by Rebecca Walker — March 18, 2011—The crisis at Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan is raising serious questions about high-risk installations all over the world, according to the chair of BIFM’s business continuity special interest group, Stephen Dance.
Dance told FM World that, while a comparable natural disaster in the U.K. is unlikely, the effect of massive damage to similarly sensitive sites “needs looking at.”
Dance cited a terrorist attack as an example of something that could cause an equivalent crisis in the U.K.. “Irrespective of the specific threat, we need to ask how we would deal with this kind of damage,” he said.
“I expect that at high levels in regional utilities companies and governments around the world, people are looking at high-risk installations and asking if there are lessons to be learned.”
Japan is renowned for its preparedness in the face of such disasters, with measures including specially designed sea walls to prevent tsunami damage. However, the scale of Friday’s quake was unprecedented, and is being described as the fourth largest quake in the earth’s history.
Speaking about the extent to which companies can prepare for this kind of crisis, Dance admitted: “We have to accept that sometimes nature is going to beat us.”
For more, see the article.
