FEATURE
For international businesses with employees in the region, their duty of care made locating staff a priority. However, along with the collapse of the phone lines, “the lack of a centralised register of travellers made assessing the risk very complex and driven exclusively from client requests for assistance or the ability of our staff on the ground to find patients in local hospitals.”
At the time, International SOS overcame these barriers by setting up identification and information centres to deal with the breakdown of local communications. In Phuket, the company established a crisis centre to address client needs locally and support international communications and travel. The team also prioritised clearing roads of debris in Indonesia to facilitate access to the more remote locations hit by the tsunami.
PRIOR TO THE CATASTROPHE IN 2004, NO WARNING SYSTEM HAD BEEN PUT IN PLACE BECAUSE THE RISK OF SUCH AN EVENT WAS NOT DEEMED LARGE ENOUGH TO JUSTIFY THE INVESTMENT.
Ten years on, many lessons have been learned about planning for natural disasters. In the Indian Ocean, there is now an early warning tsunami alert system in place, which includes notification buoys, alarms and plotted out evacuation routes. Prior to the catastrophe in 2004, nothing like this had been put in place because the risk of such an event was not deemed large enough to justify
the investment – an attitude that too many health and safety professionals will be familiar with.
As a company that is expected to be ready for any situation, International SOS has also improved its operation in the last decade. From a crisis management perspective, the company has developed a new command and control structure to organise emergency responses more effectively. Each country crisis team now works within a wider structure that enables cross regional coordination when faced with emergencies that traverse borders.
One of the major problems in the days, weeks and months after the 2004 tsunami was locating the employees of clients who were travelling or off-
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site when the earthquake struck. In response to this, International SOS has developed a travel security capability in partnership with Control Risks.
“Through this we have developed a capability to deploy assets quickly to events to advise and assist those in need,” said Mike. “Our ‘TravelTracker’ system has also been constantly developed and updated. This enables the automatic preloading of travel related information (flights, routes, hotels, mobile phone numbers etc.) into global mapping software for client travellers. This allows International SOS to highlight risk to clients and support outreach to individuals who may be affected by a crisis.”
While the Boxing Day tsunami was a major threat to health and safety, what it had in common with smaller, day-to-day health and safety issues was a lack of information. Such a powerful and far-reaching natural disaster was never predicted in the region, so people were unprepared for the severe damage it caused. This was especially true for visitors to the area, whether there on business or on holiday.
The advice that International SOS gives to its clients in high risk regions has not changed much since 2004. “What has changed is the understanding of the risk, exposure of the information to a wider group within client companies and the better availability of information to the individual traveller,” Mike commented. On the International SOS website and mobile app, individual travellers can now notify of their location, search for information on risks in the region they’re visiting or call their nearest International SOS centre.
Mike summed up the importance of being informed when he said: “The information available to International SOS members may not allow them to avoid the natural disaster, but used wisely, will help them to prepare for an event and give them the available tools to reduce the personal impact.”
www.internationalsos.com
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