Coping With a Crisis

Naomi Romanchok, CMP, is a veteran independent planner who has seen it all, from the hilarious to the harrowing. It was the latter that occurred on a sunny day in Bermuda not long ago, during a golf event she organized, when a participant, an older man, had a heart attack at the seventh hole. Thanks to Romanchok's calm ability to react appropriately during an emergency, the man was made as comfortable as was possible, calls were quickly made and soon he was being airlifted off the course to a nearby hospital. Fortunately, he survived.

"Once you get over the shock that this thing is happening, your mind kicks in and you pull all your experience out of the bag," says Romanchok, who is based in Fairfax, Va., and taught meeting planning for 10 years at Northern Virginia Community College. It helps that she is armed beforehand with a contingency plan, which she tweaks after each incident (one year, she had five meetings in a row where she had to handle a medical emergency).

Unfortunately, too many meeting professionals are not well prepared. According to this month's M&C Research poll (see "On-Site Emergencies"), 40 percent do not have an emergency-response plan for their events, and 40 percent neglect to review their facility's disaster-response plans.

Of course, at any type of gathering, there are countless ways that something could go horribly wrong. A bus could crash, a person could fall down a flight of stairs, a freak storm could flood the meeting space. Planners have to be prepared for anything.

"An emergency is when you have an incident that requires external resources outside of your own ability to manage or that has external visibility," says Bruce McIndoe, president and co-founder of the Annapolis, Md.-based risk-management firm iJET Intelligent Risk Systems. "A crisis is an incident that has escalated to where it can impact the finances or reputation of the organization." The number-one element that interrupts a meeting is weather, says McIndoe, followed by transportation incidents, slips and falls, and petty crime.

When weather strikes Washington, D.C.-based consultant and independent planner Joan Eisenstodt is one of the meeting world's greatest proponents of having an emergency plan in place; she learned this lesson early in her career with relatively minor incidents, such as needing to switch hotels on the fly when the association she was working for discovered its rival opposites were holding an event at the same place over the same dates. She began preparing for every eventuality. So while Eisenstodt didn't expect a tornado in Minneapolis at one meeting, she had a plan in place when the warning was sounded.

"I got on the radio and told the center's staff to get everyone out of the meeting rooms and into the designated gathering point -- the exhibit hall," she says. "We also had assigned a channel on the event radios that would work in any emergency." Attendees were kept informed throughout, until an all-clear was sounded and the tornado passed without touching down.

Planners need to operate with that "what if" mindset and act calmly, Eisenstodt adds, having seen her share of meeting professionals stymied by "crises" that were minor problems and easily solved. It's important to act swiftly and decisively, she stresses: "You deal with the people first, and then you move forward."

Bruce McIndoe was at an event in San Diego when a 5.6-magnitude earthquake hit, shaking the conference center and stunning the attendees, sending them for the doors. "The conference organizers wanted to make an announcement about what people should do, but nobody knew where the P.A. system was at the venue," he says. "It took them 30 minutes to make an announcement." Lesson learned: Once you determine that a facility has the right amount of space for your group, find out what its emergency plans and resources are.

What would happen in case of a tornado, hurricane, earthquake or fire should be outlined in your contracts and should be modified for each meeting, depending on your destination. As M&C's legal expert, Jonathan Howe, principal of Chicago's Howe & Hutton firm, has said in these pages, in the wake of 9/11 and hurricanes such as Katrina and Rita, the force majeure clause has become more crucial than ever. (To view a sample clause, go to mcmag.com/webexclusives.) This paragraph allows both the group and the hotel to cancel an event without any monetary penalty. It should outline the steps the selected facility will take (including emergency medical attention and evacuation) in the event of a disaster, whether natural or man-made.

Howe also suggests separating acts of God clauses, which address events outside of human control, from force majeure, rather than lumping them in the same paragraph. "You really don't need an act of God clause in the contract," he says. "If a hotel is damaged, the court has no ability to force the owner to rebuild it in time for the meeting."

Howe suggests putting partial force majeure language in the contract. "Let's say people in Duluth can't get to the meeting because of a severe winter storm, but you want the meeting to go forward," he says. "Put in the contract that in the wake of a storm, you won't have to pay for the people who can't make it."

And in the planning process, particularly for outdoor events, outline details for canceling or postponing. Sandy Biback, CMP, CMM, who runs Toronto-based Imagination+Meeting Planners Inc., tried her best to convince a client that this was important, to no avail, and the result was an extra disaster. On the morning of the event, a first-time fundraiser held in western Ontario, Biback woke up to no power -- she had slept through a tornado. Her client insisted on proceeding, even though all the vendors and entertainers were willing to postpone for a week. "We found some generators, the band went acoustic and we found an old-fashioned loudspeaker," says Biback, "but it was all a failure -- no money was raised." It's difficult to pull the plug at the eleventh hour, but, she stresses, sometimes it's the smartest move.

Weather problems come in myriad  guises. Think exposure to 100-degree F days on the golf course (have plenty of sunblock, water and hats to hand out) or outdoor evening events when the temperature drops (hot chocolate, blankets and maybe a jacket as a giveaway item).

"Unfortunately, planners get pushed into situations where they want to take advantage of low rates in certain destinations at a risky time," says McIndoe. He cites a meeting in Colorado Springs, Colo., that hosted an evening event with a Renaissance theme. "It was out in this field in September, and it was colder than anyone had expected. They opened up a tent and had about 200 blankets. Problem solved. Had they not done that, people might have gotten hypothermia or left earlier."

Of course, no one can predict how bad a snowstorm actually will be or what path a hurricane eventually will take. In fact, the National Hurricane Center won't even release until later this spring its predictions for this year's season, which runs from June 30 to Nov. 30. But keeping an eye on developments via the Weather Channel or related mobile-device app is paramount, as is knowing how you will answer attendees' questions about hotel rooms, flights and the meeting itself if the weather takes a turn for the worse.

Urgent medical problems To devise a plan that effectively meets the challenges of a medical emergency, start with the basics. "It's easy," Romanchok says. "How far is the nearest hospital? Where's the nearest 24-hour pharmacy? What's the emergency-response time for your facility?"

Certainly, when someone at a meeting needs immediate medical attention, dialing 911 comes first. But it also helps if several people on staff have first-aid training. Romanchok has taken Red Cross classes and knows how to use an AED (automated external defibrillator), a skill that came in handy at an event when the singer in a band complained about chest pains and a shooting pain in his arm just before performing. "Someone was calling 911 while I was using the AED," she says. The singer ended up in the hospital, but the band went on as planned.

"What you do first is a function of where you are," says McIndoe of iJet, who thinks all meeting professionals should be certified in CPR and know how to use an AED. "Being in a cruise meeting or at a hotel or in the Australian Outback clearly dictates what resources you have available. Those first few minutes literally can be life-saving."

Before the event, planners should designate a staff person in charge of identifying areas of trouble and evaluating the site with an eye to safety. McIndoe assigns what he calls a "safety pup," someone who has a reputation for seeing problems before they happen. "This person should walk the venue and think about all the things that could go wrong, looking for sharp edges, uneven surfaces, walls, or step-offs without a barrier or handrail," he says.

Being alert during the event can help keep one accident from multiplying. "I once was at an outdoor gathering on a lawn, where they had set up bars and food stations, and there was a 200-foot-long area that was two steps down with no hand rails," McIndoe recalls. A woman talking in a group of people backed up without looking, fell backwards, and broke both her arm and her ankle. Later, four more people were injured on those steps. "That was incredibly negligent on the part of the planner, who should have put up a barrier once the first incident happened," McIndoe notes.

The worst-case medical scenario, of course, is when someone dies. Planners should understand that in this instance, it's not in their purview to play coroner. "If a person is limp and nonresponsive, call 911 immediately," McIndoe says. "Maybe the person is revivable, time being the critical factor. Hopefully that's done in parallel with starting CPR, not making any layman's assumption that the person is dead."

In situations where it is crystal clear that a person has died, experts say it's important to avoid disturbing the scene, control the area around the person and call the authorities. But also have knowledge of who in your group is the correct person to contact the family, and who to tap as the organization's spokesperson if the media becomes involved.

Think on your feet One planner, who asked to remain anonymous, will never forget her experience on Sept. 11, 2001. She was in Reno to set up a show. "I had started the day in the hospital, ironically, as I had thrown my back out. Watching TV, I saw the second plane hit the tower, and I jumped out of bed. I knew it was going to be one of those days."

Suddenly she had to deal with the minute-by-minute horror of the unfolding news, including the death of a staff member on the plane that hit the Pentagon, even while juggling the complex logistics of her show. "It was just chaos," she says.

First, she met with the staff to make some decisions -- go forward with the meeting? With the exhibits? Cancel and file an insurance claim? "We canceled the exhibits but we did go forward with the sessions, albeit on a much more somber note," she says. She and her team met  regularly as the situation evolved and took care of issues as they arose, even bringing in a local clergyman to help attendees handle the grief.

Joan Eisenstodt believes planners should take improvisation classes -- as she has done -- to get better at handling the unforeseen. "Most planners do very badly with the little things -- the paper cuts, I call them, like the coffee break is late and they flip out," she says. "Improv teaches you to think on your feet, to carry the thought forward." And that ability, along with first-aid training, can help planners manage when unfolding situations threaten to spiral out of control.

Tip: For M&C's checklist on "Emergency Plan Components," go to bit.ly/e5PfJL.