Major disasters are rarely a single event. They set off a cascade of difficult decisions made under pressure. Two powerful earthquakes that struck Venezuela in June put this reality into sharp focus: as communities assessed the damage and emergency services were overwhelmed, organisations faced hard choices about their people, operations and responsibilities.
Control Risks was on the ground in the aftermath, supporting clients through the response lifecycle and the recovery that followed. What our teams saw echoed a pattern common to major disasters worldwide: the organisations that cope best treat readiness, response and recovery as related but distinct disciplines and rehearse them before disruption arrives.
The first 24 hours: speed, command and communication
In the immediate aftermath of a disaster, speed and clarity are critical. Life-saving decisions must be made often before the full picture becomes clear. A rehearsed disaster response plan allows you to focus on these priorities, that help set the trajectory for everything that follows:
- Speed of credible information beats completeness. The first reliable picture matters more than the full one, act on what you can verify.
- Command authority must already be agreed, who can authorise an evacuation, spend, or escalation.
- Establish a common operating picture. Teams receive different information streams; leadership needs a single, validated view to avoid conflicting decisions.
- Engage local stakeholders early, emergency services, landlords, logistics providers and key suppliers, before demand overwhelms the available support
Venezuela also reinforced a hard truth: organisations should plan to operate without a fully functioning national response, not as a worst case, but a realistic baseline.
Two capabilities are critical:
- Mass communication and alerting that doesn't depend on local infrastructure. When national networks fail, you need another way to reach and account for your people. This is a core operational capability, not a comms afterthought.
- A mapped web of dependencies. Organisations tend to know where their people are, but not which suppliers, transport providers, accommodation partners or infrastructure they rely on, nor their internal dependencies: who is responsible for what, who the nominated alternatives are, and what happens if a critical person is unavailable when the incident hits. Response cannot rest on one team's shoulders; it demands coordination across an organisation, for example security, communications, HR and legal.
Control Risks helps clients build both, standing up infrastructure-independent alerting and mapping the internal and third-party dependencies that determine whether operations continue. Our intelligence-led approach helps clients turn a flood of contradictory reporting into a validated, decision-ready picture. Where people are hurt or need care, our travel risk management capability and partnership with Falk connect alerting to medical support, while mapped dependencies help keep the business operating.
Sustaining the response: the long tail few anticipate
Once the immediate emergency passes, complexity often escalates as impacts compound. Power outages, transport disruption, communications failures, supply-chain interruption and workforce constraints cascade into one another, creating challenges that test resilience plans.
Expertise on the ground is invaluable. Remote monitoring can tell you a great deal, but it cannot read a situation the way local presence and judgement can. Navigating this long tail is where Control Risks' presence and reach prove its worth, turning local insight into decisions when it matters most.
Once again readiness defines the response:
- Work through decisions concerning your people in advance. Have a clear readiness plan for the different populations within your organisation, from expatriate staff, their families and local nationals who may not wish to leave, recognising that each may require a different response.
- Coordination is key. Cross-functional planning matters: teams that plan in isolation across an organisation, for example security, communications, HR and legal, act in silos precisely when integration matters most. Global organisations face the added challenge of supporting affected locations while keeping unaffected regions running.
- Balancing competing priorities. Safety, continuity, customer commitments and reputational concerns collide quickly without established governance.
- Effective communication shouldn’t be an afterthought. Leadership may be consumed by the response, but stakeholders still need to be kept informed. Where a vacuum forms, misinformation fills it, along with the perception that nothing is being done.
Recovery: the phase that gets the least investment
Recovery is often the longest and costliest phase of any disaster, and almost always the least prepared for. It is where operations are rebuilt and people supported over months, yet too many organisations treat it as an afterthought to "figure out once the response winds down."
That is an expensive mistake, because recovery routinely outlasts every forecast. Power, transport, workforce and supplier resilience lag well behind the official all-clear, a gap felt most acutely where destruction is widespread, as in Venezuela.
Control Risks helps clients treat recovery as a distinct, planned capability, with its own resources, objectives and metrics. This supports organisations in regaining and restoring operations faster and supporting its people better.
Why readiness is decisive
The through-line across every phase is simple: the organisations that fare best, rehearse. Practising crisis processes means faster, more confident decisions than trying to coordinate structures mid-crisis.
In practice, that means putting the following in place before an event:
- Treat readiness, response and recovery as three related but distinct capabilities, each planned and resourced in its own right.
- Build an intelligence-led decision process, not just a monitoring function.
- Stand up mass communications and alerting that doesn't depend on local infrastructure.
- Rehearse the plan at least annually against a live, compounding scenario, not a single, isolated event.
- Map and regularly review critical dependencies, suppliers, logistics, facilities, communications and key personnel, so failure points are understood before a crisis.
- Build recovery into your exercises, measuring success by how quickly you restore critical operations and support your people over the weeks and months that follow.
How Control Risks helps
Control Risks' Protective Intelligence and Operational Security team supports organisations across all three phases, readiness, response and recovery with:
- Intelligence-led processes supporting decision-making.
- Decision thresholds, escalation routes and command authority before an event.
- Alerting that works when infrastructure fails.
- Mapping dependencies that keep operations running.
- Embedding recovery as a planned capability.
- Testing readiness against live, compounding scenarios.
- Forming crisis communications and engagement plans.
Speak to our Protective Intelligence and Operational Security team.