US ports prepare for worst

“Port staff are busy, and tend to focus on day-to-day operations, rather than preparing for ‘potential’ disasters. Our partnership with Simudyne will help to ‘Future Proof’ the Port and make it more resilient and recoverable against any external factor,” said John Milam, CEO, Dynamis.

Currently, the majority of efforts related to the threat of devastation of entire regions by natural disasters are focused on prevention and preparation for dealing with the potential immediate threats to health, safety and the environment. However, Dynamis says it’s learnt through experiences such as Hurricane Katrina, the Fukushima Earthquake and Superstorm Sandy, that the recovery from a disaster can be just as complex, if not more, as the immediate response.

Around 250 key professionals from the ports of Seattle, Tacoma, Everett and Olympia, gathered recently to practice handling severe disruption of their maritime transportation systems and to see how it could be potentially disastrous on a global scale.

“Our simulated reality exercise gave them the opportunity to learn to work together to identify, recognise, and meet known and unknown challenges,” added Justin Lyon, CEO of Simudyne.

A participant of the event concluded: “We’ve learned a lot from Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, but one thing that surprised us is how complex the dependencies could be. We want to make our mistakes fast and cheap with the computer simulation.”

This scenario is one of many used by Simudyne to help ports see the potential consequences of disruptions. With the Simudyne platform, leaders are able to test in a safe environment to demonstrably improve decision making for recovery.