At 7:34 on the morning of August 10th, my wife woke me in a panic. Before I could ask what was wrong, I felt it — the floor beneath us was moving.
We ran for our son’s room. By the time we pulled him from his bed, the shaking had become so violent we could no longer walk. The three of us huddled in a door jamb, holding onto each other, while the building convulsed around us. For what seemed like several minutes — and I promise you, minutes feel like hours when the ground will not stop — we rode out a violence that is genuinely hard to describe to anyone who has not lived it. Concrete groaning and shattering. Glass breaking. The sense that the ninth floor of a building is a very long way from the ground. The quake a 7.4 magnitude, would cause death and destruction across multiple cities in Colombia.
When the shaking finally stopped, we had a narrow window and we used it. We climbed through debris to grab our cell phones. Then we ran down nine stories, dodging fallen concrete the whole way. Later, my wife, Sandra, would run up to grab our passports and wedding rings before anything else could happen.
Outside, the air itself had changed. Concrete and brick dust hung thick over everything. Exterior walls had peeled away from buildings. Windows were shattered up and down the street. And across the park, a four-story building had collapsed entirely.
I have spent my professional life around emergency planning, leadership, and organizational readiness. Nothing in a binder prepares you for what came next.
In the hours before family could reach us and help us get away from the most heavily damaged area, we watched the people of Pereira respond. Not agencies. People. Neighbors climbed onto the rubble of the collapsed building and began digging for survivors with their hands. Others cleared debris from streets so help could get through. Others worked to shut off gas lines as the smell of gas spread through the neighborhood and fear of an explosion spread with it.
Emergency services were completely overwhelmed. Whatever plan existed was non-functional within minutes — not because the planners were incompetent, but because no plan survives contact with a catastrophic, mass-casualty event spanning hundreds of miles and affecting hundreds of thousands of people at once. Every resource that was supposed to respond was itself a victim of the disaster.
And yet the response happened anyway. My brother-in-law, Daniel Londono, and I went back into our damaged building and carried an elderly, wheelchair-bound man down seven flights of stairs to get him to safety. No one assigned us that task. No plan named us. We simply knew someone could not get out on his own, so we went — the same instinct; pulling people onto the rubble across the park to save lives, to help, to support their community.
That morning taught me more about crisis leadership than any tabletop exercise ever has. Here is what I took from it.
Even the best emergency action plan will fail at catastrophic scale. Most organizational plans quietly assume the surrounding system still works — that first responders will come, that hospitals have capacity, that communications hold, that help is minutes away. In a true mass-casualty regional disaster, none of those assumptions survive. If your plan has never been pressure-tested against the scenario where everyone needs help at the same time and no one is coming for hours or days, you do not yet have a plan for the worst day.
In the most dire situations, people come together. The first responders in Pereira were shopkeepers, grandparents, teenagers, and family members. Community is the true first line of emergency response, and leaders should treat it that way — investing in the trust, relationships, and basic skills of the people around them, because those are the assets that function when everything else fails.
People want the basics. In the aftermath, no one was asking about anything sophisticated. They needed housing, food, water, and electricity. Recovery, whether for a city or an organization, is anchored in restoring fundamentals fast. Plans that obsess over edge cases while under-resourcing the basics have their priorities backwards.
People will fight to get back to normal. Resilience is human nature. Within hours, people were cleaning, organizing, checking on neighbors, and rebuilding a sense of order out of chaos. Leaders don’t have to manufacture that drive — they have to support it, resource it, and get out of its way.
And finally: no community stands alone. Pereira is a capable city with real resources, and it still needed everything its neighbors, its country, and its allies could offer. The other cities affected by the earthquake all had a level of resources, Cali, Armenia, and Manizales, they all needed them help of their nation, their neighboring states, and supportive countries. The same is true of every organization and every community. Mutual aid relationships cannot be built in the middle of a disaster. They have to exist before the ground starts shaking.
My family walked away from August 10th. Many families did not, and they have been on my mind every day since. What I owe them — what all of us in the leadership and preparedness world owe them — is honesty about what that morning proved: our plans are more fragile than we admit, and our people are more capable than we plan for. So I’ll leave you with the question I’ve been asking leaders I have spoken to since we got home: Has your organization ever tested its plan against the day when all systems are overwhelmed and no outside help is coming? If the answer is no, that conversation is worth having this week — not someday.
— Written by Stephen Hartz, FACHE for H&H Leadership Solutions, where we help leaders and organizations prepare for the days no one wants to imagine.
#Leadership #EmergencyPreparedness #CrisisManagement #Resilience #BusinessContinuity
