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Disaster Drill: Practice Makes Perfect

As one of the nations largest insurance companies, USAA is in the business of managing risk. So it makes sense that the company uses exercises, simulations and drills to learn how to respond in the event of a disaster.

The series of evacuations actually produced one of the event's most interesting lessons. The employees of USAA's life insurance unit were evacuated from their building and were supposed to be relocated to another area where IT was setting up computers and phones for them. But the process would take almost two hours. During that time, employees would be standing on the lawn in the hot Texas sun. An executive in the CSMT questioned leaving them out there. Was there a safer place to put those employees in the interim? How should USAA determine if or when employees could be allowed back in the building? How would thousands of people access their vehicle if their car key was still sitting on their desk? And was there an alternate transportation plan if the company needed to send employees home? Just imagine trying to quickly evacuate a football stadium full of people, and you can see the challenges.

IT'S 10:30 A.M.The CEO has been confirmed dead. In one very high-profile fatality, Yates's exercise "killed off" the company's CEO (whose body was discovered in the wake of one of the explosions). "We did that to let his succession plan unfold," says John Blaha, USAA's assistant vice president of business continuation. The property and casualty SMT ran through some of the steps it would have to take in such an eventlike notifying the state's insurance commissioner.

IT'S 11:30 A.M.The hurricane has reached Category 4 and is projected to make landfall on the Virginia coast at 4:30 p.m. Even though weather and on-campus chaos were intentionally thrown into the exercise, reality also presented its own challenges.

A bona fide emergency call actually came in during the July 24 drill when a suspicious substance was found in the company's cash processing center. The USAA staff reacted appropriately. To avoid confusion, employees had been instructed to say, "This is the exercise," before exchanging information about the different scenarios so that everyone would understand what was real and what was simulated. As a result, no one was confused when the real call came in. "Within minutes, we had guys suited up, the security team in force, and the area cordoned off," says Wayne Peacock, the senior vice president of corporate real estate. Although ultimately it turned out to be a false alarm, Peacock was impressed with the employees' ability to quickly take what they were practicing and apply it in real life.