Power blackout reminder of need for business continuity planning

13 June 2006

Yesterday’s power blackout in Auckland is a reminder that businesses must be prepared for all foreseeable civil and workplace emergencies, the Department of Labour says.

Chief advisor, health and safety Mike Cosman said the chaos caused by the power outage showed the importance of good business continuity planning. This would not only help businesses cope with and recover quickly from emergencies, but would protect the health and safety of employees.

“Civil emergencies like extended electricity blackouts, floods, earthquakes and so on, as well as pandemic emergencies, are all foreseeable occurrences in New Zealand, and yesterday’s incident shows that businesses may not be giving as much consideration to the reliability of their systems in business continuity planning as they possible should.”

Mr Cosman said the fragility of some business emergency planning was apparent yesterday. There were reports of people stuck in elevators for hours and no emergency lighting in stairwells, which meant people couldn’t safely evacuate buildings.

“The robustness of some of the systems comes into question. Businesses need to ask themselves ‘what if’ in relation to their essential services, because it’s not a question of if, but when they may fail.

“Is plant or equipment going to shut down or restart safely? Is data storage going to kick-in? Are there alarms and phones that work with no mains power so that people in lifts can be rescued? Does the emergency lighting work? These questions and more need to considered and acted on before a workplace emergency happens.”

Mr Cosman said all businesses, big and small, should think about developing and testing continuing plans, including providing back-up power supplies where necessary.

“At one extreme you have hospitals needing emergency generators so that operations can continue, while a meatworks would be ruing the day if it didn’t have backup power to keep the freezers operating.

“Effective business continuity planning not only helps manage risk during an emergency it accelerates a business’s ability to return to normal operations afterwards.”

The Department of Labour’s workplace contact centre fielded numerous calls from people concerned about health and safety aspects of the blackout, but there were no reports of worker injury as a result of the power cut.

To the journalist: please note that health and safety services formerly referred to as Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) should now be referred to as the Department of Labour.