Of course all the facts are not in yet, and some conclusions may await the NTSB report due some time next year on this summer’s Asiana Airlines 777 crash, but it’s not too early to review your own emergency plans in light of some of the widely-reported communications failures that San Francisco International Airport reportedly experienced in the minutes following the aircraft accident.
Among the problems reported were a software glitch that prevented communication of the disaster to SFO officials and a website that crashed shortly after the accident apparently due to volume.
With communications being one of the most critical components of any disaster plan, large airports and major companies are undoubtedly scurrying to re-check that their systems are robust enough to withstand the deluge of hits a disaster provokes and that they have sufficient back up in case one system fails. But smaller companies need to use SFO’s problems as an opportunity to review their own plans and look for communication vulnerabilities. In some cases, the vulnerability will not be a software glitch but, for example, an over-reliance on cell phone voice communications that are more likely to be disrupted by an increase in call volume.
It was interesting to note that SFO officials turned to Twitter to update the public on the accident after their own website failed. Whether that was part of their contingency plan or not, companies may want to formally consider the use of social media websites in their disaster plans as a way of updating their own employees and the public in the event of an emergency.
