(Expansion) – After the collapse of a section of Line 12 of the Mexico City metro, someone asked me how many types of crisis a company can face. Outside of the classifications known in the manuals, any institution only faces two types of crisis: those that emerge stronger and those that end in the bankruptcy, or at least the loss of prestige, of an institution.
Each crisis is different as well as its origins, but the important thing is to learn in each of them from the review of everything that was done during the time that the event lasted. Unfortunately, the importance of documenting the origin or causes of a crisis, how it was managed or what was learned to avoid future similar events, is not always kept in mind.
Having a document that accurately reflects the management of the crisis is to have a guide for reflection and learning to, in an exercise of self-criticism, recognize what was done wrong and what can be improved. This is part of the prevention in addition to frequent audits to identify potential scenarios and crises in each area of an institution, which includes, among others, reviewing production and service manuals, conducting physical audits of facilities, estimating severity levels and effects of a potential crisis, review policies and analyze the performance of those involved.
A crisis can arise when an alert system is lacking or communication to the higher levels of the organization fails; when an element is overlooked that, obviously, was not considered, or perhaps because a scenario planning was never done in the event of possible operating failures, among multiple other factors.
In the case of the subway, in recent days it was one month since the fatal accident that left 26 deaths and injuries and injuries to many other people, but the first results of the investigation into what caused this accident are just yet to be released.
Unfortunately, it is not the first time that this transport system has suffered serious accidents. In its little more than 50 years of service, the Mexico City Metro has accumulated four serious accidents, three of them collisions between trains, in addition to a fire in an electrical substation in 2021 with one death and several intoxicated.
The first train crash occurred in 1975, two years after its inauguration, at the Viaducto station with 31 deaths; the second was in 2015 in Metro Oceania without fatalities; the third in Observatory in 2020 with one dead and 41 injured and the recent collapse on Line 12.
In all three cases, the drivers were blamed for an error: one for not obeying an instruction, another for keeping the autopilot in a rainy zone and the other for omissions in operation. The question is, what did the respective governments and subway managers learn from each of these accidents?
After all, the generality of accidents is due to human errors, not necessarily by those who operate the trains but can be from controllers, maintenance, supervision, training, human resources, engineering, and so on. Prevention does not imply looking for culprits but rather avoiding that, in this case, a train wreck is repeated.
Why did it happen to the subway on three occasions and a section of track fell off? Perhaps frequent audits have been lacking in each area of metro operation to identify possible failures in human operating systems; possibly little attention to reports on the state of the tracks, trains, structures or control centers; probably improvisation in the face of localized defects (it was recently published that the telemetry system has had a failure for months, so the routes and distances between convoys with dominoes are calculated).
It is possible a lack of a continuous assessment of the physical and emotional state of the operators, and, above all, there has surely been deficient decision-making by the top management of the system to attend each report on time.
The collapse of a section of the subway and previous accidents confirm what many studies have shown: More than 70% of the crises originate from situations that are not properly addressed in matters such as poor maintenance of equipment or carelessness in operation; and, contrary to what one might think, 50% of the crises are caused by decisions or indecisions of the managerial commanders.
Hopefully this time it will document the crisis, who for now is still “only the director of the subway.” It’s about avoiding deaths!
Editor’s note: Mario Maraboto Moreno has a degree in Journalism from UNAM. Associate Researcher at the University of North Carolina. Author of the book “Journalism and Business. How to link companies with journalists”. Consultant in Communication, Public Relations and special situations / crisis since 1991. Write to him at [email protected] and follow him on. The opinions published in this column belong exclusively to the author.
