In this week’s bulletin, Charlie discusses the impact of the devastating fires in Los Angeles and gives an important insight into what we can learn from the event.

This week, I was interviewed by Alex Fullick for his ‘Preparing for the Unexpected’ podcast. The title of my talk was ‘Future Risks: Why the World is Becoming More Dangerous’, and in it I talked about how I believed that there were five risks which are likely to cause more incidents in the future. The five risks were: geopolitical permacrisis, complexity and close coupling of systems, cyber threat, business change, and climate change. On climate change, I talked about how we are more likely to get extreme weather events, but also, we may get weather events in areas which have not experienced the events before. This makes risk assessment much more difficult, as even though we have never had flooding in an area before, it doesn’t mean we won’t get it in the future, so our business continuity and crisis plans have to take this into account.

There was an excellent interview on this morning’s Radio 4’s Today programme with California fire chief David Acuna. His commentary on the incident inspired me to write this bulletin on what I think are some of the lessons all of us practitioners can learn from the fires.

1. My first lesson ties in with my previous point about climate change, these are the worst fires in Los Angeles ever. There was a previous fire, Woolsey Fire in November 2018, which burned approximately 96,949 acres, destroyed 1,643 structures, led to three fatalities and cost an estimated $6 billion. The current fires will greatly surpass that number in terms of acres burned, buildings destroyed and fatalities, there are already 10 to date, and the cost is likely to be in tens of billions of dollars. The event is not yet over, with further high winds forecast for the weekend. This incident is proof that climate change will bring more severe incidents than have occurred before.
2. Climate change has increased the likelihood of these fires occurring. The area has experienced a prolonged dry spell, with little rain for months. Typically, the region expects about two and a half inches of rainfall during the season, which helps mitigate the fire risk. However this year, the winds arrived before the rain, exacerbating the fire conditions. The fire chief mentioned in this morning’s interview that the fire season has been getting longer over the years due to the persistent lack of rain, making devastating fires more likely to occur.
3. On last night’s news, there were heartening stories of neighbours helping people without cars and the elderly to evacuate, some getting out in the nick of time before their houses burned down. I read an excellent book ‘A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster’ by Rebecca Solnit, which talks about how people behave in disasters. They do not, as portrayed in Hollywood disaster films, take the approach that it’s every person for themselves and fight over resources. On the whole, people behave well and look after those affected and will share scarce resources with others. There will always be some who will try and take advantage of the situation and loot, but these are often a very small minority. Desperate people may loot shops if they have no food or water, but a 50-inch TV is not much use in a disaster.
4. David Acuna also spoke about how lessons were learned from the Woolsey Fire and they were better prepared than before, but he did say how quickly we forget the lessons of previous disasters and all the improvements which were going to happen get lost, as the memory of the disaster fades, other events intrude, and the budget allocated for improvements gets reallocated to more pressing issues. This always happens after an incident and it takes discipline and commitment to ensure that the actual changes are made and the lessons learned in the previous incident are not relearned in the next incident.
5. In business continuity, we have the ‘maximum scale of incident’ planning concept. We should declare in our planning what is the biggest incident our plans should be able to deal with and beyond that, we are in a best endeavours effort. We often say that the maximum scale of an incident is the loss of our key building, but if all the staff were killed in it, as happened to some organisations in 9/11, then we have not planned for this. In light of this incident and the other five risks as we advance, we need to plan for more extreme events, even if they are a low probability of happening, it does not mean going forward that they may not happen, and we should be prepared for them.
6. In fires affecting people’s houses, it is usual for only one house to burn down at a time, so the impact on the businesses that employ the people is minimal. Staff will need time off to sort out their affairs, and if you are living in a temporary shelter, it is more difficult to go off to work every day. They may not even have appropriate clothing to turn up to work in. With whole neighbourhoods destroyed, businesses that are not affected by the fire may struggle to have sufficient staff to carry on. Business continuity planning assumptions are generally not developed to deal with the majority of staff being unavailable, including permanent and temporary staff.
7. Firefighters have been unable to fight the fires effectively due to the size of the blaze, the number of resources available, and limited water. I think we have to take responsibility for our own organisations’ resilience and make sure we have taken reasonable precautions to protect our buildings and their associated infrastructure. The fires have shown that in large incidents the emergency services and responders can become overwhelmed and may not be able to support your organisation, so you are on your own.
8. I have always been interested in an organisation’s responsibility for staff when an incident affects their home life rather than their place of work. Many people in the fires have lost everything and will be living in temporary accommodation. How much time should they be allowed off to sort out their affairs? If they have no insurance and have lost everything, should their employer help them financially? Does the employer have a duty of care to support the mental wellbeing of staff who have been subjected to trauma outside work? I suspect this will depend on the employer, business model, and culture. Different organisations will behave in various ways. It is worth having a conversation as part of your business continuity planning to discuss this and put in some guidelines. In Scotland, we are unlikely to have the scale of fires in Los Angeles, but we have been discussing with clients the duty of care of employers in prolonged power outages. What support should they provide employees or is a power cut affecting employees a personal issue for them to sort out?

I considered doing a cyber case study for this week’s bulletin, but I felt the fires are such a significant incident that I should not ignore them. As always, there are lots of lessons to learn from this incident, and I think by learning from this incident, we are trying to make sure that something good comes out of a horrendous event.