Health and Safety Checks on residents Medical, weather or alerts to the cities and townships. The BWL advised that they followed their Emergency Action Plan. That plan includes a process for the activation of the and Communications Center’, providing “Command that, a catastrophic event, the Unified Command Team, charged with managing the “[i]n BWL’s emergency response, will determine whether or not the situation warrants activation of the CCC.” BWL published its Crisis Communications Plan in March 2014, in response to criticisms of its inability to communicate with the public during the ice storm and outage. The stated purpose of that plan is to assure a and consistent line of reliable “constant information” from the BWL its customers.” That plan lists the members of its “to “Crisis Communications Command Team” as the General Manager, Assistant General Manager, the Director of Communications and the Director of Governmental and Community Services.” The Unified Command Team and the Crisis Communications Team identify differing personnel for crisis leadership. It seems apparent that the Emergency Action Plan and the Crisis Communications Plan were developed and drafted independently of each other, with no consideration for the potential overlap in planning, processes, and personnel. This is only one example of why comprehensive unified plans are needed. Of greater concern, the March 2014 Crisis Communications Plan, although expressly detailing the forms of response for specific contingencies, does not reference any emergency operations plan nor does it connect with any city or regional plan. As detailed elsewhere herein, the CRT received thousands of pages of documents from the BWL in response to their requests. Despite asking repeatedly, BWL has apparently not preserved any records from the BESOC nor elsewhere in Electrical Operations, on its actions in response to the ice storm nor in the restoration process. No documentation equals no lessons learned. There apparently was no organization-wide process for retention of key documents for subsequent analysis to determine what worked and what did not. In answer to a question about the lack of organization-wide exercises, BWL pointed out that every event is an exercise, that they had a windstorm in November 2013, which downed 3000 lines and that there were learned’ from that event. “lessons Yet, there is apparently no documentation of any of the steps taken, nor of the overall process used, to recover from the worst outage ever to affect the BWL customer area. CRT Planning and Response Working Group members met with City of Lansing Emergency Management (EM) and Fire Department personnel. The City EM personnel
Health and Safety Checks on residents Medical, weather or alerts to the cities and townships. The BWL advised that they followed their Emergency Action Plan. That plan includes a process for the activation of the “Command and Communications Center’, providing that, “[i]n a catastrophic event, the Unified Command Team, charged with managing the BWL’s emergency response, will determine whether or not the situation warrants activation of the CCC.” BWL published its Crisis Communications Plan in March 2014, in response to criticisms of its inability to communicate with the public during the ice storm and outage. The stated purpose of that plan is to assure a “constant and consistent line of reliable information” from the BWL “to its customers.” That plan lists the members of its “Crisis Communications Command Team” as the General Manager, Assistant General Manager, the Director of Communications and the Director of Governmental and Community Services.” The Unified Command Team and the Crisis Communications Team identify differing personnel for crisis leadership. It seems apparent that the Emergency Action Plan and the Crisis Communications Plan were developed and drafted independently of each other, with no consideration for the potential overlap in planning, processes, and personnel. This is only one example of why comprehensive unified plans are needed. Of greater concern, the March 2014 Crisis Communications Plan, although expressly detailing the forms of response for specific contingencies, does not reference any emergency operations plan nor does it connect with any city or regional plan. As detailed elsewhere herein, the CRT received thousands of pages of documents from the BWL in response to their requests. Despite asking repeatedly, BWL has apparently not preserved any records from the BESOC nor elsewhere in Electrical Operations, on its actions in response to the ice storm nor in the restoration process. No documentation equals no lessons learned. There apparently was no organization-wide process for retention of key documents for subsequent analysis to determine what worked and what did not. In answer to a question about the lack of organization-wide exercises, BWL pointed out that every event is an exercise, that they had a windstorm in November 2013, which downed 3000 lines and that there were “lessons learned’ from that event. Yet, there is apparently no documentation of any of the steps taken, nor of the overall process used, to recover from the worst outage ever to affect the BWL customer area. CRT Planning and Response Working Group members met with City of Lansing Emergency Management (EM) and Fire Department personnel. The City EM personnel
CRT%20Report_May%205_FINAL.docx