Last Saturday marked the anniversary of the Kegworth Air Crash. On 8th January 1989 a British Midland Boeing 737 developed an engine fault shortly after taking off from East Midlands Airport bound for Belfast. The pilots mistakenly shut down the wrong engine and the plane crashed onto the M1 just outside the airport perimeter. Of […]
It seems incredible that, in the space of just a few weeks, we have stumbled from the chaos of the withdrawal from Afghanistan to national CO2 shortages and now a fuel distribution crisis. Inevitably, comparisons are being made with the end of James Callaghan’s government and the “Winter of Discontent”. Despite the title of this
Crisis-Hit Britain – is this as bad as the 1970s? Read More »
It’s always great to see a new book on crisis management, and I was particularly interested to see this one as I used to run crisis management training courses with Jonathan Hemus some years ago. One of the most common problems with books that purport to be about crisis management is that they really just
Fifteen years ago today, at 6am on Sunday 11th December 2005, the largest ever explosion and fire in peacetime Western Europe took place at the Buncefield Oil Storage Depot in Hemel Hempstead. Miraculously there were no fatalities, and only 60 casualties; but in every other sense the impact of the incident was huge. Summarising some
On This Day in History – The Buncefield Explosion Read More »
On the evening of 18th of November 1987, 31 people died and many more were injured in a terrible fire in Kings Cross Underground station. As always in these blog posts, we should firstly remember the victims and the many others who were affected by the incident. Whilst the most obvious “cause” of the tragedy
Donald Trump has been roundly criticised for his most recent comments downplaying the severity of Covid-19. It appears that he has inferred from the fact that he appears to have had a mild form of the disease (although he is not out of the woods yet) that all Covid-19 infections are mild and there is
Near Misses: Donald Trump, NASA and the 7 July Bombings Read More »
This is certainly not a new book (the most recent edition came out in 2018), but I only recently became aware of its existence and relevance to risk and crisis management. Richards Heuer enjoyed a distinguished career in the CIA and wrote the book primarily for his fellow intelligence professionals (and consumers of intelligence such
Book Review – Psychology of Intelligence Analysis by Richards J Heuer Read More »
I read and enjoyed Sabrina Cohen-Hatton’s “The Heat of the Moment: A Firefighter’s Stories of Life and Death Decisions” last year but neglected to blog about it at the time. It was only when listening recently to media coverage of the London Fire Brigade’s (LFB) response to the Grenfell Tower fire that I was reminded
Book Review – The Heat of the Moment by Sabrina Cohen-Hatton Read More »
Building on her previous studies over the last twenty years, Deborah Pretty of Pentland Analytics has recently published new research looking at “Reputational Risk in the Cyber Age”. The study analyses a sample of 125 reputational risk events over the last ten years including: The Samsung Galaxy Note7 recall; The Volkswagen emissions scandal; and Cyber-attacks
New Research Looks at the Cost of Reputational Crises Read More »
