Dealing with the risk that’s not on the register

 Authored by: Andrew Pike, Fellow of the Institute of Risk Management South Africa (IRMSA)

In August 1991, excited holiday-makers boarded the Oceanos, a Greek-owned passenger vessel, at East London for the trip of a lifetime.

Despite a raging storm, the Captain ordered the ship to set sail for Durban. Hurricane force winds and giant rogue waves battered the ship.

About 4 hours after she had set sail and when she was a couple of miles off a remote stretch of the Transkei coast, the auxiliary engine room was breached and the ship started taking huge volumes of water.

Panicking senior crew members scrambled into lifeboats, leaving the ship’s evacuation to on-board entertainers and crew staff. Women and children clambered aboard life boats which were then launched into the monstrous seas, but eventually all operational or launch-able life boats had been used and 221 passengers were left stranded aboard the sinking ship.

The South African Air Force, in cooperation with the Navy, then launched its biggest rescue operation in history to airlift passengers off the stricken vessel, battling 70 knot winds and waves in excess of 20 meters.

Passengers who had been evacuated in life boats were eventually all picked up by merchant ships and fishing vessels in the area.

The airlifted passengers were removed from the ship and taken to a local hotel about 2 to 3 miles away from the ship. During the helicopter airlift, the Captain of the ship also deserted all of the passengers and remaining crew, thus leaving the ship completely in the hands of civilians and junior crew members.

Eventually, about an hour before the ship sank and 17 hours after the drama started, all passengers had been safely evacuated. It was against all odds that no one perished in the disaster. Stories abound of heroism, cowardice, commitment and the emergency response of all involved.

However, the reality is that the Department of Transport itself had never planned for a disaster on this scale and certainly no one in South Africa had ever given any thought to the possibility of a passenger ship sinking.

This was the materialization of a risk on such a grand scale in maritime terms that it was never in any one’s contemplation and, had risk management been the art form then that it is nowadays, a sinking passenger liner would probably not have been on any one’s risk register.

And yet, despite mountainous seas, a cowardly crew, a shortage of life boats and everything else, South Africa pulled together and effected what was arguably the most successful maritime rescue in history.

Nowadays, with a keener sense of risk identification, most major organizations have some level of preparation in respect of most risks.

But what do we do about the risks which were just never seen coming? Given the current accelerated pace of technological growth, climate change, uncertain financial markets and the like, it seems inevitable that at some stage most organizations are going to be faced with a risk they hadn’t thought about.

For me, the common thread running through the Oceanos rescue was a combination of the following factors which made the rescue the success that it was:

People and skills:

• There were people in all of the key response areas (Air Force, Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre and so on) who were capable of making sensible, but more importantly, bold decisions.
• Those people were all empowered to make those decisions i.e. they did not need to defer to some higher power before the decision could be made.
• It is one thing to have the right people in the right places, but unless they have sufficient skills and training, they will only be able to work within the realms of what they know. Where they have a depth of training which will enable them to extend their skills to any situation, no matter how unforeseen, the organization will have the necessary resilience.
• Even where they do not have specific skills, sufficient basic skills must be in place to enable people to work efficiently well outside of their comfort zones. In the Oceanos rescue, the helicopter crews which flew from the hinterland did not have maritime rescue training in place, but they were nonetheless able to perform admirably.

Resources:

• Remarkably, sufficient resources were available at the time. Somehow or other the Defence Force managed to mobilize sufficient helicopters, divers, air crew and naval vessels which were sufficient for the job.
• The maritime rescue systems in place were able to call on resources which were not on any asset list, but were available nonetheless. Those were the civilian merchant vessels which came to the rescue. By convention, ships at sea are required to come to the aid of ships which are in trouble. How much stronger might we as a country be if that sort of convention existed amongst companies and organizations, rather than the prevailing attitude of “there but for the grace of God go I” and watching our competitors sink?

Systems:

• Although there was no plan anywhere in the country for a sinking passenger ship, there were nonetheless systems of communication, response systems, support services like the NSRI, emergency services and so on.
• Provided there are systems in place which can speak to virtually any eventuality, they will in most instances prove sufficiently resilient, even for risks which weren’t expected or foreseen.

Commitment:

• There were on my reckoning over 50 different organizations involved at one level or another in the rescue operation. Every one of them was totally committed to rescuing the lives which were at risk, regardless of personal risk, safety or indeed legality.
• The hinterland helicopter crews in fact flew unlawfully to the site of the rescue and participated in the rescue unlawfully because they had neither the necessary rescue equipment nor training. Nonetheless, they were so committed to a bigger cause that they worked outside of their normal parameters.
• Looking at the operation in its entirety, that description can be given to most people who were involved: divers, entertainers, ships agents, air crew and the rest. Within any organization, unless the people in that organization are completely bought into the bigger vision of the organization and therefore willing to commit beyond the ordinary, the organization remains vulnerable to risks which are not on the register.

In conclusion, whilst Risk Registers and Risk Identification are becoming more sophisticated, it is likely that, as things change, organizations will not be able to anticipate and prepare for every risk.

However, if the basics and essentials are in place, what organizations will do is build sufficient resilience to address the disasters which may befall them.

ENDS

MEDIA CONTACT: Rosa-Mari, 060 995 6277, rosa-mari@thatpoint.co.za, www.atthatpoint.co.za 
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