THE THIN WHITE LINE: the history of a future avian influenza pandemic

Chapter 4: "The End is Near"

"Energy is civilization"

    Consider the case of Great Western Oil, a producer of heavy oil in western Canada as well as midstream and refined products, with more than 3,500 employees and $10 billion in assets. Oil is the lifeblood of industrialized economies; government classified all energy-related industries as essential operations during the Pandemic.
    Before Avian Flu had been identified as a major potential risk, Great Western had conducted classic disaster planning: Y2K, an ice storm and then, after the September 11 attacks, a terrorist incident. Most of this planning assumed a temporary disruption to operations and focused on how to resume. When assessing the risk of a major epidemic, however, Great Western began a process of developing a continuity plan——how to continue operations during a major disruption with a reduced workforce.(70) Since the disruption wouldn’t come all at once, the company adopted a phased approach of mitigation.
    Before the epidemic, Great Western developed its own stockpile of antiviral medications, N95 masks, disinfectant wipes, aerosol sprays, latex gloves——even food and bottled water. The company distributed some of these resources to its employees for their use both inside and outside the building. Every morning when they arrived for work, they would be given a PPE kit——a personal protective equipment kit. Every night, they would throw away their used supplies in a special receptacle in the lobby.
    The lobby, with its access controls, formed a quarantine point. Visitors were screened as they entered the building and given hand-wipes; if the visitor exhibited any signs of influenza, Security denied him or her access to the building.
    While it was possible to isolate the building from the outside world, the company’s facility managers could not isolate different parts of the building. Ideally, each department would have had an isolated air supply so that if an employee developed infection, he or she would be likely to spread disease only within that department and not throughout the building. Great Western occupied an older building, however, that was not equipped with such granular ventilation control.
    Inside the building, the custodial staff wiped down all hard surfaces at desks and in common areas with disinfectant every night.
    The company instituted a liberal leave policy that enabled any employee feeling sick to go home and stay home until they felt better. New travel guidelines minimized international travel in general and specifically to countries reporting outbreaks. Teleconferencing and videoconferencing became encouraged and later required for face-to-face meetings. Employees were further discouraged from taking public transit. To promote social distancing, the company staggered lunch hour so that fewer employees congregated together for meals; later, it would encourage people to eat alone at their desks.
    Hank Walcott, vice president of corporate administration for Great Western Oil, became known within the company as the CPO——the “Chief Pandemic Officer”——during the epidemic. “At first, it was hard to convince people that there was a problem,” he recalls. “They complied very well with mandatory measures but not very well with the voluntary kind. As the epidemic worsened, compliance improved.     Nonetheless, we had to continually train them over and over again about hand washing and hygiene. One employee carried around a cane, which he used to open doors. I saw him do this once and asked him: ‘Are you are aware that as soon as the cane’s handle touches the door, it can get contaminated if there’s virus on it? Look: Right now you’re holding the cane by its handle.’ His jaw hit the floor. He’s a smart guy, a geophysicist, actually. He just never made the connection.”
    As the epidemic wore on, Great Western experienced problems just keeping the business operating. One problem was communication: The company allowed certain classifications of employees to work at home and telecommute, but during the first weeks of the epidemic, it was difficult to get a phone signal. By the end of the epidemic, it had employees at home using remote-access technologies and web-enabled applications within a distributed computing environment——a true virtual office and a real feat for the company’s then-skeleton IT department. But these systems required electric power that wasn’t always available. Over time, the city suffered blackouts during periods of heavy snowfall.
    “We’d work long hours, and you’d be on the phone with the lights on in a warm office in front of your computer, and suddenly you’d lose it all,” Walcott recalls. “And there you’d stay, sitting in the dark, wrapped in your coat, trying to stay warm until the power came back on. I’d literally pray for it to come back on. If the power stayed off too long, that meant we were all in serious trouble. Energy is civilization.”
    Overall, he says, the company lost about 25 percent of its employees, most of them during the peak two weeks of the epidemic. He estimated about 5 percent of this to be normal absenteeism given the time of year, about 7 percent too scared to come to work and self-isolating, and the rest either sick or caring for others who were sick. The company used a carrot approach to bring healthy workers back: Employees could receive a hazard bonus equal to 20 percent of their salary if they worked until the epidemic was declared over in the local health region without any unauthorized absences.
    “The province came to us and said the public health emergency gave them the legal authority to literally force essential workers to work,” says Walcott. “They asked if there was any way we could help enforce this directly with our employees. I wasn’t sure how we were supposed to do that.” He wonders now whether the government even had the legal right to force people to work when they reasonably thought it was dangerous to do so. “We operate in compliance with the Canada Labor Code, which has three basic rights——the right to know, the right to participate, and the right to refuse,” he adds. “If there’s a hazard, we have to tell our employees about it. If an employee identifies a job-related safety issue, we have to address it. And an employee can refuse to work if they reasonably feel that doing so would be a danger to them or other employees. As for the company itself, the law says the employer must protect the health and safety of every employee.”
    Even with hazard bonuses, Great Western lost nearly 25 percent of its employees, about 850 out of 3,500 workers, to desertion and illness; these losses slowed production. In addition, Great Western uses a lot of contractors, which had their own problems, affecting vendor reliability. The company required equipment made in Asia that became increasingly difficult to acquire and service. “Our globalized economy, which stresses efficiency at the expense of everything else, meant that many industries that had an offshore supply chain suffered deeply,” says Walcott. “The manufacturers and distribution didn’t keep inventory, because inventory means costs, and relied on getting everything they needed ‘just in time.’ But what they needed was made in Asia, and Asia was imploding and world trade collapsing, so all industries ran out of everything fast. It was like telling somebody with almost no body fat that they had to go on a crash diet.”
    He says companies in the oil and gas sector had special risks. Great Western engaged in offshore development in Vietnamese, Chinese and Indonesian waters, right off the coast of a politically and economically imploding continent. The company isn’t in the retail business, however, so it didn’t have to supply and protect gas stations.
    On the other hand, the company benefited from its operations being spread out in remote regions. Great Western, for example, operated an ethanol plant in Alberta, a heavy oil upgrader and asphalt refinery in Saskatchewan, a light oil refinery in Nova Scotia, natural gas storage in Manitoba, drilling projects all over western Canada. Many of these sites were isolated and could operate under absenteeism rates as high as 25 percent. If a site stopped being able to operate, the company shut it down.
    In contrast, consider the problems of a grocery chain. These stores dealt directly with the public, selling them essential goods, and therefore had to stay open with intense security issues other businesses did not have. The stores suffered an initial spike in panic buying and some looting, and then another wave of panic late in the epidemic as goods became increasingly scarce. Retaining staff was difficult, even though some stores established an “employee only” hour each morning to ensure staff got first pick of essentials.
    “We had good days and bad days,” says Walcott. “One day, a group of employees evicted a co-worker who had seasonal allergies and kept sneezing. The worst was when Jim Bronson, our VP of exploration and production and a key player on the executive team——a personal friend——caught the flu, and passed on. . . . But we had some good days, too. I remember when Pat, my assistant, recovered from the flu and returned to work after three weeks of being stuck in bed being cared for by her husband. I had worked with Pat for four years, and I don’t know how I functioned without her during the crisis. Everybody in the admin group liked working with her. She’d gotten the flu early in the epidemic, just unlucky, but made a full recovery and came back to the office——with the added benefit of now being immune. I pulled the admin group together and we cheered her arrival. Somebody even scrounged up a cake. That was a good day. But the best day is today, and tomorrow, and the day after that, as now we can all look back and say: We made it.”(71)