In Depth

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.

By Stacy Collett

The company also has what Blaha, a former NASA astronaut, refers to as the No-Comm (no communication) plan. The senior staff and SMT members have laminated white cards with directions written on them to point executives to a location where they can go to meet up with the rest of their team in the event that something massive in scale occurs and the phones are jammed.

Not only is it important to know how to communicate in crisis, it's also critical to know what to communicate. Strong wanted to test and find out how quickly her corporate communications team could draft a message as well as what kind of language they would use under pressure. So during the exercise, Strong and her group practiced what they would say to the company's employees and customers. They wrote memos and press releases and communicated updates to employees over a limited number of public announcement systems.

Strong had the CFO go to an on-campus studio, where USAA has its own closed-circuit television system, so that he could record a message to the employee population. This exercise gave Strong a chance to test these messages with a number of employees to see how they, in turn, would react to certain kinds of language.

IT'S 3 P.M.The exercise ends. How did they fare? The July 24 exercise was the largest the company had ever done and the first time it had included the San Antonio fire department and EMTs in a broadscale drill. During the exercise, the fire department helped evacuate employees and get them to medical assistance, and it also had the opportunity to interact with USAA's own emergency personnel.

Now, if a real emergency occurs, the partnership USAA has built with the city will benefit both groups. "The city fire officials have seen our folks face-to-face; they've talked and worked together. It's not just Captain So and So," says Blaha. "There's no question that because of what we did here, if we had a real disaster next week, we'd work better with the city. We'd certainly minimize injury to employees and emergency workers, and our company would recover faster."

At the end of the day, all the teams talked through the major lessons learned, highlighting areas where improvements should be built into the company's continuity plan. The next morning another meeting was held to analyze the exercise at a deeper level, and each situation management team presented the top three problems it had encountered along with a plan to fix them. The company documented all of those findings and actions, and set a turnaround time of one month to implement the fixes.