Archive for the ‘risk management’ Category

There’s a big story today in Ontario, with the banner headline:

“Ontario premier’s office was set to back decision to quit Elliot Lake rescue

Emails sent by Ontario premier’s staff reveal shifting views” 

Here’s the story in a nutshell, from a timeline of events published by CBC online.

On June 23, 2012, a shopping mall parking deck collapses in the northern Ontario town of Elliott Lake. By early the next morning, a search and rescue team is on site and beginning to stabilize the rubble to search for survivors.

On June 25, the Ontario Ministry of Labour orders a stop to rescue work, saying it’s too dangerous and unstable to continue. In an intense series of events, the rescue efforts are restarted and crowds of angry bystanders are critical of

On June 27, 2012, two bodies are removed from the rubble.

The news today is that the government of Ontario had prepared a statement supporting the suspension of rescue efforts.

Sorry to say, I think this story is not a story at all. Why?

1. This was a disaster, and a communications crisis. It is beyond naive to think that governments would not have statements prepared in the event of suspending the rescue operations.
2. The government was relying on its search and rescue experts to inform the discussion and to prepare for action. Is that wrong?
3. This sort of activity is a standard part of contingency planning. For example, when Apollo 11 went to the moon, there was a chance that the astronauts would be lost. The US government prepared a presidential speech in the event that Aldrin, Armstrong, and Collins were killed during the mission. Is this terrible? It may seem hardhearted. But for communicators in crisis mode, it’s necessary.
4. I particularly enjoy the story’s subhed: “Emails sent by premier’s staff reveal shifting views.” My gosh, as a situation evolved at a rapid pace, the staff were assimilating input from experts, gauging public opinion, and working on a communications strategy that would serve the most people in the best way? Wow. Would ironclad unvarying views have been a better position for the Premier’s staff to choose?

When bad things happen, difficult choices have to be made, and worst-case scenarios must be addressed. I don’t see anything telling me that this news story is anything more than the portrayal of a fast-moving crisis and disaster management scenario playing out. Shame that it’s being played as it is by the CBC.

I guess I’m not finished writing about information security after my post about University of Oklahoma researchers losing years of cancer research data on a stolen laptop.

I got pointed back to the topic when I learned that there was another stolen laptop incident in New Orleans, at Tulane University. The details are these. While the university closed for the Christmas holiday, a staffer in the human resources shop thought he would get some work done on the W-2 forms necessary to produce for each of the more than 10,000 people employed by Tulane. Fine. He brought home the records on a laptop. The records were unencrypted. Uh-oh. The employee left the laptop in his car and went out of town. Uhhhhh-oh. The laptop was stolen. Now records including Social Security numbers, salaries, and other information that is classified as confidential by the university are in the hands of the thief.

There are obvious lessons to be learned, and obvious mistakes here. I’m not going to go into those. They should be self-evident.

But here’s where I am going: as organizations, you need to ensure that your employees are (a) aware, and (b) trained to act on, the sensitivity of your data.

I’ve worked at two post-secondary institutions, and there was very little talk of IT security. One opportunity to refresh my education was when Canada introduced the Personal Information and Protection of Electronic Documents Act (known to normal humans as PIPEDA). That required some extensive training for anyone with access to the database program our fundraisers used (which I had, subject to limits). But overall, I’d wager that this is how things are at most organizations:

So if I’m right, why aren’t employees more sensitive to these issues? Because there’s plenty of information out there suggesting that this is a BIG problem. One 2009 report for Dell by Ponemon showed that three-quarters of IT directors surveyed knew of a case in which their organization’s data had been put at risk because of a lost laptop (not even COUNTING all the other IT threats). Another Ponemon survey showed that nearly 4 in 10 data breaches occur because of lost or stolen laptops or mobile devices. That same study pegs the cost per record of stolen data at over $200US. (If that math works for Tulane, that’s a cost of two million bucks.)

So what’s to be done?

I’d bet that most organizations have IT security policies in place. Tulane has one. I’ve read it. All 14,000 words of it.

I’ve found countless other ones like it for universities, colleges, and other institutions and organizations.

It it reasonable to think that a 14,000 word policy is going to be regularly read — even by the IT staff or the HR staff? I don’t think so. I’d suggest that organizations of all shapes and sizes need to bring some resources to bear to make their employees far more cognizant of the risks to the organization and to themselves of sloppy data security.

If communicators are going to be counsel to their organizations, they should be scanning the horizons for threats. This su

re as hell is one. And I think that we communicators ought to lead it, rather than wait for the IT or HR staff to come to us.

As Maximus might say: Who’s with me?

A Toronto company named EasyDNS has become a potent case study of two things: crisis communications and the limitations of journalism in the Internet age.

EasyDNS provides domain name servers for clients all over the place and is also a domain registrar. Until early December, there wasn’t much reason for an average person to know much about them.

But that was before a misunderstanding catapulted them into the middle of the largest news story of 2010. Someone, somewhere, confused EasyDNS in Toronto with EveryDNS in New Hampshire. EveryDNS had terminated its servicing of Wikileaks. This ticked off the supporters of Wikileaks, and when someone mistakenly identified EasyDNS as the villain, things went wrong.

Valleywag was the first major site to make the mistake, posting “Wikileaks loses its domain” on December 3rd. Within two hours of finding the Valleywag post, EasyDNS has gotten the post corrected and put up  a blog post of their own explaining the situation. After that, the Financial Times(registration required) the  New York Times “The Lede” blog, the Associated Press, and The Guardian all — independently — ran stories perpetuating the idea that a company who until now had no dealings with Wikileaks had struck the organization a blow.

Mark Jeftovic, EasyDNS CEO (Globe and Mail)

And in the meantime, EasyDNS’s team, led by CEO Mark Jeftovic (left), who seems a savvy and smart guy, were eliciting corrections and trying to keep their site and blog up to provide correct information. Aaaaannd… they were approached by Wikileaks to be one of several companies providing DNS services. By December 6, EasyDNS was providing service to Wikileaks.

You can read the full timeline in quite some detail in Timeline of an Epic Fail, the company’s blog post trying to compile all of this information. I’m more interested in teasing out some of the implications.

First: you are always at risk. I’m sure that if Mark Jeftovic at EasyDNS had someone tell him in November that his company would be misidentified as a “villain” in the biggest story of 2010, he’d have chuckled (or “chunkled”, as he writes in his timeline). But he was. One of my rules for crisis communication and response is that even things that are HIGHLY unlikely sometimes happen.

Second: as an organization, you need to be flexible enough to devote ALL your resources to resolving organizational crisis. At one workplace a few years ago, my team and I were running flat-out on a crisis that threatened customer service standards, financial damage, and public embarrassment. A few office doors away, I don’t think the response would have been “Crisis? Is this a crisis?” You need to have your whole organization be aware that a crisis state exists (not necessarily an EMERGENCY) and that action has to be quick, decisive and significant.

Second-and-a-half: Just because you’re totally focused on the crisis, don’t forget you have other business. EasyDNS was sending out e-mails to its customers as well as updating its own blog, as well as keeping feedback channels open on e-mail, twitter, and phone. They seem to have done a good job of keeping their existing customers informed and addressing their concerns.

Third: Be politely persistent with media who get something wrong. It’s shocking and disappointing that EasyDNS were badly served five separate times by media both blog-based and mainstream. It’s certainly made them more cynical about the quality of journalism. Who can blame them? But they did things right. What’s also interesting is that some media noted the error, while others simply corrected it in their online versions.

Fourth: Don’t be shy. EasyDNS was tireless in chasing down rumours and being proactive. Particularly if you’re “in the right” as they were, don’t just hope for things to “blow over”, be quiet, and wait for eyes to pass you over. You’re already part of the story. You might as well be a FULL part of it. I don’t know how “human” the company’s voice was before this, but their tweets, blog posts, and e-mails had a great voice, correcting errors and portraying emotion without coming off like ranters or bullies.

Fifth: recognize that in crisis lies opportunity. Jeftovic was already thinking this way when he wrote his blog post OK, so would we take on Wikileaks at this point? Now is there business benefit to EasyDNS actually doing this? Probably not directly. But my impression of EasyDNS has gone from zero — until yesterday when Jeftovic appeared on CBC Radio’s “Ontario Today” (you can listen to an interview with Jeftovic there) I’d never heard of ‘em — to “this is a company that has its act together and has some principles.” That can’t be bad.

Are there other lessons to be learned from this incident? You tell me. And attention Craig Silverman! There’s likely a whole chapter of “Regret the Error Volume 2″ in this story.

Cherry & Ford, in a Toronto Star photo

I’ve been dithering on whether to write about the investiture of Toronto’s new Mayor Rob Ford since I first heard that Don Cherry had been invited. You may recall that I covered Rob Ford earlier this year, when he didn’t quite do an interview with CBC Radio’s “As it Happens” on the day after his election.

For non-Canadian readers, Ford has styled himself as a plain-speaking council maverick who will stand up for the “little guy.” Don Cherry is a former NHL coach who is now a commentator on Hockey Night in Canada, a Saturday-night sporting institution. He’s also got a number of other gigs, from a radio commentator on sports radio networks to endorsements or ad appearances for things such as Cold-FX, the Quizno‘s restaurant chain, a series of hockey videos, and a chain of restaurants with the Don Cherry name over the door. He’s a passionate supporter of Canada’s military and a number of charities from organ donation to a hospice named after his late wife Rose, to whom he seemed to have been quite devoted.

Cherry is also a polarizing figure. He can seem belligerent, he doesn’t seem to suffer fools gladly, and he would likely place himself pretty far on the right of the political spectrum. In a recent byelection, he recorded a robocall in support of Conservative candidate Julian Fantino.

And then he was asked to attend Rob Ford’s investiture ceremony to place the chain of office around Ford’s neck (it should be noted that in most cases, the city clerk does this duty). Here’s what he said after he did the deed:

So. I was a little horrified at this speech. It seems to me that the investiture of a mayor and a council is a time for a little dignity and not for baiting of one’s ‘enemies’ and crude insults.

And I wasn’t alone. Spacing Toronto is holding a poll to design a “LEFT-WING PINKO” button, and others are busily printing t-shirts and other merchandise. Meanwhile, more right-wing media outlets are supporting Cherry as plain-spoken and just what was necessary. Joe O’Connor, for example, wrote in the National Post:

Be outraged over Cherry. Be embarrassed for Toronto. Or else be like this left wing, bike riding, print media wacko and lighten up. And remember this: we are talking about a 76-year-old Grampa.

But I think it’s too easy to simply dismiss Ford — or Cherry, for that matter — as ignorant or stupid. Ford is sending messages here, and I think they’re very specific. I think he’s specifically targeting the “pinko” contingent and smacking them verbally.

Now here are the public relations / communications questions, and I don’t know if I have answers or not:

1. What does it gain Ford to do this?
2. What are the circumstances – in politics or outside of them – when it’s appropriate to antagonize or alienate publics?

I would REALLY appreciate some insights on this. I rarely find myself unable to answer my own questions.

Two Ottawa-related crisis communications stories have caught my eye in the last few days.

First, there’s a long and entirely worthwhile story in the Ottawa Citizen today about how the federal government responded to the magnitude 5.0 earthquake that hit Ottawa last June.

On June 23 at 1:41, life was proceeding in Ottawa as normal. City council was meeting, the New Democratic Party was preparing to make an announcement, people were preparing for the G8 and G20 summits in Toronto and Muskoka that were happening that weekend, etc. Then… this happened.

Buildings across the city were evacuated, and media and the public began to look for information about the earthquake.

But as Tom Spears writes in the Citizen story, precious little information was available from Canadian authorities.

Within minutes of the quake, the Earthquakes Canada web went down, quickly followed by the phone lines for public and media information.

The first government update cited news reports of the magnitude, not its own sources.

Media began to rely on the US Geological Survey, while in some cases complaining about a lack of response from Canadian government sources. People who had actually experienced the earthquake were leaving firsthand reports at the USGS site. Earthquakes Canada has the same functionality… but it was down.

An hour later, a twitterer at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation said “Pretty sad that the traffic has totally wiped out NRCan’s earthquake site. Emergency preparedness much?”

At 4:25, a media conference call was planned. The call was scheduled for 6:00 pm. The media advisory went out … at 6:24. Only three outlets were on the call. Not surprising.

One academic claims this is a result of a general desire for control from the Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy Council Office.

The department provided a statement to Spears, telling him that improvements have been made in web functionality, and that the failures of systems seen on the 23rd had nothing to do with true emergency communications networks between agencies.

That may well be true. But as a communicator who’s dealt with a few crises and who’s prepared for a bunch that haven’t yet happened, it seems to me that there were some missteps here.

• The surge capability of the Earthquakes Canada site was obviously not there, and its phone system wasn’t sufficiently robust.
• There were far too many approvals necessary to allow seismologists to start informing media
• There weren’t pre-approved templates for crisis media advisories and the like which could have been issued without translations
• There were too many layers of approval and not enough delegation to responsible public servants

Second, the University of Ottawa had an unfortunate incident take place last week. When it was testing its emergency-notification text-messaging system, it sent a notification of a violent intruder to about 3,000 members of the university community. The message read:

“LOCKDOWN in effect! Violent aggressor {in/at XXX location}. Stop all activities. If possible, close and lock the door, and turn off lights. Silence cell phones. Keep away from doors and windows. If it is safe to do so, close blinds. Take cover and remain quiet until authorities instruct otherwise.”

A number of classrooms did exactly as the message said, until about 20 minutes later, when an all-clear message was sent. Was this a fail? I’m not sure it was. I think it’s obvious that sending out the templated message was a mistake. But there was little real harm done, and rather than reduce the credibility of the university’s emergency communications, it may have reinforced in the university community that the system will work in the event that something does happen.

To sum up the lessons that I take from this:

• Crises are going to tax all the resources of your organization. Make sure that your crisis plans assume almost total breakdown of systems and will allow you to operate with minimal functionality. One place where I was involved with crisis planning wanted to develop a “dark site” using FTP technology that would require complicated (at least to me) software and seemed to me to be almost impossible to predict would work efficiently in a real crisis. I argued for a WordPress-based site that could be updated from anywhere with Internet connectivity or from a smartphone.
• In large organizations, make sure your communication plans are shared and tested with the other key elements of the organization and that you’ll all know how to react.
• When you’re testing, it’s likely a good idea to tell people about the testing in advance. Saves a moment or two of stress.
• Have someone on your crisis team who can summon the most pessimistic scenarios you can imagine. If you prepare for the absolute worst, you’ll be better able to deal with only the moderately bad. (For some reason, I secretly love doing this type of stuff.)

And the final secret you might be interested in:

I think that while nobody wants to see a crisis or disaster happen, it can often be one of the most exciting times to be a communicator. Crises tax people’s brains and judgment to the maximum. They’re like intense workouts for the brain. And the more prepared you are for the crisis, the better you perform, and the more the experience feels rewarding rather than disheartening.

There was a time when I pointed to the Transportation Security Administration as an example in social media, like this:

Hey, if the TSA can start a blog, what’s stopping other government agencies?

But I have to say that they’re fumbling badly with the introduction of their new Advanced Imaging Technology machines and the “advanced patdown” – also known as the “Don’t touch my junk” patdown.

I don’t need to tell you how much attention all of this is getting and how many gaffes and incidents are getting attention now.From women being asked to remove breast prostheses to children being patted down to an amputee having to run her prosthetic leg through the luggage x-ray machine to a woman doffing her duds and trying to be patted down in lingerie to (and this one hit home for me) a bladder cancer survivor having his urostomy bag broken by the pat-down and having to board his plane with pants soaked with his urine.

And tomorrow seems like it’s going to make things even worse, with “National Opt-Out Day” encouraging US travellers to opt out of the scanners and allow themselves to get groped.

The TSA’s response? In part, this video:

Not Blogger Bob.

Ouch. The lameness burns.

UPDATE: The very smart (and very good on how to work with video) Ike Pigott has taken a run at why the Pistole video doesn’t work in his very worthwhile blog Occam’s Razor. Check it out.

TechCrunch has pointed to the mysterious “Blogger Bob” as having the most unenviable job in social media — that of running the TSA’s social media presence. He’s at the former “Evolution of Security” blog and he’s running the one official TSA Blog Team twitter account. And man, he takes a lot of heat.

But the problem with TSA isn’t their social media activity. It’s that their social media activity isn’t matching up with their real-world actions. Blogger Bob is trying to do his best in the time-honored Dell model, but it doesn’t feel like TSA is doing what Dell did to re-engineer their business and to better meet their customers’ expectations and demands.

If I use TSA as an example in a future, it is going to be more along the lines of:

Don’t start down this road unless you’re willing to actually CHANGE based on what you hear. Just saying you’re listening only gets you so far.

So to Blogger Bob, I wish a happy and stress-free American Thanksgiving. To all those travelling, I hope your trips are free of horror stories.

To the TSA, I hope that you’re soon better able to balance the need for security with basic human rights.

And finally, if that video by TSA administrator John Pistole has left you with a bad taste in your mouth, here’s something that’s about airport security, but also a bit more entertaining: webisodes from the Gruppo Rubato production of “Airport Security”, starring buds Kris Joseph and Nancy Kenny, among others.

Due to a scheduling snafu at the Business Network, my column got delayed a week, and just ran this morning. You can listen to it here, but here’s the script.

“I’m pretty certain that Baron de Coubertin is doing triple somersaults in the pike position in his grave.

The leadup to the 2008 Olympics has been like no other. When Canada hosted the Calgary Olympics in 1988, thousands of Canadians carried the torch and it was a big unity-booster.

This time, the torch run has been dominated by controversy as pro-Tibet protesters have done everything in their power to disrupt the procession. From fire extinguishers to giant signs on the Golden Gate Bridge, what was supposed to be a triumph has turned into a branding catastrophe for the Chinese government.

My interest, however, is more in the potential effects of this on Olympic sponsors.

For a movement that’s supposed to be building a better and peaceful world through sport, the Olympics is big business, and corporations pony up nearly half a billion dollars each year to be part of it.

And I would wager that some of those corporations have been wondering just what is going to happen to their investment in what has become a VERY controversial event.

It’s likely that a corporation like Coca-Cola, which has been involved with the Olympics for 80 years, won’t break its ties. But it’s found itself under pressure, as have other sponsors.

This is likely the highest-level version of a dilemma that all businesses likely face from time to time.

Businesses are pitched all sorts of sponsorships all the time, and have to make complicated decisions. What’s the investment? What’s the potential return? What are the dangers? How much non-financial investment – time, products, services – will your business have to bring to the table?

If there’s a lesson to be learned from the Beijing torch run, or in the phrase Mia Farrow coined, the “Genocide Olympics”, it’s that businesses need to do some serious due diligence before making any significant sponsorship deal.

Like most things that will have some impact on a corporation’s public image, sponsorships or partnerships need to be looked at VERY seriously, with extravagant attention paid to worst-case scenarios.

In one of my jobs, I used to tell my boss that I got paid for thinking of the worst thing that could happen. If you’re in business, you need someone to do that. You just might keep your image from getting torched.”

Ciao,
Bob.

I was late getting my Ottawa Citizen today, so while I munched my sandwich and vegetables , I read that Canada’s Natural Resources minister Gary Lunn wrote a letter on December 27 that was, in effect, telling the head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) that she was going to get fired on January 11, and if she had anything to say, she should do so by the 10th.

I did a lot of blogging about the controversy that sprang up about the NRU Reactor and its shutdown, which threatened the supply of medical isotopes worldwide, back in December, as it was happening.

The short version, if you don’t want to read my previous posts on it, is this:

• A 50-year-old reactor in Chalk River, Ontario, produces something around two-thirds of the world’s medical isotopes (which are needed for testing and treatment of all kinds of diseases).
• The reactor was shut down for safety reasons, and a fight began between its operator, AECL, and the CNSC over how to get it restarted and what constituted safe.
• When this hit the media, the government introduced a bill which ordered re-opening the reactor for four months, and there were first-of-their-kind hearings on the floor of the House of Commons where CNSC head Linda Keen, and officials from AECL were closely questioned by parliamentarians.
• People started asking questions about the balance between safety at the reactor and the health outcomes of isotope shortages.
• The bill (C-38) passed in record time.
• The Chair of AECL (Mr. Burns. Seriously) resigned.

David Akin at CTV has done some really good work on this story, and he (to my knowledge) was the first to get the response up on his blog, which is slugged Nuclear regulator fires back at Lunn.

And does she! CNSC President Keen released a 38-page package of documents she sent to the Minister of Natural Resources to the media and on the CNSC Web site.

Here’s my very plain-language summary of what Keen’s package says:

• Lunn has no right to fire her without just cause, and he doesn’t have it.
• The allegations he makes in his letter (that she lacks good judgement, that she hasn’t been carrying out the duties of the job appropriately, that her hard-line position on safety eroded public confidence) are total BS.
• Lunn has already decided to fire her, and that she’s gonna fight.
• The NRU incident should be the subject of a public inquiry or a parliamentary committee.

It’s remarkable that this fight is being played out in public, and that Keen is taking such a vociferous position.

More on this later, but it’s another fascinating glimpse into how this government conducts itself when the agenda goes out of its control.

Ciao,
Bob.

PS: More commentary coming from Dr. Dawg…, and tons of news coverage.

As part of my interest in the Chalk River-medical isotope-NRU situation that currently exists, I thought I would send an e-mail to a scientist who is an international expert in risk management.

I was pleasantly surprised, if not overwhelmed, to get a full essay from him in response. He’s agreed to allow me to post it here as a guest post. It provides a perspective far more informed on the topic than I am, but one that reinforces much of what I’ve been thinking (as a sideline, improving my self-esteem).

Here’s the bio of Dr. William Leiss from his site:

William Leiss is a Fellow and Past-President (1999-2001) of the Royal Society of Canada and an Officer in the Order of Canada. From 1999 to 2004 he held the NSERC/SSHRC Research Chair in Risk Communication and Public Policy in the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. This five-year chair program, with total funding of $1.25 million, was part of the MOTC (Management of Technological Change) strategic grants program; a consortium of Alberta-based industrial sponsors from the chemicals and petroleum sectors, led by Nexen Inc., provided one-half of the chair funding. From 1994 to 1999 he held the Eco-Research Chair in Environmental Policy at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. The five-year Eco-Research Chair program was funded at a total of $1.3 million by the Tri-Council Secretariat (using funds from Environment Canada) and Imperial Oil Ltd. His earlier academic positions were in political science (Regina, York), sociology (Toronto), environmental studies (York), and communication (Simon Fraser). At Simon Fraser he was also Vice President, Research.

And here is his essay, in its entirety. I have added hyperlinks where appropriate.

Grandstanding about Risks:
What Lessons can we learn from the Isotope Mess?

William Leiss

December 13, 2007

Apparently the bill mandating the re-starting of the nuclear reactor at Chalk River was the first use of the Government of Canada’s emergency powers since World War II—or at least since the use of the War Measures Act in 1970.

The combination of high parliamentary drama, overheated partisan rhetoric, and thousands of critically-ill patients going without essential diagnostic tests will be hard to match in future. Of course, things never should have come to such a pass. This was a tragedy waiting to happen, like so many others (the discovery of BSE in the Canadian herd is another recent example).

We have all the tools we need already in hand to avoid such needless crises. But when it comes to risk management, all bets are off: Politicians simply do not want to deal with bad things that might occur but haven’t happened quite yet. Once they do happen, they’re quite comfortable in writing large cheques against the public purse to clean up the mess, and then finding someone else to take the blame.

As Ian Macleod explained in a superb background article on the front page of yesterday’s Ottawa Citizen, the isotope mess had been in preparation for a very long time. Canada’s MDS Nordion has developed a very useful and profitable business selling nuclear isotopes for medical diagnostics and radiotherapeutics under an agreement with AECL, and as of now Canada is responsible for half the world’s supply of these vital substances.

AECL’s aging Chalk River installation was supposed to have been replaced ages ago with a new generation of reactors, the so-called “Maple” models. The new models are eight years behind schedule and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget. An ugly legal battle between MDS Nordion and AECL over who was going to pay for the enormous cost overruns was settled only last year. But, as Macleod explained, there may be a serious design flaw in the reactor, and Canada’s nuclear safety regulator is still not at all happy with AECL’s present plans for bringing them into service.

The current facility in Chalk River is over fifty years old. The dispute between AECL and the regulator, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission [CNSC], over whether or not the facility is in compliance with current safety standards, has been going on for about two years. Natural Resources Canada is the government department with lead responsibility for these agencies and the legislation under which they operate. Health Canada has regulatory responsibilities for the use of radioactive substances in diagnostics and patient care.

All of the senior administrators for all of the above parties live in the same city. Didn’t anyone see the train wreck coming? Laying the blame at the feet of the CNSC alone is a crude and unconvincing way of trying to disguise the fact that all of the parties named above, including two federal ministers, were asleep at the switch.

What can be said about the substance of the matter? When the crisis broke, what patients, the medical community, citizens of eastern Ontario and western Quebec, and governments faced was in fact a risk/risk tradeoff situation. Two types of risks, equally compelling in nature, are present: (1) patient risks from delays in diagnosis and treatment, on a very large scale, and (2) unsafe operation of a nuclear facility, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the region around Chalk River and perhaps elsewhere.

The first set of risks is immediate, widespread, potentially catastrophic for many sick individuals, and obvious to the rest of us. The second set of risks is a hypothetical one, based on a complicated process of estimating the likelihood and consequences of a reactor failure and the unavailability of some or all of the backup safety equipment at the facility. I hasten to add: Just because it’s a hypothetical risk doesn’t mean it’s not “real”! The Prime Minister may honestly believe that “there will be no nuclear accident” as a result of restarting the reactor, but such a statement is illogical on its face.

However: Almost certainly a reasonable, fair and considered judgment—on the competing “balance of probabilities” for adverse outcomes—would conclude that, in this case, the first set of risks trumps the second, and that the current facility should continue to operate. So why didn’t the CNSC make the call in this way?

Because it has no legal, regulatory, or moral authority to do so. CNSC’s mandate is to ensure that nuclear installations in Canada are operating according to approved standards of performance and acceptable risk. That is its only mandate. It has no authority whatsoever to “balance” the safety of nuclear reactors against the needs of Canadians and others to have reliable access to nuclear isotopes. Just imagine the hypothetical counter-case: The reactor is restarted, it fails, and a catastrophic accident ensues as a result of the lack of adequate emergency backup systems—a situation of low or very low likelihood, that is, improbable, but not impossible. Then what would we all be in a position to say to the CNSC?

So whom should we hold responsible for getting us into this mess—and, hopefully, for getting us out of it again? My candidates are the ministers of natural resources and health in the Government of Canada, and the officials who report to them. For who else should have noticed, sometime in the past two years at least, while AECL and CNSC were battling, that potentially tens of thousands of patients around the world were at serious risk of a disruption in the supply of nuclear isotopes?

Where was the contingency plan, devised in advance? Where was the directive given to AECL in 2006 to respond immediately and completely to the CNSC’s requirements regarding its operating license? And, knowing how important Canada’s role is in supplying nuclear isotopes for medical purposes to the world, why has the Government of Canada been sitting on its hands for so long while AECL was embarrassing itself with its Maple reactors fiasco?

Risk management means that you look ahead, for the risks that are known to you, and try to devise ways of minimizing the adverse consequences that have a good chance of coming down on our heads. This is also called “the precautionary approach,” which was adopted some time ago as an official policy of the Government of Canada. These are very good tools, by now developed at a high level of sophistication. But at the political level, the mantra always is, “Please, dear God, don’t let this happen in my term of office.”

# # #

Thanks, Dr. Leiss.

Ciao,
Bob.

Last night, the Canadian Senate passed Bill C-38, which mandates the startup of the NRU reactor at Chalk River, Ontario.

The bill overrides the rulings of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and requires the reactor’s operator, Atomic Energy Canada Ltd., to restart the reactor and operate it for 120 days. This will provide a temporary solution to the problem with medical isotopes.

The reactor provides about two thirds of the radioactive isotopes used in medical diagnostic testing and therapies for the world.

I posted yesterday that this was a fascinating case of risk communications and management. Let me illustrate and blather about that a bit.

The decision to introduce the bill and restart the reactor seems to have been made using this sort of reasoning:
The worst-case scenario of an unsafe reactor operating might be some sort of catastrophic failure. But that is unlikely, even if you take the views of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission into account.

However, the nasty effects of an isotope shortage include delayed diagnosis and delayed treatments. That could mean shortened life spans, premature deaths, worsened quality of life…

These are high stakes. When you add in political gamesmanship, media that love scary stories, and corporations trying to protect their businesses and images, the stakes may not get higher, but they do get complicated.

I’ve emailed a risk expert I worked a little with some time ago in the hope that he’ll share some insights about this. In the meantime, let’s hope that the safety mechanisms in place continue to work.

Ciao,
Bob.

PS: While there’s precious little humour in this situation, I have to say that the fact that AECL’s board chair is named “Mr. Burns” makes me chuckle.

Real Burns Fake Burns