Alcatel-Lucent's earthquake response
Global telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent’s internal communication team faced the ultimate test in February 2011, when a catastrophic earthquake struck in Christchurch, New Zealand. Bryony Hilless and Susanne Newton tell us how the experience proved a valuable opportunity for the IC team to demonstrate their worth to the organization, as well as providing some important lessons about planning for emergencies.
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At lunchtime on 22 February 2011, a shallow magnitude 6.3 earthquake hit Christchurch, New Zealand. Several office buildings pancaked, the iconic Christchurch Cathedral's spire twisted and toppled into the square, elsewhere the stone and brick facades of shops and cafés peeled away, crashing down onto the streets filled with buses, cars and pedestrians. Around the city the ground liquefied, roads buckled, water mains broke and sewage pipes ruptured. The power went out.
Over 600 kilometres away at Alcatel-Lucent's Network Operation Centre (NOC) in Hamilton, alarms went off as cell sites on Telecom New Zealand's mobile phone network in and around Christchurch lost mains power and automatically switched over to battery backup. Call volumes surged and calls to the national 111 emergency number spiked. In response, the NOC team moved into major event mode to coordinate any necessary service restoration to safeguard the operation of Telecom's fixed and mobile networks and the national 111 emergency number.
In the 24-hour digital world, telecommunications has become the fourth essential service
Based in Wellington, Alcatel-Lucent's communication and human resources teams clicked into action. We knew that internally the top two questions on everyone's minds would be:
- Are the Alcatel-Lucent people and their families in the disaster area safe and well?
- How are the networks performing?
We are a close-knit company and we had an office with employees working in it, located in the central business district when the earthquake struck. We knew within the hour the status of the office building and also the status of our employees working there. But employees in other locations were already asking about our Christchurch team, so to prevent any misinformation and to alleviate concerns we knew we needed to communicate to all employees what had happened and that all our employees there were safe.
Also, in the 24-hour digital world, telecommunications has become the fourth essential service, so when a disaster strikes one of the first things people do is reach for the telephone to call for help, or to contact friends and family. Because our core business is the design, supply and maintenance of the fixed and mobile networks for Telecom NZ, and also because the media were already reporting about down cell-sites and faults on the fixed network (for example emergency calling), it was important for the company to take control and provide accurate reporting and information on the status of our networks - both internally and externally.
Implementing the crisis plan
The HR and communication teams had a well-established rapport and had collaborated on a wide range of projects. In the last 16 months, we had several opportunities to hone our crisis management skills, successfully supporting the business through several major issues including a series of partial network outages, which attracted adverse national and international media coverage, a CEO transition and the September 2010 Christchurch earthquake.
We have a crisis communication plan that forms the basis of the strategy for how we will communicate in an emergency. It first defines the type of crisis - whether it's a network outage, human, natural or involves loss of life or injury. The answer to this then determines what "mode" we swing into. The Christchurch earthquake essentially ticked all of the above boxes, so the plan then set out:
- Incident control centre - Where it will be located and its contact details.
- Response team - People's roles and responsibilities and the roster, to be filled in during the first hours of the crisis and distributed to the response team.
- Communication tree - Which stakeholders need to be notified and how they are to be notified.
- Communication schedule - Determines the type of communication we should be considering, how regularly they should be sent and to whom (e.g. emails, SMS, webcast, teleconference and social media channels, etc).
- De-escalation decision and process - Is the crisis winding down? Is the crisis over? Which members of the response team go back to "business as usual"? How and when does communication scale down?
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This article was originally published in Strategic Communication Management.
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