
The Leading in a Crisis Podcast
Interviews, stories and lessons learned from experienced crisis leaders. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Being an effective leader in a corporate or public crisis situation requires knowledge, tenacity, and influencing skills. Unfortunately, most of us don't get much training or real experience dealing with crisis situations. On this podcast, we will talk with people who have lived through major crisis events and we will tap their experience and stories from the front lines of crisis management.
Your host, Tom Mueller, is a veteran crisis manager and trainer with more than 30 years in the corporate communications and crisis fields. Tom currently works as an executive coach and crisis trainer with WPNT Communications, and as a contract public information officer and trainer through his personal company, Tom Mueller Communications LLC.
Your co-host, Marc Mullen, has over 20 years of experience as a communication strategist. He provides subject matter expertise in a number of communication specializations, including crisis communication plan development, response and recovery communications, emergency notifications and communications, organizational reviews, and after-action reports. He blogs at Blog | Marc Mullen
Our goal is to help you grow your knowledge and awareness so you can be better prepared to lead should a major crisis threaten your organization.
Music credit: Special thanks to Nick Longoria from Austin, Texas for creating the theme music for the podcast.
The Leading in a Crisis Podcast
EP 32 Mastering Crisis Leadership with Incident Commander Dan Smiley
Emergency situations don't come with a playbook, but when they strike, it's leaders like incident commander Dan Smiley who orchestrate the chaos into coherence. In our latest episode, Dan reveals the behind-the-scenes drama when multiple agencies, such as the EPA and Coast Guard, must unite under the banner of Unified Command. He gives a gripping account of a vessel grounding off the coast of California, unraveling the complexities of authority, collaboration, and the decision-making that pivots on the signing of the Incident Action Plan. As we dissect these challenges, Dan shines a light on the stark contrasts between rehearsed exercises and the unpredictable nature of real crises, where every decision carries weight.
Navigating through the fiery aftermath of the Genius Star 11 ship incident, our conversation with Dan evolves into an intricate look at adaptability in leadership roles. We examine how the response can swell or contract as necessary, transitioning from public information efforts to liaison-focused strategies.
We'd love to hear from you. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Hi everyone and welcome back to the Leading in a Crisis podcast. On today's episode, we're continuing our conversation with Dan Smiley, a well-known emergency responder and incident commander based out in Washington State. On this episode we go a little bit inside baseball within Unified Command. We talk a little bit about crisis exercises versus the real thing. We talk a little bit about the mindset that you need to be able to work effectively in a major crisis response and we talk a little bit about the US EPA and other agencies engaging around the response. I hope you enjoy this episode. D an, we've got a lot of things we'd love to cover with you today, but I wanted to just kind of pick your brain a little bit about unified command, and you know I've worked in a number of different unified commands and they can be a little bit tricky to navigate for when you've got agency people alongside company people or responsible parties kind of working together. I wonder if you've seen examples where you know unified command, where there were just real challenges there and what lessons we maybe take away from that.
Dan Smiley:That's a really good question. I did a response. I came in as a planning section chief for a response a couple of years ago to a grounded vessel in Southern California and it was a ground on Santa Cruz Island, california. And it was a ground on Santa Cruz Island and the Coast Guard was actually just stepping away from the unified command. The hull had been all beaten up and they didn't feel like there was really any potential for oil to still be on the vessel. You know, and that's what brings the Coast Guard to the table in the role of Federal on-scene coordinator, right, it's the threat of pollution, and when the threat of pollution is gone they no longer have any FOSC authority. So they were stepping away.
Dan Smiley:But the vessel was grounded on a national park, the coastline was a national marine sanctuary, and so the Unified Command, what it was going to be, became a real issue. You know, in my first meeting as the planning section chief, I brought them back to an initial UC meeting and re-evaluated who belongs in the Unified command, and we ended up with NOAA, national Park Service, the responsible party and the state of California because, though the Coast Guard stepped away from the FOSC, the state wasn't convinced that there was no longer a significant threat of pollution and one of the things that came down to was who was going to sign the incident action plan? Because people want to be in the unified command, but when you explain to them, at the end of the day you're going to approve the actions that are being taken by the response.
Dan Smiley:Well then, you can't be in the unified command We'll hook you up with a liaison officer.
Dan Smiley:But I mean, either you have authority to sign the IP, you don't, and so that became the benchmark there. I've watched the Coast Guard and EPA duke it out. Years ago down in Southern California we were just doing a drill for one of the refineries and the EPA and the Coast Guard were both there and the EPA felt like they should be the FOSC, and when they didn't get their way, they literally picked up all their tools and went home. It's like see ya.
Marc Mullen:Left in a snit.
Dan Smiley:So it can be a challenge, but for the most part I am a huge fan of unified command. People are like, oh, I'd rather just have a single incident commander incident action plan. You really cement responder immunity. Remember the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 says that responders have some. They don't call it immunity exactly, but they have some protection from prosecution for violating things like the Marine Mammal Protection Act during the response. If you're acting at the direction of the president by getting having that unified command, by establishing a federal on-scene coordinator, by getting them to sign an incident action plan and approve the activities that are taking place, I think you really do provide all of the personnel who are involved in the response with some protection that might otherwise be a little gray.
Marc Mullen:So it sounds like a good recourse to a fraying incident commander Unified Command is take them back to who has the authority to sign, so that that that kind of takes the chaff away and keeps the people in the room that actually have authority, which typically means responsibility as well I think that's true.
Dan Smiley:I mean I kind of look at it that way. That's not the way the incident management handbook kind of outlines it. It says says you know, you have to have, you know, authority, you have to have access to equipment. I mean there's guidelines for how you become, you know how, whether you can be in the unified command or not, but you know, as soon as somebody says, well, yeah, I can't, I'm not going to approve the incident action plan, there's the door.
Tom Mueller:Yeah, because you have a whole outside world that's going to offer advice and criticize, and monday morning quarterback, and yeah, it's going to go on forever you know, dan, I have a long-standing perception around the epa, uh and their engagement with unified command and, and that perception is essentially that EPA tends to shun unified command. I've seen that in a number of incidents, mostly in the Midwest. Certainly you know landlocked areas where EPA would likely be the FOSC. I'm curious, you know, if you have a perception that way about EPA or you know any other agencies that might be part of a unified command.
Dan Smiley:Not really. I mean, most of my experience is in the coastal zones, where it's very clearly the United States Coast Guard who is the federal on-scene coordinator. Other than that one unfortunate incident that I mentioned. All of my experience with the EPA coming in in the inland areas as the FOSC have been just as positive as they've been with the Coast Guard.
Marc Mullen:So, dan, you've had a significant experience in actual events, and you also obviously not only had experience with, but planned and conducted a lot of exercises. So, based on those two realities and those two depths of experience, what are the biggest differences between an exercise and an actual event?
Dan Smiley:that's a great question. You know, it depends on what state you're in if you're going for credit state of panic.
Dan Smiley:Right, right, right, yeah, my, my wife has a sign up in her office that says something along the order of of confidence is the feeling you have until you understand the situation. Oh no, we plan for these drills to. You know, get credit, whether they're at the federal level or the or the state level, and so we, we craft a lot of activities and objectives in order to meet that credit, and the same activities don't always come to pass in a real event.
Dan Smiley:You know I just did the Washington State Maritime Cooperative's triennial worst case drill this last April 11th and we opened it up for people that wanted to participate, that could get some training. We had people from King County Emergency Management, we had people from the Navy, we had other WISMIC cooperative members and in a real event, even with the scenario that we had, I would have tried to keep that initial staff down to like 20. You know a term that one of the incident commanders I work with a lot that I really respect, chris Graff at Gallagher Marine Systems, is constantly talking about right-sizing the response, constantly evaluating. You know, do we have enough people or do we have too many people? What is it that you're actually here to do? You know the door that command post opens up and everyone wants to come in, but not everybody's providing value, and so we just have to constantly reevaluate that.
Dan Smiley:You know, up at the, I was planning section chief in late December, early January in Anchorage for the Genius Star 11 ship fire. This was a ship bound from Vietnam to San Diego with a cargo of lithium ion batteries, and when I say batteries, I'm not talking about your laptop battery, I'm talking about 22,000 pound enclosures loaded with batteries that provide the temporary storage for large solar farms, for large solar farms and these things can become chemically unstable if they're damaged. And we set up the command post in Anchorage and ended up bringing the ship into anchor in Dutch Harbor, anchor um in dutch harbor, and the response really a salvage, not an oil spill um, but really became a liaison function rather than a pio function. The media, after a couple of stories, didn't really seem to care that much. It wasn't dramatic, the ship wasn't still on fire, it wasn't dramatic enough. But the community on the island of Unalaska was very concerned.
Dan Smiley:The really the lead then for this response became the liaison officer rather than the, the PIO. And so you know, when we do drills there's actually not all that much. That's um for credit, that's structured for the liaison officer. We really focus on the PIO, right, initial press release, social media, press conference. I mean we've got these structured things that we're required to do. Guess what? We didn't do any press conferences during the Genius 11, right, I mean we did put out press releases, but a lot of the things that we're required to do for credit in Oregon, in Washington, in California, in Alaska, just don't happen in a real event. So I think that's the difference.
Marc Mullen:So it sounds like one of the things you have to deal with is not just addition of people, but graceful subtraction.
Dan Smiley:Yes, yes, and that can be a challenge, especially when the people that you're trying to uh get out of the command post are wearing blue uniforms. All right, so you know, you know understanding that, um, you know we understand that you want to take this as an opportunity to. You know, get some training, get your PQS signed off so that you can qualify for these roles, and to the extent that we have physical space to accommodate that, that's fine. But we're not paying for it. And so you know, making sure that everybody who's in the command post is filling a role. That's necessary because, at the end of the day, we still have the P&I clubs to answer to, we have the whole machinery insurers to answer to, we have the responsible party to answer to. So you know, we want to protect the environment, we, but we, you know, we need to manage it responsibly as well.
Marc Mullen:Right, I dare say the pni club is fairly busy right now, on this day of april 2024.
Dan Smiley:So yeah, I saw on the news today they got the at least a temporary canal opened up so we they can get. They got the first cargo ship back into the port of baltimore.
Tom Mueller:So, yeah, yeah, so that's great yeah, we've been, you know, watching that response a little bit and, uh, you know, getting unified command there and communications seem to be flowing pretty well. Come out of that to Keybridge response so far. Any, dan, have you been watching that? Any thoughts about what you've seen so far around that particular response?
Dan Smiley:No, I haven't really been following it that much. You know I've had. I have some colleagues who are out there, but you know I never call in to a response when people are doing real work.
Tom Mueller:Yeah Well, let me pivot just a second here, dan. I want to focus on some leadership aspects of response now and just kind of tap your brain. And you know we've all worked with leaders who were really excellent to work with either an incident commander or a section chief. But we've also worked with others who weren't as successful or even failed kind of in the role, have any stories you could share about. You know both sides, a leader who didn't carry the day as part of a response, and you know what do we, what can we take away from from you know their lack of success.
Dan Smiley:Yeah, I don't have a good lack of success story. I certainly wouldn't want to speak badly of anyone but I do have some real good success stories, and the Genius Star 11 is one you know.
Dan Smiley:Shout out to Captain Culpepper, who was the captain of the port in Anchorage.
Dan Smiley:He was the federal on-scene coordinator and he took a very deliberate, scientific, appropriate approach to that response and in the short time about 10 days that I was up there, he was a pleasure to work with.
Dan Smiley:So you know, I think when people are well trained in the incident command system and are ready to fill the role as it is intended, then the system works really, really well. When people are unfamiliar with the incident command system and believe that maybe their leadership experience and style from, you know, government work or or whatever it might be, is sufficient to carry the day, uh, they would be wrong. And so we, we we've seen that uh, we had, um, you know, situations I won't, I won't be specific, but uh, where uh state leaders took on the role of section chiefs, um, and or you know, uh, uh, fire or whatever, and you know, over the course of you know, two months, failed to ever even produce a single IEP because they didn't understand the, didn't understand the process. So my opinion is teach the incident command system, teach it as cleanly as you can so that people understand what their role is, and at least when they have to go outside of that role, as we all did in Deepwater Horizon, for a number of reasons political reasons, you know, geographic reasons.
Tom Mueller:at least you understand why you're making something up that's not really ICS, Sure yeah, and that's oftentimes where we see the challenges is where you've got, you know, people who are in over their heads, right, they've been put into a leadership position, haven't been fully trained for that role or, you know, perhaps perhaps they just don't have the experience, or perhaps they just don't have the mindset and the demeanor to work in a crisis setting like that. I know, dan, most of the folks you work with today are professionals who deal with responses a lot. But you know I'll jump back to Deepwater Horizon, where I worked for BP in incident command for that, and you know we were pulling company people in from all over the world to help staff positions and you know it became clear fairly quickly that people who just didn't have the appropriate demeanor to work in a constantly changing situation with a lot of uncertainty and you know you need a particular mindset to be able to work effectively in those types of situations work effectively in those types of situations.
Dan Smiley:I think that's right and I don't think exercises, although critical, adequately prepare you for those kinds of situations.
Tom Mueller:I don't know that anything really would.
Dan Smiley:Deepwater Horizon kind of stands alone in that area, but things are fast moving.
Dan Smiley:You know I've been the incident commander for two ship fires in Tacoma over the last you know three years and you know that involvement of you know fire departments and EPA and others that maybe aren't normally at your exercises that makes it a challenge.
Dan Smiley:I mean, it's one thing to form a unified command when you're forming it under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, and you're forming it with people who have been to exercises. You know I get a captain of the port as the FOSC and I get somebody from you know Ecology or Department of Environmental Quality or ADAC as the state on-scene coordinator and I get a responsible party incident commander who has been trained and has gone to drills. That's all fine, but all of XYZ fire and the you know the port and now it's the mayor and you know the city's PIO never been to any of these kinds of drills. It becomes a big challenge and you know, one of the things that I, as the primary incident commander for the Washington State Maritime, always look at is you know who is the responsible party and, based on what has happened and who they are, is this going to rise to the level of media engagement. And so if you're, you know XYZ fishing vessel and you have broken a hydraulic line and put a cup of oil in the water.
Dan Smiley:I don't activate a PIO right off the bat for that. But if you know, if you're XYZ tanker company, I don't care whether that sheen alongside the vessels because the chief mate threw their coffee and cream overboard. You get a PIO. That's just the way it is. I call the Osro and then I call the PIO. And it's not because I want the PIO to do these checklist things that we often do in drills put out an initial press release, set up a website. That's not what I want my PIO to do.
Dan Smiley:First thing out of the chute. What I want them to do is get a hold of the Coast Guard's PIO, get a hold of the state's PIO it's going to involve a fire department or the city. Get a hold of those PIOs, drag them into a Teams meeting or into Zoom and give them enough information so that they don't do something stupid. You know, we had a situation up in Anacortes a few years ago where we had a barge that had a pressure relief valve tripped on the deck piping. Nothing was damaged, they just had an over-pressurization. They shut down the pumps and closed the valve and they sprayed about 20 gallons of oil on the deck and of the oil that went on deck, about five gallons of oil went in the water, and so we're. You know it's pre-boomed.
Dan Smiley:Oil wasn't going anywhere, it was. It was a calm night. You know, the Osro was there. Sorbit pads were going in the water going to wipe the hole down. It was, you know, not not a big deal. Until about 2 o'clock in the morning, the state agency put out a tweet that said we are responding to a crude oil spill in Anacortes, Washington, with now, remember, there's five gallons of oil in the water, so wait for it, with the potential for 550 million gallons. Well, the internet woke up. Yeah, wow. I called my PIO and Suzanne Ligoni and she came to Anacortes and that day for five gallons of oil in the water, mind you she did five on-camera interviews. We set up a website. We ran a worst case joint information center for about 36 hours for five gallons of oil in the water because of a tweet that didn't need to happen, and that's why I activate my PIO to make sure that that kind of thing never happens again.
Tom Mueller:All right, hey Dan, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today. Really appreciate you taking out some time and it's been just a fascinating conversation, so I hope you'll find an opportunity to come back and join us again soon.
Dan Smiley:I'd be thrilled to do so. Thank you both. Thank you.
Tom Mueller:And that's going to do it for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast. Thanks for joining us. If you like what you're hearing, then please like and subscribe to the podcast and please tell your friends and colleagues about us as well, and we'll see you again soon on the next episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast.