When disaster strikes - Poomam Chambers

It's a rather plain and uninteresting photograph. A staged photograph of two Bank employees at work in a vault (S. Gurumoorthy, left and Karitha Vishwanathan, right). Nothing special. But in that vault, a few months after this photograph was taken, these two people were buried alive.

The Regional Head of Strategic Sourcing for India and Nepal knows the story as well as anyone. It had been his job to lease the space and build the vault.

The Bank leased space in the basement of an eight-storey commercial building called Poonam Chambers. It was to be the new location for the Bank's custody division. The most important feature was the vault. It would house all the hard copies of all the shares and commercial documents placed in the Bank's care by its many corporate and institutional customers.

The vault was constructed to extremely high international standards. The branch opened and the Bank had been conducting business as usual for almost a full year. There was no indication that anything was amiss. But unbeknownst to many, a number of elements were conspiring to bring disaster.

First, the building was old and had not been maintained properly. It was near the ocean and on stormy days the wind blew salt water onto the building. Over time, the salt had weakened the structure. Second, renovations were being carried out on the fourth floor. It's believed that contractors had drilled holes through supporting beams to make way for new wiring. The holes had weakened the beams. And finally, the night before the disaster, someone had filled two 65,000-litre tanks located on the roof of the building with water.

The day of the calamity began as any other day. However, in the early afternoon, the building suddenly began to shake and shudder. There was a tremendous amount of noise. And then oddly all fell silent. For five or six minutes there was nothing. No sound. No sense of impending doom. And then, in an instant, the structure failed and the floors pancaked one on top of the other. People on the upper floors had a good sense of what was happening and had time to evacuate. Unfortunately, people on the lower floors did not escape.

She had been trapped in utter darkness and had no idea of the fate of her colleague.

A total of 19 people perished in the collapse of Poonam Chambers. Most deaths occurred on the lower floors. The Bank lost one full-time employee and four out-sourced employees who had been engaged by the Bank on a part-time basis.

By this time, the whole city was aware of the building collapse. Traffic had come to a standstill. Flights were delayed or cancelled. The Regional Head was stuck in traffic. He spotted a man on a motorbike weaving through the traffic toward him. He got out of his car, stopped the man and asked if he could borrow the motorbike. He offered the keys to his car as security.

The Poonam site was `complete chaos.' The fire brigade didn't have the equipment necessary for cutting people from the rubble. Ambulances jammed the street. Friends and family of the missing called desperately for their loved ones.

The Bank had more than 100 employees at the Poonam Chambers location. The first concern was to get the people out. Second, they had to save the Bank's assets and the assets of its clients. Fortunately, most of the custodial staff were able to free themselves from the rubble, in large part because the reinforcing structures put in place for the vault prevented the building from collapsing on top of them. When the Regional Head arrived, they had already set up a command post and a project management office. The Regional Head said with some pride that his team `had put the Standard Chartered machinery of project management expertise into play.' The Bank was also working closely with the fire brigade. Before long, they were able to source metal shears and other heavy equipment the fire brigade lacked. They also contacted a number of doctors and summoned additional ambulances.

After the collapse, emergency lighting allowed the custodial staff to escape. They then used this light to re-enter the collapsed structure to remove precious documents. By the time the Regional Head had arrived, they'd removed 99 per cent of the documents. This effort was at considerable personal risk as the building continued to shift and fall. The custody department, like many of the Bank's back-office processing departments, work on what is called an `operational risks model.' This means that they are trained to exit any location as quickly and effectively as possible. Evacuation drills are staged on a monthly or quarterly basis. This accounts for the high survival rate and the team's ability to salvage so much in such little time.

Unfortunately, two Bank employees, S. Gurumoorthy and Kavitha Vishwanathan, remained in the vault when the building collapsed. Both had been working to remove documents. Because of the vault's central location in the building's basement, the vault itself received the full force of the eight-story collapse. As a result, the roof of the vault had caved in slightly, jamming the doors and trapping the two inside.

Apparently, the two had been in the process of emptying the vault when they were ordered to evacuate. Once outside, S. Gurumoorthy decided to return to make sure that the remaining cabinets had been properly locked. He had told Kavitha Vishwanathan to remain outside. Nevertheless, she followed him back into the vault.

Within the vault were two rows of heavy fireproof cabinets on steel tracks. The tracks allowed the staff to roll the cabinets apart to make space for access. Fortunately, Vishwanathan had fallen into the space between the two rows of cabinets. She survived. Gurumoorthy was not so lucky. He too had fallen into a space between two cabinets. But when the building collapsed, the wall of the vault was pushed in, forcing the cabinets together and crushing him.

It took more than 90 minutes to free Vishwanathan. They had to dig through the rubble and the concrete and cut a hole in the vault. She had been trapped in utter darkness and had no idea of the fate of her colleague. Within minutes of being freed, Vishwanathan was anxious to help save her colleague and continue her work removing documents.

The Regional Head could not praise the custodial staff enough. He points out that within seven hours of the collapse, after having lost a colleague, the custodial staff were up and operational at a business-continuity planning site. The very next day they were ready to receive customers and conduct business as usual. And within three months, they were fully operational at a new location.

Poonam Chambers collapsed in 1998. Today, there is little need for a vault the size of the one that saved Vishwanathan's life. Most documents are now `dematted' or de-materialized--rendered and stored in a digital or electronic format. Nevertheless, the need for business-continuity planning remains. Around the globe, country by country, business by business, each and every function is protected by a mirror site. In Chennai, the Bank has a 100,000- square-foot site up and operational to mirror the Bank's new 750,000-square-foot facilities. Nothing is left to chance.