One Crisis Often Leads To Another – Lessons From A Recent, Real World Incident

One of the better recent examples of how one crisis often leads to another is with BP and the incident in the Gulf with the Deep Water Horizon platform.

As most people are aware, the first crisis occurred when the blow out preventer failed leading to other explosions, fires and the oil leak (though some may say the first crisis occurred when certain protocols where not followed).

The massive oil leak lasted for months, leading to the additional crisis of how to handle the clean up and cap the unprecedented leak at depth.

The large oil spill in turn lead to the loss of income to businesses in parts of the Gulf and Congressional hearings forcing BP to take further action of setting up funds to reimburse losses.

The size and scope of the incident lead to questions from the media, along with public statements from BP which lead to a significant PR crisis for the company. Most would say this was handled very poorly by BP.    

The reimbursement process required BP to gather information from people who were claiming a loss. As of this morning it has been announced that BP has lost a laptop containing 13,000 names and personal information, including social security numbers of those filing claims with the company.

As you can see, once a crisis starts it can be difficult to stop the dominos from falling in other areas, even over the long term. One way to get in front of a crisis, and preventing a potential domino effect is to implement effective planning prior to an incident, along with training and discussions among your leadership team has to how potential crisis’s and incidents will be handled.



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[Earthquake kits]

Some of the worst natural calamities to strike the world since 1900 is listed in the followings . Hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, cyclones, earthquakes and other storms are all clearly natural phenomena. According to the definition, floods and famines as well as flu pandemics have been included for our purposes on the assumption that disasters that are not man-made are natural. The death tolls from disasters in the long past are, at best, rough estimations. But we can be sure that our pre-1900 fore-fathers endured some appalling calamities such as the bubonic plague (The Black Death) that spread through Europe beginning in 1348 A.D and wiped out an estimated one-third of humanity, or about 2.5 crore people.



Natural Disasters and their Root Cause:

This is a fact that natural disasters occur everyday somewhere in the world. Flooding, hurricanes, typhoons, earthquakes, and more occur these disasters. Natural disasters can directly or indirectly cause severe threats to public health and well-being. These are the naturally occuring events and here I want to inform you of the many causes of natural disasters and how their impact affects the world. There are mainly two broad categories of natural disasters. The first category is climatic disasters. Floods, hurricanes, and droughts are the major climatic disasters that affect countries on a large scale. Floods are caused when excessive rainfall or snow melt allows rivers to overflow their banks. The large storms that form in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world are hurricanes where the water is warm. These hurricanes need a constant supply of plenty of warm water in order to stay intense. Hurricanes is weakened by any ineraction with land or colder water. The effects of hurricanes are the most strongest near coastlines, on islands, and in mountainous regions, but the effects on each of those regions are different. Droughts affect agriculture and the gradually destroys the fertility of land which results in famines and starvation. Climatic disasters affect people, and are dominant through forces of wind and water.The second category or another main cause of natural disasters is geological disasters. Geologic disasters include earthquakes, volcanoes, and the disasters that occur as a result of geologic changes. The most significant geological disasters are earthquakes. An earthquake is the shaking of the land caused by an abrupt shift of rock along a fracture in the Earth. However, the direct effects of an earthquake depends on the economy of the region.