ResilienceHow one transportation company survived Hurricane Sandy
In a year-long case study of a major American transportation company, researchers have uncovered the strategies that helped the company maintain safety and meet customer demand during 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. One key to the company’s effective response was its setup of a weather event management team, an ad hoc group that set planning priorities as the storm approached the United States, ensuring the protection of personnel and equipment in hurricane’s path.
In a year-long case study of a major American transportation company, researchers at the Ohio State University have uncovered the strategies that helped the company maintain safety and meet customer demand during 2012’s Hurricane Sandy.
One key to the company’s effective response was its setup of a weather event management team, an ad hoc group that set planning priorities as the storm approached the United States, ensuring the protection of personnel and equipment in hurricane’s path.
More surprisingly, as landfall was imminent, the company’s schedulers were able to provide an especially fast response to changing conditions by bypassing normal communications channels that relied on technology. Instead, they spoke to each other face-to-face or directly on the phone to speed the exchange of information about time-critical issues.
An Ohio State University release reports that the researchers were already studying the company when Sandy occurred almost exactly a year ago. David Woods, professor of integrated systems engineering at Ohio State, and doctoral students David Deary and Katherine Walker, spent time in its command centers and field operations throughout 2012. The company asked that its name be withheld from the study results.
“It was an opportunity for us to see resilience in action at an organizational scale,” Woods said. “When this hurricane struck the northeast — an area of the U.S. that’s very sensitive to transportation disruptions — it provided a salient example of how organizations need to be prepared for challenging events in our interconnected world.”
They results of the study are reported in a paper titled “Resilience in the Face of a Superstorm: A Transportation Firm Confronts Hurricane Sandy,” to be presented later today (Thursday, 3 October) at 3:30 p.m. at the annual meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society being held in San Diego.
As technology continues to make the world more interconnected, businesses have to be more concerned with resilience, Woods said — not just automakers, banks and utilities, but any company that relies on managing risk or digital assets or continuity of service for its customers. Financial, political and environmental threats emerge quickly, and aren’t as easy to anticipate as a hurricane.
Woods has long studied the issue of resilience, and is president of the Resilience Engineering Association — an international professional organization “facilitating the development of techniques to outmaneuver the complexities of today’s world.”
