Khamal Georges

The con­fu­sion that fol­lowed the Paria div­ing tragedy, which claimed four lives, could have been avoid­ed with bet­ter cri­sis com­mu­ni­ca­tions and treat­ment of anx­ious rel­a­tives, ac­cord­ing to one of the world’s lead­ing cri­sis man­age­ment and mass fa­tal­i­ty ex­perts Robert A Jensen.

The first in­di­ca­tion that some­thing went wrong on Feb­ru­ary 25, on what should have been a rou­tine main­te­nance dive at one of Paria’s un­der­wa­ter pipelines, was at ap­prox­i­mate­ly 3 pm, af­ter the crew saw suc­tion bub­bles. The com­pa­ny’s first com­mu­ni­ca­tion to the pub­lic came at 8 53 pm, rough­ly six hours lat­er that day.

“The time­line was nev­er go­ing to work if there weren’t things put in place be­fore an event,” Jensen, chair­man emer­i­tus of Keny­on In­ter­na­tion­al Emer­gency Ser­vices, told Guardian Me­dia.

“Part of any good cri­sis man­age­ment plan is hav­ing state­ments. You should have the first three state­ments ready to go that can be re­leased in min­utes. I think that that time­line, with­out know­ing the com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tem of the area, is too long.”

Jensen has spent most of his life deal­ing with crises around the world, most­ly mass fa­tal­i­ty events. He and his firm have been sought af­ter by com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ments world­wide for ma­jor events like the Ok­la­homa City bomb­ing, 9/11 ter­ror­ist at­tacks and the Hur­ri­cane Ka­t­ri­na dis­as­ter in the Unit­ed States, the Gren­fell Tow­er fire in the UK, the Haiti earth­quake and mul­ti­ple aero­plane dis­as­ters, bomb­ings and ter­ror­ist at­tacks.

As a di­ve­mas­ter, he has al­so been fol­low­ing close­ly the tragedy of the four divers here in Trinidad and To­ba­go from Key West, where he has now re­tired. He be­lieves there were gaps in Paria’s re­sponse.

“What I see is a lot of con­fu­sion,” he said in an in­ter­view on Wednes­day.

“I see some fin­ger-point­ing and I see stuff that is not help­ful to the fam­i­lies. And I think they’ve prob­a­bly made it much hard­er than they had to make it,” he added.

Asked if he were hired to man­age the af­ter­math of this in­ci­dent what he would do, Jensen out­lined sev­er­al fac­tors, but none more im­por­tant than the treat­ment of the divers’ rel­a­tives.

He said, “The first thing to re­mem­ber is the fam­i­lies are the au­di­ence, fam­i­lies are the con­sumers here and life will nev­er be the same for them.”

Once the ac­ci­dent has oc­curred, he ex­plained, “The best thing you can do is ze­ro be­cause you can’t bring back the dead, so the best you can do is not make it worse.”

And not mak­ing it worse re­quires that rel­a­tives know first. He said with­in 30 to 45 min­utes, they should have been alert­ed. While Paria has in­di­cat­ed that it com­mu­ni­cat­ed di­rect­ly with im­me­di­ate fam­i­ly, some have chal­lenged the qual­i­ty of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and treat­ment they re­ceived from the com­pa­ny.

“You get the fam­i­ly, you as­sign some­one to be their rep­re­sen­ta­tive to help them nav­i­gate what to ex­pect, what’s next, what are the in­ves­ti­ga­tion process­es, how long should that take place,” he ex­plained, as of­ten­times, many rel­a­tives have not been through a trau­mat­ic event like this be­fore. With decades of ex­pe­ri­ence han­dling events that have led to loss of live, he said com­pas­sion, car­ing and hon­esty go a long way in com­fort­ing fam­i­lies and mit­i­gat­ing fall­out.

“And then there are some ba­sic things you do such as, pret­ty quick­ly, is a let­ter of sym­pa­thy, it’s not a let­ter of de­fence, it’s not writ­ten by a lawyer or in­sur­er, it’s writ­ten from one per­son to the next say­ing I am sor­ry that this has hap­pened,” he said.

“Whether your com­pa­ny was neg­li­gent, or it was an ac­ci­dent or a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter doesn’t mat­ter, you’re the lead­er­ship of the com­pa­ny and the fam­i­lies are look­ing to you for help,” Jensen al­so said.

The news con­fer­ence held by Paria al­so came too late, Jensen said when asked about the time the com­pa­ny faced the pub­lic.

Paria held a news con­fer­ence on Feb­ru­ary 27, two days af­ter the in­ci­dent.

Ac­cord­ing to Jensen, these things can build dis­trust.

“If peo­ple feel they’ve been lied to or mis­treat­ed, they won’t want to talk to you,” he said.

That’s an im­por­tant fac­tor con­sid­er­ing, he said, some of the in­for­ma­tion that may be re­vealed will be dif­fi­cult for the rel­a­tives and it must come from peo­ple they trust.

Jensen al­so em­pha­sised the need for con­tin­u­ous com­mu­ni­ca­tion that clear­ly states what is known and not known and the set­ting up of a me­dia cen­tre for easy ac­cess to in­for­ma­tion.

He al­so ad­vis­es against com­mu­ni­cat­ing via What­sApp in a sit­u­a­tion like this, as Paria did when it set up a What­sApp com­mu­ni­ca­tion group with the divers’ fam­i­lies.

He did not want to com­ment on the de­ci­sions ​not to send in divers to res­cue the men, but ad­vised that there should be trans­paren­cy with the pub­lic in all de­ci­sions that have been tak­en.

Jensen said, “I can un­der­stand that the peo­ple mak­ing de­ci­sions at the time are us­ing the best in­for­ma­tion avail­able to them, and they will weigh the risk of it. We weigh the risk go­ing in to re­cov­er bod­ies; is it worth in­jur­ing or hurt­ing a per­son to re­cov­er some­body you be­lieve is de­ceased. That puts a dif­fer­ent pa­ra­me­ter than go­ing in to res­cue some­body you’re pret­ty sure is still alive or has a chance. So, I don’t know why the de­ci­sion was made be­cause I don’t know the facts. I do know that an­swer­ing that ques­tion with­out any type of pub­lic re­la­tions spin with­out any type of equiv­o­ca­tion is go­ing to be huge­ly im­por­tant for build­ing trust with the fam­i­lies and the com­mu­ni­ty.”

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