City seeking incident review consultant

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This article was published 26/04/2023 (1247 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The City of Brandon is looking to hire an outside consultant to help review its responses to critical incidents going forward.

“In recent years, the city has experienced a number of critical incidents related to major utility infrastructure failures, life-safety emergency events [flood events and catastrophic fires] and communications issues,” a tender posted to the city’s website on April 13 reads.

“These events have identified the need to enhance the city’s process related to the review of and future responses to such incidents.”

The winning bidder will be granted a two-year contract, during which the city estimates it will need to help review six incidents a year.

According to city manager Ron Bowles, the city has a process to unpack emergency events after they occur but wants to do a better job dealing with critical events that don’t reach that level.

“We’re looking for a consultant to help us have tough conversations between our departments,” Bowles told the Sun. “Some things are significant events — they’re not emergency events, they’re significant enough that we want to sit back and learn from them.”

As an example, Bowles brought up a significant water main break from last August near the city’s water treatment plant that led to the largest boil-water advisory in Brandon’s history.

At a city council meeting the same night as the incident, it was mentioned that some affected residents didn’t receive any communication regarding what happened because they don’t own cellphones.

Then-mayor Rick Chrest said the city’s communications department would be tasked to improve how it engages the public going forward.

“We unpacked that after. We did brilliantly from finding where the leak was, identifying the leak, getting it fixed, reacting to that and keeping people safe,” Bowles said. “Where we felt we could have done better is communicating with our citizens.”

An organization Bowles said does good work in reviewing critical incidents is the United States Navy SEALS.

He pointed to a Forbes article that mentions five questions they ask after a critical incident: What were we trying to accomplish, where did we hit or miss our objective, what was the root cause of the result, as a team what should we stop or continue doing and what are our key lessons learned?

» cslark@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @ColinSlark