As they sit on the various COVID-19 task forces overseen by the Resilient Louisiana Commission, petrochemical leaders are finding they have a lot in common with other market sectors.
“There has been a lot of sharing of best practices, since there is significant overlap among these groups,” says Rhoman Hardy, vice president of Shell U.S.–Gulf Coast and co-chair of RLC’s energy task force. “That will have huge benefits now and in the future.”
Hardy’s group—one of 15 such task forces—is largely composed of oil and gas, refining and petrochemical, and electric utilities companies, while a separate manufacturing task force addresses chemical plant and manufacturer issues.
Navigating the coronavirus crisis hasn’t been totally new for Louisiana’s industrial companies— most of the larger plants crafted pandemic plans years ago.
Scott Whelchel, Dow’s global chief security officer, says his company’s pandemic response and recovery plan was first created in the early 2000s and has been periodically updated in response to other threats such as H1N1. Whelchel began coordinating COVID-19 response efforts at Dow’s Asian Pacific sites as far back as January.
“In some respects we were better prepared in the U.S. as a result,” Whelchel says. “We were in an advanced state of preparation from a communications and procurement standpoint, in regards to masks, sanitizing agents, etc.”
Dow Louisiana also empowered local site teams to operate more efficiently in order to reduce manpower levels.
“We developed guidance that could be locally executed, regionally managed and corporately aligned and supported,” Whelchel says. “We wanted to let our people adapt and give them the ability to locally execute. We didn’t want to provide them with a set of guidelines that were rigid and inflexible.”
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