‘Use emergency systems to build muscle memory’

Michael Berkowitz is currently director and regional head of corporate security and business continuity with Deutsche Bank, Asia Pacific. Last week, he was in Mumbai for the seminar on terrorism and security, organised by Bombay First.

Berkowitz is an emergency response expert, having worked with the office of emergency management in New York city. Here he was involved with disasters like the 1999 outbreak of West Nile fever, tropical storm Floyd, two airplane crashes and, most importantly, the World Trade Centre attacks of September 11, 2001.

He talks to DNA  about the importance of building “muscle memory” into emergency response systems.

What are you offering India?
We’d like to offer some practical lessons that we learnt in the issues in New York. The September 11 attacks were a huge disaster which impacted everything — people, transport, infrastructure and communication systems. Recovery went on for a long time, about six months. We realised then the importance of private and public collaboration, when it came to setting up command centres, control systems, communications.

How do you talk to the public and how do you talk to business?
We learnt from that experience that there was a lot that went right and a lot wrong. The whole emergency response community needed a culture of honest self-examination. We’ve tried to do that since.

In your experience, are manmade or natural calamities more difficult to deal with?
Many elements of dealing with them are the same. You need a communications network, you need to know who’s in charge. In NY in the 1990s, we spent a lot a time preparing for hurricanes, which pose a deadly threat to the city because of the way it is placed and because of the population density and the infrastructure. So we had all that in place — the engineers to deal with the debris, what would crumble, we knew how to manage mass casualties and fatalities. Who would have expected two planes to fly into the World Trade Centre? But all that planning helped.

What can Mumbai do now?
Put in place practices now, which can help at any time. Using emergency systems builds muscle memory. Use it for everything and when you have the big one, you know what to do. Mayor Rudi Guiliani took such threats very seriously and had the foresight to put practices in place. It’s little late to put the roof on after the rain starts.

Having been through all this, we feel the pain when any disaster happens — we feel with Mumbai, we feel with New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, the tsunami. India has so many emergencies — bandhs, strikes, communal violence, bomb blasts, floods — there’s always something happening. The same emergency practices can be used for all of them. As it happens, you improve your responses and each incident is a test. You know what works and what doesn’t immediately.

You’ve lived in Mumbai. Do you feel a difference in the city after the attacks?
This has clearly touched people. Mumbaikars are the most resilient people I have seen — they’ll wade through waist-deep water to come to work. No one else does that. But this one (November 26) made them stop and take notice.

You’ve moved from the public to the private sector. How different has that been?
Not so different. Corporate offices are like homes to many people and citizens are captive with us for most of the day. One of the lessons of 9/11 is that businesses have to be involved. We have to share our emergency systems and we have to communicate with everyone involved.