning to our simulated
hurricane, having launched his crisis
management plan and its associated
tasks, Mummah is now receiving
responses from the ‘contacted
employees’ – “so these responses,
whether they were able to successfully
complete a task or not, are all collated
back in my operations centre so
my team knows in real time where
preparation is going well and where
maybe we have some issues so that we
can focus on the latter”.
In addition, you can use Everbridge’s
traditional capabilities through the
platform to tell those employees whose
places of work are in the affected areas
not to come into work, and when they
will be told these have reopened. “If
you are in manufacturing or dependent
on a supply chain, we’ll tell you which
supply chain assets are also in the radius
of that event; we can also monitor
routes, ports, rail lines, really anything
that can be included as part of your
supply chain, so we’ll let you know this
particular supplier or supply route is
at risk,” says Mummah. He also shows
how the system can be used to monitor
traffic and evacuation routes to guide
the user organisation’s own evacuees
and help them avoid gridlocked
The VCC
software also
provides the
user with
customisable
dashboards to
make it easier
to keep tabs
on risk events,
assets and
communications
October 2019 @CritCommsToday 11