Advancing Emergency Response: Lessons from Travis Hansen and Art Powers

This episode explores the complexities of emergency planning and response, focusing on the personal journeys of professionals in the field, strategies for effective training, and the critical role of technology and collaboration in enhancing preparedness. Listeners gain valuable insights into the mindset required for success and the importance of fostering teamwork amid crises.

• Personal journeys into emergency response and the motivations behind them 
• Importance of effective exercises for readiness and team cohesion 
• Use of technology to create realistic crisis simulations 
• The necessity of strong collaboration within the industry 
• Building trust through open communication with regulators 
• Shared lessons learned and advice for emerging professionals in the field

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:03

Hello and welcome to the Response Force Multiplier, a podcast that explores emergency planning and response. On the Response Force Multiplier, we bring together compelling experts and thought leaders to provide a fresh take on key issues and cutting edge techniques in this field. In each episode we'll dive into one aspect and we'll use OSRL's unique pool of experts and collaborators to distill that down into actual tools and techniques for better preparedness and response to incidents and emergencies. My name is Emma Smiley. We are All Spirit Response and this is the Response Force Multiplier.

Speaker 2 0:45

And this is the Response Force Multiplier. Hi, emma, here's where your intro will go.

Speaker 3 0:48

Welcome to our podcast, to Travis and to Art Travis, if you'd like to introduce yourself and explain how did you get into?

Speaker 2 0:58

this field of emergency response. Thank you for hosting us. Really quite nice to be able to do something like this. Yes, travis Hansen and I'm the EAME and AP Regional Response Team Coordinator and what that means is keeping track of and supporting a group of about 200 volunteers who are there to help us in any major incident, and I'm within this global EPNR group. So Emergency Preparedness and Response group that Art has been part of for quite some years and I've been in this role for about three and a half years.

Speaker 2 1:31

But to your question of how I first got interested in it one of my predecessors who was based here in the UK we used to run emergency support group training and I think that generally the industry standard for that is crisis management, and as he was presenting it I could see some of the different places that they had been to, I could see some of the risks that they helped to mitigate and for me it just started to.

Speaker 2 1:56

I started to interpret it as very interesting, very adventurous, and it reminded me of my military days, because I used to be an interpreter in the army and there was so much that I liked about it and that I got from it. So this kind of sense of adventure going to places and really having major incidents that can potentially happen in the world and having a team, kind of like a band of brothers and of course it's brothers and sisters these days that would address an incident. So all of these things were quite attractive to me and I think, after having been in the office and dressed like this for so long, just having that sort of opportunity to me was very interesting and attracted me into it, probably back in 2012.

Speaker 3 2:39

Thank you, travis. So, art, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for giving us your time. And same question to you what do you do and how did you get into it?

Speaker 4 2:48

and what we do for the corporation. My current role is Senior Principal for Emergency Preparedness and Response as part of our global operations and sustainability group at ExxonMobil and in my job I'm responsible for having the higher level strategic view of what we do. We have a unique role in GONS, ep&r where we like to refer to it as our corporate purview. We can kind of see across all the businesses, what's everybody doing. We can kind of see across all the businesses, what's everybody doing. We get a really good understanding of what the health of our company's ability to respond is throughout the course of the year, looking at different types of events that occur, seeing how they're setting themselves up for success through training and exercises, and then we try to apply our expertise and experience from different affiliates to help out other affiliates right. So, I think, a good visual of us. We're kind of like bees in a garden where we're flying from plant to plant and we're trying to pollinate ideas across the organization. So strategic, thoughtful, corporate purview, just kind of seeding the good throughout the company as much as possible. So I work with Travis quite a bit on exercises. I like to give him advice on what he's doing because I used to have a very similar job to what he does now. I used to coordinate the America's Regional Response Team, which is my segue into how I got into this.

Speaker 4 4:22

When I went to university back in 1989, I went to the Massachusetts Maritime Academy and the year that I was starting school was the year of the Exxon Valdez and, as a future mariner, how the merchant marine were going to be dealing with the new US regulations. The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 was a big part of what the university was all about, and so I saw a lot of things going on as industries trying to figure out what do we do now? How do we exist under these new rules and regulations? So in the background, as I was getting into the shipping world, I had a couple of different jobs that I had had throughout my initial career exposed me to oil spill from my worked for a tanker company in New York Harbor, the very first Harbor tanker that I worked on. As I was boarding it they had a gasoline leak and a crack in the hull, so throwing pads was like literally my first assignment as I got on board to soak up the gasoline that was spilling into the Long Island Sound. And then I worked for an inspection company before I came to ExxonMobil and I was involved in the gauging of some barred activity related to a spill in Rhode Island, the North Cape spill, which was a heating oil spill that occurred in the mid-'90s.

Speaker 4 5:36

And then I started with ExxonMobil in 99 at our Exxon Everett terminal and I was really, really impressed with the level of training that we received for our roles as potential responders as a Marine facility, and so we had a lot of equipment. We had a lot of exposure to training. I distinctly remember the first time I was trained on our oil spill response plan for the facility and they got to the part about our tiered response and what we were expected to do locally and that it talked about these different groups. It talked about a strike team and it talked about these regional response teams that were scattered around the world and I remember being really impressed by the fact that this company had these resources available and these people and these people and it was essentially explained just the same way it is now, which is volunteer employees that are trying to respond to emergencies, that can be mobilized when the need arises, and it was a real feeling of encouragement that there were people there to back us up if we had a really bad day, and even then I understood that that was a pretty significant thing.

Speaker 4 6:42

Fast forward to 2008,. I was actually went to a bunch of different assignments, ended up back at that same facility in Boston and I went back to school, to my alma mater, and got a master's in emergency management and after I was done with that assignment I said I wanna go do this full time, I wanna be an emergency management person. Eventually I did get what I wanted because I worked really hard networking with Greg DeMarco. We used to meet periodically, so Greg became an advocate for me. And then, of course, john Lay, who was the global manager when we consolidated all of our emergency response advisors into a global team. I met him through the regional response team. John got to know me and then went to that and I ended up in this group doing emergency response and I've had a number of different roles, but I've been the senior principal for about two years now, and so it's been about 10 years that I've been doing EPR.

Speaker 3 7:37

So what in your view, might someone be a good emergency preparedness and response professional? What are the attributes? What's the dna that someone needs?

Speaker 2 7:48

yeah, I think some of the best people that I'll see, the ones that are most committed, are the ones who realize that there's something greater out there, who want to come together as a team and try to tackle something. But they're in it because they know that it's the right thing to do. And you bring it a bit from the emergency services, a bit from the military. Sometimes they're doing it because people are so important to them that the community is so important, that their country is so important. So being able to look at a greater good and essentially put that ahead of your own values Now, thankfully, in our line of work you're not putting that ahead of your own values.

Speaker 2 8:24

Now, thankfully, in our line of work you're not putting that ahead of your own health. But what you are able to do is to put that ahead of your free time. In some cases, to put that ahead of your career aspirations is that you're willing to take time out, sometimes just for training, other times for actual incidents and exercises, and being able to subsume your own wishes for that of something greater. And the other one is when something major happens. There are some people who can just approach things a little bit more calmly and have clarity of mind. There could be thousands of iterations of things that you could be doing to be able to, in a relatively short shrift, come up with a good course of action to create clarity out of confusion. I think those are two big traits that I value and have seen people to success.

Speaker 4 9:15

Yeah, I agree with what you say, travis, and I think that that level of conscientiousness that we look for in our people right, it's people that are committed to serving the community, serving people. It's definitely a sacrifice being part of a response organization to do something like this. A good example is whenever there's a lot of discussion in companies about back to work. We need to be in the office where we work best, and whenever I hear discussions about that, I always think that refers to everybody else. That doesn't refer to us, because when they talk about are you in the office or not, I'm like you have no idea where I am. I'm in Addis Ababa waiting for a flight, or I'm working with Travis and yourself, dave, at five o'clock in the morning finishing inject on day two of an exercise. It's traveling on a weekend, so we can be sharp and ready to go on a Monday morning or even a Sunday morning if we're in the Middle East. Our schedule is what it is and we're prepared to put in those hours.

Speaker 4 10:17

Some of the most impressive people that I've worked with are the ones that are so focused on their work that you need to literally pull them away. You need to say you need to stop or we need to get you light so you can keep working, because it's too dark out now. I think that there's an element of that order from chaos that Travis referred to that does appeal to people, and I've worked with a few people that have dipped their toes in the regional response team waters and said, no, this isn't for me, because they need order, they need to have predictability, and I think that there's a certain personality that definitely goes for the chaotic tumult of this type of work that bribes on creating a plan and then that plan completely going sideways and having to come up with a new plan on the fly. To us that's response Plans are useless, but planning is priceless. I think that's what we're all about.

Speaker 2 11:11

Yeah, and I must say Art just gave me a bit of a flashback talking about putting the mission ahead of self. There we were in 2022 in Guam running an exercise with the US Coast Guard and during the middle of this we had an incident in Africa and it was quite clear that Art would be the right guy to help respond straight away. And, of course, art was also running the simulations for the exercise. The next thing I know I get a call from one of the guys in the SimCell saying yeah, art just left with his backpack. He told me I'm in charge now and he's gone to Africa. Again, putting mission ahead of self is a good example, and this is the world of response.

Speaker 3 11:49

But for a lot of people not in this world, that's big, isn't it? That's major.

Enhancing Emergency Response Exercises

Speaker 2 11:53

And also the guy that Art handed off to. He was a new guy. That's something in the military we would have called battlefield promotion. You're now the one in charge, and it's a way to train and ultimately empower people. You might be the resource unit leader right now, but you could very quickly become something like a deputy or a planning section chief, depending on the need. I think it's that unpredictability.

Speaker 4 12:14

That creates a really interesting dynamic for people. That is extremely stimulating and it's almost to the point where I expect plans to be disrupted more often than not. There's probably aspects of it that aren't as healthy as it could be when it comes to trying to adopt regular work patterns when things are calm and we have some space between exercises. But it's a lot of fun and it's, I think, probably the most gratifying thing. It's seeing other people come in from whatever their day job is and just really thrive in the environment that we get to create for them when we do simulations or, in the case in the few mobilizations that we've had, see how they come together and work together. And that's the strength of when we have exercises. We have our team.

Speaker 4 12:59

Opportunities is that when a real event occurs and people have to go into a very uncertain situation that is going to be high stress, with a lot of emotion, to walk into that space and see Bill or to see Sammy or to see Dave, and you're like, okay, this is just like when we were at that hotel doing an exercise two years ago. I know, oh, I just need to gravitate to these people because they're my people. Now they can just focus on the other uncertainties, which is what's the actual problem that we're here to deal with, and what's my role in that going to be?

Speaker 3 13:33

So you've got us in the direction. Now talking about exercises, and, in your view, what does a great exercise achieve and what have you learned about the best way to do that?

Speaker 4 13:48

So exercises is an area that we put a lot of emphasis into for our players. To me, exercises it's all about the people. It's all about getting the system tested, getting people comfortable in their roles, getting them engaged, and so a really successful exercise is one that gets people comfortable in their roles, getting them engaged, and so a really successful exercise is one that gets people thinking in the context of what they would be doing as realistically as possible. You know there are limitations to the simulations that we can run. Typically, we're in an area that we don't want to disrupt normal operations at a site, or may not be practicable to go set up a field location in a warehouse down by the beach where we may be dealing with incoming oil. So we'll be in a more convenient location that makes sense for all of our players, for the scenario.

Speaker 4 14:36

But there's things that we can do that will get people to set aside what their day job is and come in to assume their emergency role, and so that is realism in the SimCell.

Speaker 4 14:46

It's simulations using electronic tools. It's writing a really good script that's developed by people that understand the situation that they would potentially be using. It's using other people's experiences to overlay onto whatever our scenario is that we've decided with our businesses that is the best one to test people's ability and for me, success is when people at the end of the exercise say, wow. I hope that never happens because that was terrible in terms of the experience of having to deal with such an awful outcome. But a comment I made recently we had a pretty successful crisis management exercise that ran across four different global locations is comment I made recently we had a pretty successful crisis management exercise that ran across four different global locations is that at the end there was a lot of input and feedback from the participants. To me, that's a success. If I get people talking at the end of the exercise, even if it's what can be done better next time, that means that they were engaged.

Speaker 2 15:41

Yeah, and for me, one of the most gratifying things that I like to hear is and we've heard it a number of times is that just felt so real and when you get people saying that you know, when you're able to simulate some of the stresses that they would go through very, very beneficial, as I was thinking, just like our good ICS principles, management by objectives is, each exercise will set some overarching objectives for it, and for my very first one, it was this global exercise, and people would ask why are you doing a global exercise? And it was because it was at the very end of 2021, and we were coming out of COVID and the main objective it wasn't testing national oil spill contingency plans, it wasn't testing mutual aid. What everybody needed at that moment was what kind of exercise could we have that can bring together the highest number of people in the greatest number of locations? At that time, both in Asia Pacific, in Europe and in North America, that was the greatest number of people we were able to bring together and still fit within the COVID rules, and that was about rebuilding the team after being on Zoom calls for so long and after running exercises remotely. So hitting those objectives were so important.

Speaker 2 16:53

Some of the sub-objectives that also came out through that were testing people in their roles. We had had a high amount of turnover, so for them to be tested in their roles, remember what their responsibility, you know, exercise that exercise muscle really, really critical. And if we then follow out into subsequent years, we started to have even different exercise objectives, which, for example, were to start building our upstream and our source control experience, so high level objective there. Alongside, we want to test mutual aid in Africa, for example. We want to build relationships with regulators, build relationship with other operators, and so for our angle exercise in 2023, that was the overarching objective and so nice to see that you get a large amount of feedback, especially when you're extra disciplined with evaluation and testing some of those objectives and getting the feedback from it would give us really rich data.

Speaker 4 17:50

I think it's something that you realize, travis, listening to you is there's an energy that each of us has and they're somewhat different, but they're extremely complementary. And when I talk about exercise and you said, what makes great exercise to me, it's the experience of the participants, the context, and how I communicate the context and imprint that upon people so that they are responding as realistically as possible. So I'll think about how can I utilize VR headsets and 360 photographs, put somebody in the environment, or how can we utilize a interesting game like the Fog of War that we used in Singapore. We would uncover a block on a map and have hazards underneath. The teams had to investigate.

Speaker 4 18:35

What it makes me realize is that when you're a visionary in a particular area, it can be a very lonely space and you really, really, really need a lot of luck and good fortune, serendipity, to kind of make sure that whatever your vision is actually can catch hold, particularly when you're in an independent contributor role. I am a influencer without authority in our corporation, right? So I can give you all the ideas in the world, but I'm not going to give any direct orders, even though it probably feels like I do sometimes, travis. So that's just personality. But when you pair up with another visionary, now you're a fourth.

Speaker 4 19:12

And that's what working with Travis is like, because Travis, he'll approach a exercise with a vision and say I want to do this.

Speaker 4 19:22

I want to have a follow the sun scenario where we've got people scattered around the world and I want to do this. I want to have a follow the sun scenario where we've got people scattered around the world and I want to do it as we're emerging COVID and just thumb my nose at our stay home and work remotely and all the things that we do, because you can only do so much remotely in this business, but you need to be together. This is a team thing where we all need to be supporting each other directly and so, working together with him, I think we've really gathered some good products over the years, and it's catchy because at a certain point, other people will start to say, well, hey, what about this idea or that idea, or why don't we try to do this other thing? And suddenly you start to find people that are sharing that vision and now you're no longer two visionaries, you're an army of visionaries, and that's really, I think, when you start to make a lot of change in your program.

Speaker 2 20:17

Yeah, and I think even taking it back to Singapore, because we talked about, you know, even building a bit of the camaraderie there when it came to the simulation cell, for example.

Speaker 2 20:26

There are some changes.

Speaker 2 20:26

We wanted to make a little bit last minute, so we brought the team together at 5 am and I remember, dave, you called in some support from OSRL during the night so we could get some things done, Made sure we had some coffee and something new to me some bakwa, a meat dish from Singapore. But in the end for me that created a bit of a thread that ended up being something quite spectacular. So it was have some of those ideas and Art was talking about building it in that fog of war and no doubt this would have come from the ideas that maybe bubble up, from creating a design course that he'll run across the business and engage a lot of people. So again, spectacular result the scenario was great. It was so engaging Singapore Civil Defence Force, and that thread continues. So we're now looking at one of our European manufacturing sites for next year to run a high consequence scenario and for me it's very much looking forward to how that next level, the Fog of War 2.0, might play out so I'm picking up the creativity thread.

Speaker 3 21:25

Where do you get inspiration from, where do you get ideas from? To keep pushing the creativity around, exercises to, as you said earlier, aspire to greater realism, greater visceral reaction from participants when we talk about exercise design.

Speaker 4 21:45

Over the years, I've been in a lot of exercises that you might imagine and I realized that there was a lot being left on the table in terms of the opportunities to be engaging with people. That I think probably the death knell of contracting out exercise design for me came when we had like the third iteration of the same injects coming at us, being slightly tweaked. So I started doing the exercise design myself and I was like I really want this to be fun for people. I want this to be a game. I want people to come and do some. I don't know where I read about VR headsets and I was like, well, this is cool, I'm going to check this out. It was the Oculus Go and I got a 360 camera Basically, the whole package probably cost 600 bucks and I went out, took some photos prior to an exercise that we were running.

Speaker 4 22:48

This was in Toronto and I went down to the river and we took pictures and then uploaded them to the headset. And then, when we had the field responders, we had set up a field room for the responders to go into. So when you went in the room, you were in the field and you had to stay there for at least a half an hour. You can just pop in and pop out. And we had maps on the wall of all the different response areas, because it was a river that we were in, right, so it was easy to capture. This is where it's going to be and these are our deployment locations. And so people would be standing there in front of the map and they'd be like there's a park and here's the river, and then they would put on the headset and they would say, oh, actually deploying here is going to be a challenge, because there's like a two meter drop from the edge of the park down to the river and a stone wall that you need to scale. So how are we going to just deploy? Boom, yeah, I just got to chuck it over the wall. So it gave the players an actual, real context. So it took it a step beyond just satellite image. Now they were boots on the ground looking at it and they could spin around and see the whole environment all at once, not flip through a bunch of pictures. And I remember watching a couple of the responders doing this and they were like, oh hey, wait a second, we need to change our plans, and I thought that was really cool and, like I said, it only cost a few hundred dollars for us to do this and then it's trying other things.

Speaker 4 24:06

Like I mentioned, the Fog of War, that was just. We've got a very strong gis team that we have access to through the regional response team basically feels like all the gis people in our whole corporation want to be part of what we do and they do a great job building what we call the common operating picture tool for us that we can deploy at any time anywhere in the world and so using that to challenge people by creating this fog on the plant which is in sing, and we would just remove a block. Which block do you want to go to? We don't have to go straight ahead. Okay, open that up and it'd be like a picture of wounded people on the ground or fire or something, and we would put a little blurb of words telling them what they were seeing you have a high LEL in this area and what are you going to do? And then they would have to come up with a response to that. They would either respond right away or they would retreat. They would call it in if it was something that needed to be reported on and on, and that just created a really good engagement little mini problem solvings for the response team.

Speaker 4 25:05

Probably the biggest challenge of this whole thing, though, is trying to get people to play into the game that you're trying to create, and I think we're getting better at that at teaching people how to play the games and I'm getting better at how to get that instruction, and that can be really challenging, as I'm sure you're aware. Otherwise, I'm a student of what's happened in the past in other locations. I mean, I have a bookshelf here that's just full of all sorts of stuff from Deepwater Horizon to Valdez. It's a ton of stuff, a lot of interesting things and some of the events in these industrial hazards. They do play a part in some of the injection and scenarios that we're creating.

Speaker 5 25:46

Is there any technology you haven't used much yet that you want to start playing with?

Speaker 4 25:50

Well, yeah, absolutely. We want to do more VR. We want to do more virtual reality, where we have an open world where people can go in there and we can build any kind of hazard out on demand. And then, of course, ai is definitely going to be a big force of all the fire, to borrow your name for exercise design.

Revolutionizing Emergency Response Training

Speaker 4 26:09

I think a lot of the upside for us is trying to create a more realistic progression in the exercise in terms of logistics and stuff, because I ask a lot of people when they sit in the back room during an exercise, particularly those that work in the response organizations, to tell me the logistics. When I'm sitting there and say I'm in Toronto and I've got a oil spill response organization from two cities over, they're like oh yeah, it'll be 45 minutes or an hour or two hours or six hours. But when it's like West Africa and most of the resources are coming from the UK or South Africa, suddenly it's a heck of a lot more complicated, as you all know, and if we don't have a logistics execution plan in place, there's a lot that needs to be figured out really quick and is back at the envelope. Good enough, it could be better, and I think that's where the AI is probably going to help us out a lot more, if we can train one to give us some realistic feedback.

Speaker 2 27:06

I know you referenced gaming when it came to the fall of war and I think by turning it into something like a game, it can be far more engaging. And we've got the younger generation, which will have grown up playing some of the games where you can't see the whole map, but as you move somewhere you start to uncover this. You could have gone northeast, but you decided to go northwest. So for me, that sort of engagement is very good and, yes, we probably need to explain that a little bit better to the participants. But again, once you get the ingredients for this kind of recipe. So, again, that's why we're looking at it as 2.0 coming up. And then the technology Art was talking about now in terms of using the virtual reality headsets. We've seen some of these rooms where you can see. You know you're in a refinery, this thing is on fire and they can actually measure it to where the heart rate elevates. So people can see this. What do I do about it? So we talk about making it more real and, of course, they say what you feel. You remember a hundred percent of that. So this is technology that's been around a long time, but I just don't know if it's been used in this space a lot, or if these regulators perhaps just haven't seen it, but when they put that headset on they're just amazed. They're on a drilling rig, for example. Or Art will set something up in our web space where you can go out to the staging area and get that whole 360 degree view of what's happening out there. So I think the more you can interconnect, the more you turn something into a game, the higher value, the more they're going to remember it. Perhaps we can chip away a little bit about the half-life of training and exercises and such, but I think, more than anything, the engagement that you get gets people wanting to come back for more and for a volunteer organization or even for positions that might rotate within regulators or other companies, so, so valuable.

Speaker 2 28:50

And then, when I think of some particular technologies, we had a sniffer dog come in for pipelines and sniffer dogs are used, and that was great. And then of course, it's okay. What about RoboDog? We know RoboDog is out there. Robodog can end up protecting people and of course it's not just a mechanized Scooby-Doo. It can take samples using drones. So can you send a drone ahead of you to uncover that fog of war, or send a drone to take air samples and then, because I think it's almost ready or it is ready, yeah, we've essentially got a remote controlled jet ski that can do a lot of these things on water, so it can get samples, it can use herders, for example, if it's a relatively small spill, and then it's even mounted with something where it can be used as an ignition source.

Speaker 4 29:35

Yeah, if anybody's ever seen videos of the in-situ burn that was done during Deepwater Horizon, which was probably, I think, the most effective method of cleaning up oil. It was Coast Guard service members in small boats throwing napalm grenades into the oil and you talk about putting yourself at risk and obviously they had safety measures that they took. But it wouldn't be nice to send a remote-controlled jet ski with a flamethrower on it into that kind of duty and so that ExxonMobil was part of the development of flamethrowing jet ski. You know, james Bond good stuff Everybody gets excited about it, except for some of the managers who cringe when they're like what are we doing? But they'd all be very thankful if we had to use it.

Speaker 3 30:21

We're talking a lot about the advancement of preparedness, particularly in exercises. What, in your view, are the fundamentals, the basic building blocks of sound emergency preparedness?

Speaker 2 30:36

Fundamental building blocks. If we go back to basic training, we run what we call the University Spill Management. I sponsor it in Southampton along with OSRL, so we'll run four full days of training and having that basic training means that everyone has a consistent language. So using a lot of those ICS principles and using that consistent language, making them feel part of a team, that's kind of that initial step in that camaraderie. If you have any questions, you know you've got the incident management handbook that you can go back through and so having people well trained very, very critical.

Speaker 2 31:17

And then it comes to having a training plan in place and that's where I'll spend a lot of time looking at what are some of the major fundamentals that we want to train. So the past few years I've been wanting to build source control capability, get closer to the upstream where we know we've got some specific risks and having some of those fundamentals very important and then looking at where are our risks. So we know that things are starting to evolve from different chemicals in the organization, starting looking at low carbon solutions and, in the back of my mind, we've got existing and growing chemicals footprints. How should we or should the regional response team be better versed in some of those risks that exist. Yeah, so having the training plan to be able to execute it very, very important to me for in the corporation.

Speaker 4 32:15

We approach it with a standard emergency management mindset of four pillars of mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. So for us, what that translates into mitigation for us is understanding our scenarios, that's doing risk assessments on our operations, identifying what the highest consequence scenarios are, and then typically emergency response falls on the mitigation side of the incident, the hazard itself right. So preventative actions are typically engineering measures that we have in place, processes for managing our operation safely. But if something does get out of control, if we do have an operational upset, what are the things that are going to occur? And then what do we have in place? And that's where we have plans and response systems that will mitigate the scenario. So that's mitigation for us.

Speaker 4 32:57

Preparedness is a lot of what travis was talking about. There is putting people through different levels of training, for whatever their role is whether that's as a first responder, which from an operation standpoint, and a person wanders, the first person that comes upon an incident when it occurs, or that operator that's involved in first person that comes upon an incident when it occurs, or that operator that's involved in an operation that gets into an upset mode it has to take some level of action. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're the ones that are engaging with the material, but they are the ones raising the alarm, mobilizing the resources and telling somebody else. And, as I tell people in training, when you come upon an incident you're the incident commander, and it's a very lonely role when you're the only one that knows about an incident and you're in charge of the whole thing. So you need to tell somebody else and it's less lonely because now two people know about it and if they know more about it than you do, then they get to be the incident commander and you get to do something else. And that's how you build your response from that initial identification upward If you're talking really boots on the ground type of response and eventually you build out the size of an organization as you need. I mean literally, we could run a scenario knocking over a coffee on the desk right here. What's my first action? You know I'm looking around, see where it's going to spread, and then I yell for some paper towels to my response team in the other room and we're going to go through a whole response. And that's what we do, from a preparedness to a response.

Speaker 4 34:20

The response for us is how do the sites understand their responsibility as the first line of defense when an incident occurs. The second line of defense for these sites is who do they need outside of the site to respond with them? And that's our oil spill response organizations like OSRL, it's our regional response team, it's our strike teams that are specially trained personnel at binaries that do a lot of hands-on response activities and then ultimately it's the full RRT global tier three response that get involved. So our ability to respond is your business back into normal operation, which that is a recovery operation. For, say, we're in a refinery manufacturing site, they would go into what I would call an emergency turnaround where now they have to bring the unit back up online, make their repairs, and that's recovery.

Speaker 4 35:28

It's business continuity plan implementation. That's recovery. That's how we're keeping our business running when something occurs. If it's business continuity plan implementation, that's recovery. That's how we're keeping our business running when something occurs. If it's something that happens in the environment, then we will transition from a response reactive phase to a proactive phase, to a remedial phase, and then that remediation group will step in and they will basically work with the regulators and whatever location that we're at to bring the environment back to whatever state is agreed upon based upon what happened in it. So that's kind of the big picture of emergency management for us.

Speaker 3 36:00

Do you hold any views which could be more contentious or controversial around this profession in general or the world of emergency management? Resilience?

Speaker 2 36:11

For me, considering, I guess, working in ExxonMobil, one of the views that I had that I expected to be more contentious was actually working more and more closely with other operators. When I joined Ipeca and I could see that Shell and Chevron and BP were probably participating in a lot of each other's exercises, going beyond just going to some of the conferences and such, but being more involved and being invited. And that's something I think within our company there was probably more of a fear of wanting that distance there for antitrust reasons and anti-competitive reasons more than anything. But what that meant is a lot of those relationships didn't develop beyond just sharing and being present at the conferences. I did expect it to meet more resistance but as I've seen opening up exercises to other operators, we've something beyond the formalized mutual aid. So in mutual aid you probably have you've got a lot of the protections there and requirements indeed to support each other in there.

Strengthening Collaboration in Emergency Response

Speaker 2 37:33

But some of the other companies could really help out. If we were desperate for a logistics section chief, had Shell or BP had one sitting around, could you use them. So it's something that I'll be exploring a little bit is going beyond having some of the other operators evaluate but potentially actually play in the exercises and then there would be a view okay, is there some sort of umbrella organization that could actually bring other operators in to help in an incident? If you consider what are the distractions, what stops effective response? And one of the biggest distractions would be considering something like liability, where I think the incident itself and the people in the communities and the environment, they don't care who's liable at that moment, they want the most effective response they can get at the time. So I think that's an area that's worth exploring companies are.

Speaker 4 38:35

When it comes to engagement with others, I've always maintained that the least competitive aspect of our business in the oil industry is the emergency response, the level of collaboration that exists. I think it's evident by the existence of OSRL, msrc, mwcc. You pick your major cooperative that exists in the world stage for major responses that have come about from major incidents that have occurred. Liability concerns are definitely an issue. Mutual aid there's actually really good mutual aid out there. The problem with mutual aid is that I don't think people put enough work into mutual aid in peacetime and then they really want it to work when it's problematic and nobody wants to test it. An example of that is I've got a stock of equipment and company Zed has a stock of equipment and I'm like, ah, they'll let me use theirs if I have an emergency or I'll let them have mine in an emergency. And then the emergency occurs and you're like, well, I'm not sure I can let this stuff go, or maybe there's a regulatory reason why I can't. Or maybe suddenly I'm like, well, actually you can't use my firefighting phone, because if I don't have a firefighting phone then I need to shut down my operation. So I didn't really think that went through, pay close attention to this and there's some areas of the world that I think do a great job with it. I think Singapore does a good job with it with their relationship with the Singapore Civil Defense Force, I think Rotterdam and the Netherlands. There's some very strong regulations there that provide a close relationship between the municipal fire brigades and the site. The channel, it's SEMA. In Houston it's the Channel Industrial Mutual Aid, and they've got like zones set up and if there's a fire at a facility it's not like, oh, let's call SEMA, no, sema responds. They literally in their zone. They will start pulling apparatus from different sites that are part of the agreement, whether it's Shell or ExxonMobil or whomever. They'll all start showing up and we've seen that over the years. It's a huge resource for industry to have strong mutual aids.

Speaker 4 40:40

But to your point, you gave me an example, trevor. You made me think of an example when you talked about providing direct support for another company when they have a response. During Deepwater Horizon, exxonmobil provided a number of experts to the response in the Gulf of Mexico and they all reported directly to the United States Coast Guard. They did not report to the responsible parties because that was not going to work from a liability standpoint, because that is a very strong assumption of liability when you're making the call for another organization in an emergency. So the entity that we were able to do that under to provide our expertise Tom Kulpat and Ned Wed, roger Prince, other greats that we've had in our scientific community they all were part of the federal response action.

Speaker 4 41:34

So that's a model that works well and I would say like, like a scenario I can see playing out is like country acts says hey, us consulate, we need help. Because they will do that. They will reach out to the US consulate and then the US consular reach back and then suddenly the noah will get involved with their oil spill response people and some interesting stories about how noah has done satellite surveillance and other types of support for other countries at the request of the embassy. So we could end up getting pulled in that way. Somebody knows somebody and then, like you know, they reached out to industry and then industry put together a task force to go support this country. Maybe it's the case of, like the Safer off of Yemen. You know that kind of situation. Maybe the United Nations puts together a group of experts from private industry. That could have occurred. They did something else, but they were successful, fortunately.

Speaker 4 42:30

Unfortunately, from a contentious view, though, I will tell you. One of my contentious views is that our company in particular is doing such a great job with its approach to process safety that they're putting us out of business. We're really doing a great job with managing incidents in this company, and so we do a lot of exercising and, blessedly, the responses are. On the lighter side of things and that's one of the challenging things about being an emergency response want to be on the winning team in terms of we don't have responses, but it's hard to get better when you're not that warm, right, so that's again feeds into the whole. You know what's your motivation for doing exercises, and it's trying to continue to advance people's skills in a really peaceful peacetime.

Speaker 2 43:18

If I can add just briefly one of the internal things that surprised me, that is contentious, is there are times and it can be quite often there's this fear of failure, especially in public. So for me, if there's an objective work with the regulators, work with whoever those would be in authority, for me that's quite clear. Let's run the exercise, let's involve them, let's have them in the simulation cell, let's have a press conference. But there has been far more than once, there's been a bit of pushback. If we fail, do we want it to be so public? If we fail, do we want it to be in front of this regulator?

Speaker 2 43:51

And I think that's one of those moments where, because I know the team, I know how involved we are, I know how seriously we take it and a lot of the capabilities for me, I've got that total confidence in them. But it's one of these situations where you know, I can have far more confidence in the team as a whole or in individuals than sometimes they have in themselves. And then I think there's the other side where you know, we will often see the regulators of the government as omnipotent and omniscient and they can do no wrong. They're the ones grading us Well in reality. A lot of times they're afraid of seeing an oil company that is well exercised and well trained. They can have that fear of failure as well, especially if it's going to be in public. Very much so.

Speaker 5 44:33

What's the most important lesson you've learned in your career to date?

Speaker 4 44:37

I'm going to say the top thing, and this hit me when I was in an event in Arkansas where we had a pipeline release in a community. I was walking down the street in this neighborhood that we had had to evacuate for the cleanup and I remember looking around at all the equipment, the trucks, people. It was a very intense period and I remember thinking that it's horrible when something like this happens. But we do have a second chance to get things right, and mounting a really strong, fully committed response is a company's way of publicly saying we regret that this occurred and we are literally you can see us right now we're doing everything possible to make this right for people.

Trust in Emergency Response

Speaker 2 45:19

For me. It's related to my previous response. Biggest lesson for me is the value of opening things up Because, whether it's work or just the line of business that we're in, you can either be someone who keeps information close to you and you want to manage it yourself, but I've just consistently seen the added value and exponential value of opening things up to others. In some cases, by involving other colleagues, you could have a fear or worry that they might steal some of the limelight from you or get some credit you were hoping would come your way. But inevitably the more that I've opened up, I would say, exercises in general.

Speaker 2 46:01

In fact OFRL has been more and more involved with things like design, evaluation and bringing great equipment and giving great training in our exercises and opening it up to the regular health and safety executive. If they're going to be involved, then let's bring them in the local council, environment agency etc. And whenever they come in they see the value. We kind of grow and then it becomes this kind of virtuous circle that they see what we're doing, they like to be involved in the training and no surprise that trust grows. And that trust element is critical whenever you're in an incident because whether it's with the communities or the authorities having that trust, a very crucial commodity. But of course, what we find is there's a halo effect, is that even after the exercise, those relationships are still there and they're enhanced and they're stronger and often they're looking forward to the next time we'll run an exercise.

Speaker 5 46:52

I have to say I love both of those answers. They're both great.

Speaker 3 46:55

What question would you ask each other?

Speaker 2 46:59

When am I getting my next shipment of bakwa and coffee? I think no. I think. For me it has been a great relationship, simply in terms of giving me the confidence, that mentorship. So from that very first exercise, art support has continued. So for me, the greatest question is, I know that we're going to be translating a lot of what we did in Singapore now to Europe and for me, I must confess, keenly interested in what that's going to look like, and already arts been sharing a few things, like you know, involving the emergency services and even, you know, using some of the exciting languages, saying you know it's going to be like the wild waterworks on the first day because the emergency services are so interested in coming and helping us. So for me, not only what that's going to look like for next year, but what's going to be happening in 2025 and beyond.

Speaker 4 47:46

Yeah, my big question is what are we going to do to push the boundaries of our next big exercise? I think that's it. I mean, for us, it's just that we've continued to raise the bar every single time, and I think that we continue to support each other in that. So what is your crazy idea that I'm going to have to adapt to, and what great idea of mine are you going to have to tolerate?

Speaker 2 48:13

I a few people just said, you know wildly ambitious for some of these things, but in the end in the end we pull it off. So yeah, we'll see um art and travis. What's next?

Speaker 3 48:23

best is yet to come. What advice would you give to someone who's starting out in this profession about how to succeed?

Speaker 4 48:32

when I look at my path that I took to end up here, I couldn't map it out for anybody else, Other than to say that keep taking assignments and opportunities that get you in that direction. If there's a volunteer team, get on the volunteer team. Show up and put in that little bit of extra work. Show the interest. Be a student, never stop learning. Take a few chances and look for a mentor that can help you out along the way. By the same token, become a mentor as you keep progressing, because any of us that have done teaching knows, when you teach other people, that you often submit the lessons for yourself. Don't let students know that, but you're also figuring things out because supposedly you know it all.

Speaker 2 49:13

Yeah, for me it would be start off knowing yourself quite well. There'll be some people who can be more generalists, and other people might want something more scientific, something much more specific. Maybe you're a risk insurance professional. Well, that means you're going to keep on a green vest and if that's what you want to do, keep going deeper and keep achieving that. If you're more of a generalist, or if you want to rise up through the ranks, then look for those opportunities and use your voice, because you'd be amazed. You don't ask, you don't get something. I know this conference is coming up, or I know this exercise is coming up, or I'm interested in a different section. There's no place like an exercise or certainly like an actual incident, for some of those battlefield promotions. The number of times that I've had people come up and say I've never seen this person with such confidence, or I've never seen this person who used to be a wallflower now, all of a sudden, is standing on a stage briefing a room of 200 people, so asking for things and knowing yourself as well.

Speaker 4 50:10

I'd say creativity. Just look for ways of being creative in how you apply emergency response to prepare people to be ready to respond.

Speaker 2 50:20

Yep, that'll definitely wake up the organization. Just the name itself can strike boredom into people a tabletop exercise, but all you have to do is make a small change. You know, create a social media engine, and then all of a sudden the guys at a chemicals plant are, wow, that really could happen. So yeah, on the creativity side and for me it probably noticed a bit of a theme open up don't be afraid of sharing the glory, or whether you're on the design side, coordinating these things, or you're one of the exercise players, it can only enrich the experience gentlemen, if there's anything that you'd like to say to wish OSRL happy birthday, and any advice, tips, wisdom, counsel, anything you'd like to say.

Speaker 2 51:03

We'll give our senior principal the last word. But for me, I feel very, very strongly about the relationship with OSRL. We are both participant shareholders and so we get far more involved, I would say, than the average. And for me, to see the capabilities, the things that OSRL do for us, these can be written on a piece of paper, but the scope of what you do is pretty phenomenal. When it comes to the global dispersion stockpile, having to manage that in the various locations, the aircraft, the training that you give us is invaluable.

Speaker 2 51:37

Now, the feedback I get from all of the training courses that OSRL had done and I do mean all of them is always of the highest level. It's some of the best training that people had done and I can't thank you enough. When I would say I've had to do it more than once in a real incident is my second phone call is always to OSRL, so into the duty manager and knowing that that team is there and the technical expertise is there and knowing the clarity of mind that you bring in the expertise is invaluable and the feedback that we've had, not just from the exercises but from the responses itself, has been absolutely some of the best feedback that we've had in terms of knowledge and support. So happy 40th birthday to OSRL and I can't thank you enough for being there behind us all the time.

Speaker 4 52:25

Yeah, definitely a big thank you to the team at OSRL for what you do on a day in and day out basis. I know something that I reflected on a while back there was an incident that was happening and there's something that happened in the US, but it didn't matter. It's the same mentality that exists across all the organizations that we respond with, and I think about the team there and the commitment that they have to this work of response. We see you on a periodic basis. Right, we have an exercise and you all show up. We have a training event. We all show up. We have a catch-up discussion and we see how we're all doing.

Speaker 4 53:00

But there are members of the OSRL team that are currently in places that aren't their home doing response for people that are extremely tense dealing with a chaos situation, and the calm that you bring to it, the confidence that we take from you when you show up, is really important to us as an organization, so we can have a room full of people trying to figure out what are we going to do next, and then they'll just say, hey, ask the OSRL guy. Hey, we need somebody to tell us what the right move is. We've got so many options. What are we going to do next? We've got overflight information. We're not really sure what to make sense of it all.

Speaker 4 53:38

That's the OSRL advisory. That is such a valuable thing for us to have, and the relationship is great, not to mention the fact that you're all great people to work with because you've got the right people in the right roles, and the level of confidence that we have and your ability to be our partner in the response when something happens is extremely high. So I'm grateful for the people that I've had a chance to work with, I'm grateful for the relationship and I'm grateful for all of our future experiences that we're going to share as we keep going on this journey as being ready to respond.

Speaker 5 54:14

Thank you for listening to the Response Force Multiplier from OSRL. Please like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and stay tuned for more episodes as we continue to explore key issues in emergency response and crisis management. For more information, head to allspheresponsecom. See you soon.