Ports of Auckland rise to the challenge

Ports of Auckland staff expecting just another day at work were in for a surprise recently when Kestrel Group swung into action and unleashed an emergency scenario to respond to.

The Scenario: The driver of a straddle carrier suffers a heart attack and loses control of the machine when working in a container yard. The straddle carrier knocks off a container from a stack which opens on impact with the ground and its contents of barrels fall out.

Two Ports of Auckland staff conducting door inspections in the container yard were then overcome with fumes and experienced breathing difficulties.

Malinda Meads of Kestrel Group was on the ground at the container yard helping facilitate the exercise. “We had about 40 personnel on site involved in the exercise including port staff, New Zealand Fire Services, St John’s Ambulance and two New Zealand Police liaison personnel.”

Malinda says the response from all agencies was in accordance with their own emergency procedures.

“There was really good co-ordination between the agencies and the face-to-face communication at the response site worked well but the largest issue identified in post exercise debriefs was the broader communications and relaying information to other areas within the Ports of Auckland including the Emergency Management Team.”

Paul Milmine, Ports of Auckland Risk and Research Advisor, says the exercise provided a fabulous learning experience and threw up its fair share of challenges.

“I think one of the biggest challenges for us was ensuring there was minimal impact on our day-to-day operations.”

Paul says that if this scenario had actually occurred they would have shut down the container terminal and terminal operations and stopped trucks from coming in and out.

“In a real life scenario like this there would be a large number of people impacted, but for an exercise we needed to manage that – we didn’t want to be shutting things down so we planned for the exercise to be held on a quiet day for the container yard.”
However, Paul says the plan backfired somewhat as bad weather prior to the exercise resulted in it being one of the busiest days at the yard.

He says one of the other challenges was trying to keep the scenario a secret whilst having to let people know it was taking place and to book out the time to take part.

“There was also the challenge of communicating with the hundreds of external people on site on a given day – we had to try to guess who would be there and who to notify in advance as well as reassuring them there would be minimal impact to normal operations.”

Despite the challenges, Paul says the exercise went well and highlighted some areas to improve upon.

“The emergency response by all the other agencies involved went well. It was good for us to see that some of our key personnel that were untested, and had major roles to play, did really well despite being put under considerable pressure.

“The emergency services also got a lot out of it and liked how they were able to use our rescue platform to extricate the driver from the straddle carrier. Our Emergency Management Team worked well together as a team.”

Paul says the major learnings came from the communications between the onsite incident and the Emergency Management Team. “We need to be a lot better at feeding quality information from site into the Emergency Management Team. We will be changing our emergency procedures to address this.

“The exercise definitely highlighted the need to have more exercises; I’d like to look at a full evacuation exercise as well as a scenario outside of normal work hours. We are a 24/7 operation so an emergency situation could happen at any time.”

Paul says there is real value in bringing in external expertise to assist in exercises like this.

“I realised I didn’t have the expertise or enough people internally to run the type of exercise I wanted to run so that’s why we contacted Kestrel Group who came highly recommended.

“Working with Kestrel was really easy – they communicate really well, they respond very well, they listened very well and they understood our concerns. Kestrel worked hard and was flexible about changing things when we needed them to,” says Paul.