With all of the natural disasters occurring in the world this last few months, culminating in the recent earthquakes and the volcanic eruption in Iceland that has affected so much air traffic, it has made me think about the way that international projects rely on the face to face component of communications along with relatively formalised and centralised power structures, which work reasonably well when everything is working but can fragment quickly when travel is restricted or power is cut.
Many organisations will have disaster plans in place, typically covering civil unrest in one of the locations the project is executed in, whether this is the home office, one of the international satellite offices or the factory or job site, I wonder, however, how many projects would take the time to develop their own disaster plan and what they would include.
My thoughts for the basics would be;

• Safety of all personnel, regardless of their position in the company and status within the project, this would include keeping registers of the locations of anyone travelling, emergency contact details for all personnel, evacuation points for personnel in the event of natural, accidental or man made disasters, and if evacuation is not possible, safe muster points for personnel to gather and arrange for whatever measures are needed to look after everyone.
  
• Protection of project assets and information, I would place this quite high on the list, certainly before restoration of services, since if the assets are lost, the project not only has to replicate them, it also has to then continue on to its completion.
  This would include safe storage of any project information, including design data, prototypes, cost and contractual management information, equipment etc.
  
• Plans to restore services, to be put in place as and when safe and appropriate to do so.
  There is little point after all in restoring power to a test facility if the personnel required to operate it are all being evacuated.
  
• Plans to restore communications, this should take a pretty high level of importance for both the welfare of the personnel and the integrity of the project.
  Communications either outward or inward are vital in any disruption, families need to contact relatives, any emergency aid required needs to be coordinated and the project personnel need to be able to manage whatever actions they have for the continuity of the work.
  
• A realistic emergency responsibilities matrix, if everything else in the world is as normal but for whatever reason the different locations are unable to communicate, the project needs to be able to continue with as few interruptions as possible, I would propose that every project has key personnel in each location empowered to make whatever decisions are required to ensure continuity of the project, welfare of all project personnel and reasonable progress of the work at hand without fear of retribution once communications are restored, these should be as simple as appointing people and giving them explicit guidelines as to when these powers come into effect, without this measure, some project teams, where the project is run with a rigid control structure, may well cease work while they wait for instructions.
  

The responsibilities matrix and associated communications plans must take into account the regional influences of cultural differences, especially uncertainty avoidance and power distance, and take away any guess work and assumptions of perceived authority which may occur.
While the emergency measures will obviously differ greatly dependent on the international locations, structure and deliverables of your particular project, some may be very simple plans indeed, while others may be relatively complex and need to consider many factors not identified above, however, I would certainly be interested in hearing from anyone on their experiences both in recent disasters and on previous projects.