Disaster Response

Overview

The past couple of hurricane seasons have been fairly catastrophic for a number of the Caribbean Islands. We have seen successive hurricanes devastate the region, crippling power and communications networks, damage infrastructure and close down various aspects of the transportation system that is vital for relief efforts. The destruction resulted in significant loss of life and countless injuries to those who were unable to escape the storm and reach the much needed assistance in the days that followed the hurricanes.

Every year we work closely with clients that have assets and personnel across the region to pro-actively identify vulnerabilities and develop plans to mitigate the potential negative impact of severe storms. In addition to planning we closely monitor activity throughout the storm season and as situations start to develop we provide advice, response coordination and operational assistance to protect personnel and assist with the continuity of operations. 

Situation:

In the aftermath of one such Hurricane, we were contacted by two particular clients each with very different but urgent needs. One client had a senior executive who had been vacationing on the island along with his family of three and had been unable to leave ahead of the storm making landfall and now needed evacuating. The other needed to get personnel into the affected area to conduct a damage assessment to the power infrastructure and restore electricity to the local hospital that was quickly being overwhelmed by victims of the storm.

Communications into and out of the affected area were difficult, especially since there was little cellphone service, no internet access and vehicle movement across the island was difficult due to the level of widespread damage.

Solution:

Given these operational challenges and our prior knowledge of the locations we quickly mobilized a number of local consultants already on the island and deployed additional response teams consisting of medical personnel, logistic coordinators and communication specialists along with the necessary satellite, medical and safety equipment to coordinate the client response efforts.

As such we able to quickly locate and evacuate the executive and his family while at the same time escort the damage assessment and engineering team in and restore emergency power to the local hospital.

Once the team had setup in a local hotel and the executive along with his family were safely on a plane, the team established a temporary operations cell. Now in situ with reliable communications we went on to execute multiple operations, supporting media teams, search & rescue as well as ongoing support to aid the wider restoration of the power grid.