Early Warning System

When “Attention, shoppers” comes over the public address system at a big-box store, most customers expect to learn about a special sale.

On February 8 at the Wal-Mart supercenter in Prattville, Ala., that message preceded a tornado warning and instructions to move to the center (safest) part of the store.

Fifty-five people died and hundreds were injured in the communities where tornados struck that day, but all the shoppers and associates in that Wal-Mart – which was in the middle of one tornado’s path – were protected by store managers’ quick response to an advance weather warning system that Wal-Mart has in place throughout its global enterprise.

In fact, entire communities have been helped by Wal-Mart’s emergency response system in advance of hurricanes in Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi, tornadoes in Missouri, Texas and Virginia and wildfires in California.

That system is housed in the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) at the company’s Bentonville, Ark., headquarters. The EOC, which has its own staff meteorologist, is being expanded from 5,600 sq. ft. to approximately 10,000 sq. ft. and operates 24/7 year-round. It consists of four divisions: planning, preparedness, operations and recovery/mitigation.

Everything the planning department does ultimately transfers to the emergency management preparedness division, which is responsible for training, testing exercises and awareness programs. Wal-Mart’s training focuses not only on preparing its two million global employees to cope with crises that occur in the workplace, but also with the crises that occur at home as the result of catastrophic events.

Operations comes into play as Wal-Mart begins to respond to an emergency. There are alarm and watch operations that are on guard “for emerging business-interruption issues constantly around the globe,” says Jason Jackson, Wal-Mart’s director of emergency management. The alerts triggered by watch operations give Wal-Mart “the ability to get out in front of issues immediately.”

Wal-Mart uses a third-party emergency alert/emergency communications tool from New York-based SWN (Send Word Now) Communications to automate alerts so that all stores that might be affected by a fast-developing event like a tornado can be alerted virtually simultaneously.

“Trying to alert 100 stores in an area that may be in the path of tornadoes takes too long if you rely on phone calls,” Jackson says.

Wal-Mart relies heavily on technology to run its EOC, with systems ranging from global positioning software to mapping, modeling and geological applications. And, during emergencies, hundreds of people can be working at once from all of Wal-Mart’s different divisions to support a response that can include thousands of people in the field.

As part of a broader partnership, Wal-Mart, through its preparedness and operations sections, also works closely with a wide variety of local, state and federal government agencies, volunteer organizations and non-profit entities like the Red Cross and Salvation Army.

In March, Wal-Mart partnered with Colorado’s Department of Health to develop a statewide preparedness program, engaging the head of the company’s preparedness section and members of the operations, marketing, government relations and public relations teams.

The end result, Jackson says, was a “huge statewide preparedness program that manifested in our stores in the form of emergency kits and information that described what Colorado’s citizens needed to do to be prepared for emergencies. Government officials were also on hand as part of in-store events to talk about the program.”

Wal-Mart also has worked with federal partners on national campaigns like Ready.gov and with local governments in Louisiana, Oregon, Texas and Utah to create emergency preparedness programs for families with themes like “Ready or Not” or “What If?”

Jackson says working with state-level planners is a wonderful way to plan for emergencies on a large scale because “you’re high enough to be strategic and low enough to be actionable.”

In the aftermath of the 2004 hurricane season that devastated parts of Florida, Wal-Mart set out on a mission to increase its public/private partnership in emergency management. Those efforts have been publicly recognized as not only being at the forefront of developing public/private emergency preparedness programs, but as examples of how effective such partnerships can be at the local, state and federal levels.

Phenomenal and valuable
Indeed, “these partnerships with our store managers have been nothing short of phenomenal and valuable,” Jackson says. “In the end, we are not just talking about corporate sustainability, but community resilience and how we, as a company, can become a part of something greater than ourselves.”

Wal-Mart is also cooperating in these initiatives with other retailers like Home Depot, Lowe’s, H.E.B. and Brookshire. “As we engage with the government agencies, we understand that these programs require support greater than what we can provide by ourselves,” Jackson says. “Programs like these require a more comprehensive initiative that includes all retailers providing support to the communities they serve.”

Being so intimately involved with governmental emergency programs also helps people working in the public and private sectors “understand each other better,” he says. “We can dispel assumptions that can lead to failures or breakdowns in a response effort.

“Sometimes people in the public sector assume that retailers can just drop everything and immediately respond when an emergency occurs somewhere,” Jackson says. The reality, however, is that “most disasters are regional and isolated in nature, and while retailers may be able to surge a response into an affected area, that doesn’t mean they can just stop operating their stores in the rest of the nation. That’s not the way it works. So that’s where we get into having honest discussions with the public sector and setting proper expectations for each other.”

Part of effective emergency preparation planning is having all key contacts identified before an emergency occurs, and Wal-Mart’s close working relationships with local governments and communities help make that possible. “When emergencies strike, we can pick up a phone very easily because we already have our points of contact identified,” Jackson says.

At a state’s request, Wal-Mart also will deploy representatives to that state’s emergency operations center to provide retailer input. Working together, the community of retailers can help the state provide solutions it couldn’t manage on its own.

For example, Jackson says, “if the state says it needs 17,000 pet carriers, we’re not thinking of that as a sale but as how we can reasonably support the state. And if … we can’t support that, we can call a contact at PetSmart or Petco.

“Or if they say they need a million gallons of drinking water, that may not be something that we can immediately serve up. But if they get 250,000 gallons from us and 250,000 gallons from another retailer and so on, then we have a state solution and we, as retailers, are not depleting everything off of our shelves — which could mean that we then aren’t able to meet the needs of our regular customers.”

Advance planning pays off
First word of what turned out to be a category F-3 tornado reached the Prattville Wal-Mart about two-and-half hours ahead of the twister itself. By the time the tornado touched down, store managers had “had the time to prepare and they were sheltered in place,” Jackson says. “The tornado actually hit the store, but we had no loss of life and only a couple of minor injuries.”

And although the store was heavily damaged, it reopened within two weeks thanks to Wal-Mart’s business continuity planning and the actions of its recovery/mitigation team (some operations, such as pharmacy, were transferred to nearby Wal-Mart stores almost immediately). By comparison, some nearby competitors were still shuttered in mid-May.

To further enhance its emergency planning, Wal-Mart is working to display/disseminate crucial information more effectively during emergencies. Part of the plan is to create better dashboards for its intranet that are designed to address the information needs of specific individuals as determined by the roles they play as an emergency unfolds.

“Being a good partner to the community is definitely high on our priority list,” Jackson says, “and it isn’t only the big disasters. It’s also what the store manager does in little disasters that is just as important. That could be a five-alarm fire down the road where the manager gives a pallet of water to the fire department, or what store managers might do to support other local emergencies.”