You Have an Emergency Plan. Does It Actually Work?

I grew up watching Grand Prix racing with my dad in the 1970s and 80s, back when the safety measures for drivers, crews and spectators looked very different to those we have today. I then spent some of my early years working in motorsport operations in the UK, so I have watched the changes in motorsport safety from both sides of the fence.

Motorsport has learnt an enormous amount about safety over those years, much of it unfortunately because people were seriously injured or killed. Cars have changed, circuits have changed, barriers and protective equipment have changed, and the way fire, medical and rescue teams respond to an incident has changed considerably. Anyone who watched motorsport through the 1970s and 80s will know just how different some of those arrangements were compared with what we expect to see at a major race meeting today.

During the China GT race at Shanghai International Circuit last weekend (5th September), British driver Ollie Millroy was involved in a multi-car collision and his Ferrari caught fire. Fellow competitor Loek Hartog stopped his own car, got out, found a fire extinguisher and went to help. Millroy has since credited Hartog with saving his life, which raises the obvious question of why another competitor ended up becoming part of the initial emergency response.

There have since been some very serious claims made about the official emergency response. A team boss reportedly alleged that marshals panicked, dropped fire extinguishers and ran away, and that an ambulance took around 15 minutes to arrive because its driver had been asleep. There is an investigation underway and those claims should be treated as allegations rather than established facts, but they are clearly going to form an important part of understanding what happened and how the emergency arrangements actually operated on the day.

China GT has issued a statement saying its preliminary investigation found that the overall event organisation and safety arrangements met the standards required for a national-level competition. At the same time, it acknowledged shortcomings in detailed management and said there would be a comprehensive review covering event organisation, safety, emergency response, rescue and medical care. An event can meet the required standard and have the required people, equipment and procedures in place, but that does not automatically mean the emergency response will work when it is needed. There is a big difference between checking that something is provided and checking that it can actually do the job it is there to do.

And actually, we see this across events all the time. There is an Emergency Management Plan, fire extinguishers are shown on the site plan, first aid or paramedics have been engaged, security and event staff have radios and everyone has an allocated role. On paper it can all look perfectly reasonable, but none of that necessarily tells us what is going to happen in those first few minutes when there is a real emergency and people have to stop reading the procedure and actually respond.

This is something I regularly work through with teams when I undertake emergency management training. I don’t just want to know that the plan says there will be an ambulance onsite. I want to know where it is going to be, who is with it, how those people will be contacted and whether they can physically get to every part of the site. If an external ambulance is called, who is meeting it, where are they meeting it and does that person actually know the quickest way to get the crew to the casualty? We also need to consider what happens if the normal emergency access route is blocked, because the route that looks perfectly clear on the site plan may look very different once the event is operating.

The same applies to fire extinguishers. It is one thing to put their locations on a plan and check that they are in position before the event opens, but we also need to know who might reasonably be expected to use them, whether those people know how to use them and whether they can actually reach them. Most importantly, we need to think about how people may react when they are confronted with a real fire rather than the controlled version they may have seen during training.

One of the areas that needs to be clear in any Emergency Management Plan is who is doing what when an emergency occurs. Writing “Event Manager to coordinate emergency response” into a plan is easy, but what does that actually mean when several things are happening at once? Who is making the decisions, who is calling emergency services, who is meeting them, who is clearing access, who is managing the rest of the event and who is looking after the people directly affected? We also need to know what happens if the person who is supposed to take control is already dealing with the incident or simply cannot be contacted.

This is where testing the plan becomes important, and that does not mean every event needs to stage a huge emergency exercise. A decent tabletop exercise with the right people in the room can expose so much. Give the team a realistic scenario and work through where everybody would be, what they would do first, who they would contact and what happens when something does not go according to plan. Block the nominated emergency access gate, make one of the key people unavailable or take out a radio channel and see whether the arrangements still work.

The actions of Loek Hartog made a life changing difference to Ollie Millroy’s with his chances of getting out of that burning Ferrari, and Millroy has publicly thanked him for what he did. From an emergency management perspective, however, we also need to look at why another racing driver apparently needed to become part of that initial response. We cannot build emergency arrangements that rely on somebody who was never supposed to be part of the response happening to be there, recognising what needs to be done and being prepared to do it.

The investigation will hopefully establish exactly what happened in Shanghai, including whether the reported failures in the response are accurate. We do not need to know the outcome of that investigation, however, to use the incident to check our own arrangements. Having an Emergency Management Plan is only part of the job; we also need to know whether the people, equipment, communications, access and response described in it are actually going to work when something goes seriously wrong.

This article is based on publicly available reporting and statements regarding the incident at the China GT event at Shanghai International Circuit. At the time of writing, the incident and emergency response remain subject to investigation. Some details reported in the media, including claims about the actions of marshals and the medical response, are allegations and have not been independently verified by Beaspoke Safety. This article does not seek to determine responsibility or make findings about the actions of any individual or organisation. It is intended to consider the broader emergency planning and response issues raised by the incident.

This article was originally published on Bespoke. 

Image source - Motorsport.com