It will be a long time before anyone forgets the dramatic events surrounding the death of Alexander Litvinenko on 23 November last year. As well as giving daily updates on his lingering death, with its eerie echoes of the Cold War, the newspapers were full of reports of severe disruption to businesses as hotels, restaurants and other premises were sealed off and subjected to detailed radiological surveys. Most notably, BA not only had a number of planes involved in the incident grounded but had to trace the many thousands of passengers who had flown on them. This incident has undoubtedly raised the profile of Business Continuity and this type of risk in particular: already this year I have been involved in running a Crisis Management exercise based on a radiological scenario for one client and I expect that there will be more requests before too long.
Only a few weeks earlier, we had watched from the window of our offices on Fleet Street, as an altogether less newsworthy Business Continuity event played out in front of our eyes. On the morning of 19 October 2006 a luffing jib crane on a construction site at New Street Square / New Fetter Lane failed after putting down a load, leaving the crane jib hanging vertically from the mast. The Emergency Services quickly attended and began to clear Fetter Lane and adjacent streets. Dozens of organisations were evacuated from their premises and a large crowd of displaced office workers began to grow at either end of the cordon. Fortunately the weather was dry and quite mild for many of them appeared to have nowhere to go and there was a delay of over an hour before the Fire Service announced that nobody would be allowed back into the affected premises that day. I am pleased to report that the incident was resolved without any injuries and business as usual resumed the next day.
The New Street Square / New Fetter Lane incident is not, in fact, an isolated one: in September last year a crane collapsed on a construction site in Battersea and, only last month, a crane collapsed in Liverpool City Centre |
