Like many of my readers I spent much of the weekend dealing
with the consequences of the big windstorm that hit the west coast on the
weekend. For those of you not aware, what was supposed to be a pretty typical rainstorm
ended up being massive wind storm which, at its peak, knocked out power to over
500,000 people in Metro Vancouver. Given our population (about 2.5 million)
that means about 1 in 5 households was affected by the power outage. Our house
was one of the 500,000 and, unfortunately, we were one of the last of the big substations
to be energized so many individual houses in our area still don’t have power 48
hours after the end of the storm. This post is a bit of a post-mortem or as we
say in my field a “post-incident analysis” where I will share some of the
things I learned from this storm to help prepare our household for “the Big One”
(the predicted earthquake that we all know is coming on the west coast). It
also ends with some unsolicited advice for our friends at BC Hydro about their
communications strategy for the storm.
In my work the way we improve our safety performance is
through post-incident safety assessments. Every negative safety incident is accompanied by a
post-incident analysis. This involves looking at the incident and asking the
question: “what is the worst thing that could have happened”. We then do a
root-cause analysis in order to establish and address the root cause of the
incident. Ideally in doing this, similar incidents can be avoided in the future.
In addition to incidents we also track and investigate every “near miss”. A
near miss is an event that could have resulted in an incident but did not. Usually
the difference between a near miss and an incident is simply good luck (i.e. a
trip that caused a bump but didn’t break a bone). In our industry a near miss
is seen as a “free learning”: an opportunity to catch a problem before someone
gets hurt.
Without belittling the cost this windstorm had in human hardship
and financial losses it pretty much represents a near miss when compared to the
Big One. In this case only 1 in 5 households was hit, in daytime, on a weekend,
in summer and only power was affected. We have been warned that in the event of
the Big One, we have to be in a position to take care of ourselves without
outside help for a minimum of 72 hours. That means assuming that the entire
lower mainland is affected; that power, water and natural gas supplies will be
offline; and we can expect no help of any kind (except from our neighbours) for
at least three days.
Looking at our how our family emergency plan held up during the power outage it was clear that
while we did a lot of things right, we have some serious holes to address.
We have a reasonable store of water and dried goods and while we would be uncomfortable
we would not starve nor lack for water for three-to-five days. Now for the biggest holes.
My plan for
cooking during an emergency involves using the bar-b-que. However, it being the
end of summer instead of having a lot of fuel, I have been working on the
bottom half of my one tank. For emergency preparedness I should have taken my
father-in-law’s advice to have at least one full tank in reserve at all times.
Since the roads to Langley City (which had power) were open (as was Costco) I
was able to rectify that problem on Sunday morning. Had I waited much longer
though, I would have been out of luck. When I showed up at the Husky (the only
place in our area that had power and sold propane) I discovered that they had
about an hour’s supply of propane left in their tank (at the rate they were
selling it) and they had already sold out of both gas and diesel.
Talking gasoline, we have a four-tiered plan for shelter
depending on what happens to our house in a big earthquake. Tier two is to
shelter in the minivan. Once again I failed to take my father-in-law’s advice.
He never lets his fuel tank get to less than half-full so he has a reserve in
case of an emergency. I, meanwhile, had let my tank get to almost empty as I
was waiting for a chance to visit my in-laws in Aldergrove (where I can buy cheaper
gas). Fortunately, I was able to get $20 of gas from the local Chevron (apparently
the only gas station in Walnut Grove with an emergency back-up generator). I
was later able to fill up in Aldergrove but, as I mentioned, the gas station
with propane in Langley City had long run out of gas and diesel so in the case
of the Big One finding an operating gas station may not have been an option for me.
As for paying for the gasoline, I only got $20 of gas from the local
Chevron because I didn’t have much cash on hand. My wife never carries cash
(she likes debit) and it is only by habit that I make sure to have a few actual
bills in my wallet. Except during the power outage Interac was down (no power)
so everyone was accepting cash-only. When the BC preparedness people say to keep
a couple hundred dollars in small bills on hand it is for that reason. Our area
has power but the phone lines are still down so it
looks like could be back to a cash-only society for a few days still.
Part of my plan for time without power is having a supply of
ice available. But we learned another lesson and this one I want to share with
the folks at BC Hydro. We were lucky that we were able to get enough ice to
save many of our perishables from the fridge (by putting them in coolers) and
our deep freeze was okay but due to the communication policy of BC Hydro we
lost a lot of food we did not need to lose. As most locals know BC Hydo (our government-owned utility) had
an almost complete collapse of its public communication system during the storm. Their web site
crashed, their phone lines were jammed and it took quite a while for even their
Twitter feed to come to life. Once up the Twitter feed (and the good old fashioned
AM radio) were what we used to make our plans and this is where my issue with
BC Hydro comes to play.
My one big complaint about BC Hydro (whose employees have
worked incredibly hard this weekend to restore power) is that they did not come
close to giving us any reliable information for most of the time we were without power. We lost power just after noon on Saturday. By late Saturday BC Hydro got their Twitter feed running and was reassuring us that we would get power back by midnight. Using that as our guide we
decided to leave the fridge freezer and fridge unopened, counting on insulation
and retained cold to keep everything okay until the power came back that night.
Waking up Sunday morning we were shocked that the power was not yet on. We went back online and were informed on Sunday
morning that power in our area would be back by noon. Come noon we
still had no power and had not had power for 24 hours which I was taught is the cut-off for trusting your fridge without power. If BC
Hydro had been honest with us at the onset we could have triaged our
fridge/freezer and saved a lot of good food by moving the more expensive meat
etc...from the fridge freezer to the deep freeze and being more aggressive with
our use of ice and coolers. The problem with triaging is that it means opening the
freezer and losing a lot of the less expensive stuff which we thought we might
be able to save by simply being prudent about fridge use (and would have
happened if the power had only been off for 6-to-12 hours).
I know, I know BC Hydro was not in a position to give exact
estimates but surely they must have known pretty early into Saturday afternoon
that this was not a problem they were going to be able to address in 6 hours.
All they would have had to do is simply announce: “this is too big to handle
right away expect to be without power for at least 24 + hours” and we could
have acted accordingly. Instead we trusted BC Hydro’s unrelentingly optimistic estimates
and lost many hundreds of dollars worth of groceries, much of which could have
been saved with better information.
As an outsider I have no sense on how BC Hydro comes up with
their repair estimates, but I am informed that until the local power sub-station has
been energized they are not going to know all the problems down-line from the
local sub-station. I only learned at around 4 pm Sunday that the sub-station that
powers our entire area had been de-energized and was not going to be energized
until Sunday at 5 pm. In our case it was a further 10 hours after the
sub-station was energized before we got power. I know the organization wanted
to put a good spin on the situation but they must have known that if a
sub-station is de-energized then telling me at 6 pm that power from a de-energized sub-station will be up at
midnight is simply not going to happen.
This situation reminds me of an episode of Star Trek: The
Next Generation (yes I am a nerd) where Commander Scott (Scotty) guest-starred.
In the episode Scotty pointed out to Geordie (the Head Engineer of the
Enterprise) that Scotty always over-estimated how long it would take to fix a
problem. His logic was that if something
went wrong he still had time to meet his original estimate but if he got
everything done right he would be done early and he would get praise as a “miracle-worker”.
By giving us overly optimistic predictions did the exact opposite, instead they made us resent them. In effect BC Hydro wasn’t helping us and In doing so was
actually hurting their brand. Throughout the weekend they repeatedly gave cheery predictions which
they, time-after-time, failed to meet. Each time they did so it got us more and
more angry. Had they told us a less optimistic (more realistic?) estimate right
up front (and they must have known pretty early that it was going to be more than 24
hours) we might have grumbled but then we could have planned accordingly.
I
have a client who gave me some words of advice early in my career that I remember
to this day. She said:
never lie to me or try to say something is clean when it is not. This is
my job and I know you didn’t make the mess and that you are just the guy
figuring out how to clean it up. I won’t hold bad news against you as long as
you tell me the truth no matter how hard it may be for me to hear. With the
truth I can make plans, allocate budgets and make promises to my bosses. I will,
however, definitely hold it against you if you mislead me or don’t tell me the
truth because then I can’t make good decisions, I will mis-spend my budget and
I am likely to make promises to my bosses that I cannot meet. If I do that
because you misled me then I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.
If BC Hydro learns only one thing from this event it should
be that people will be disappointed with bad news but will be furious if they
think (even wrongly) that they have been knowingly misled.
Always under promise, always over deliver.
ReplyDeleteThere is no point being cheerfully optimistic in a "disaster". Which, for the lower mainland, this was. Of course, the ROC is a bit better prepared since they have a lot more experience with weather.
Lessons learned at very little cost, which unfortunately means the average person won't learn much since they were only inconvenienced.
BC Hydro, well I hope the update the plan(s) based on it could have been a heck of a lot worse.
Of course, I'm safe in Victoria, and we never have weather....;-)
I'm used to long power cuts (the longest was 7 days after a hurricane). The key to survival in such circumstances is to expect zero help from outside, understand the authorities will be disorganized and provide the wrong information, that prices for everything will go sky high, and that it's an excellent time to cook all the meat in the freezer and share it with the dogs.
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