Baking & Snack - March 2015 - 61

R&D PERSPECTIVE
Theresa Cogswell
bakercogs@sbcglobal.net

Here's why I define crisis management as on-the-job training ...

ON STEROIDS
It was a nice fall Friday at the corporate office. This was
Red Friday for the upcoming NFL game on Sunday, and
there was a cookout in the company parking lot. That's
when the company president came over to where I was
eating my hamburger and asked when I was leaving for
Rocky Mount, NC. I must have looked at him with a
questioning face because he next said, "You don't know
what I am talking about, do you?" "No sir, I do not," I
responded. Then, quite literally, the floodgates opened.
Hurricane Floyd was storming the East Coast. Its
winds and water backed up the Tar River and broke
a dike above our bakery at Rocky Mount. The whole
building flooded. Water came up so quickly that the last
people out of the bakery - the plant manager and plant
engineer who turned off the power - carried two small
women out on their backs. They swam out.
To make matters worse, the bakery was downstream
from a large hog operation. We were not just dealing
with dirty floodwaters, but we also had to be concerned
about what else could be in the water due to runoff from
the hog pens.
First on the scene from the corporate office was the
vice-president of engineering. Thank goodness for pictures because you would never believe the devastation
unless you could see it yourself. Dough troughs full of
sponges were now topped with floodwater. Bread was
left in the proof box and the oven when the power was
turned off. Now those systems were full of floodwater,
too. As the wait began for the water to recede, we had to
figure out how to clean up a waterlogged bakery likely
contaminated with e. coli. Needless to say, this is not a
skill learned in college.
First: Find expert help.
I remembered that several area flour mills located
along the same river had flooded years previously.
They were the first calls we made. One miller volun-

teered his sanitation manager, who had flood experience, to help us. What a blessing!
Second: Rally your troops.
We pulled together the best sanitation staffers from
throughout our company bakeries and got them involved. We needed "all qualified hands on deck" to get
this bakery ready to make bread again.
Much to my surprise when I arrived at the bakery, it looked nothing like the photos I saw the week
before. It appeared clean, amazingly clean. That was
when I learned about disaster recovery teams that follow storms. They hired displaced workers - our bakery workers, in fact - to temporarily work for them to
clean up businesses. I was speechless. Could it really be
clean? How were we going to define "clean?"
We inspected the bakery equipment: the equipment
legs, the rollers on the feeder to the slicers and anything
with hollow areas. They were clean on the outside, but
when taken apart, floodwater poured out. I described
this as the saltshaker principle: If a saltshaker drops into
bucket of water, you can clean the outside of the shaker,
but water still gets inside. Like that saltshaker, the bakery's equipment was internally full of filthy floodwater.
Third: Enlist allies who support the final goal of
baked goods safe for the consumer to eat.
We had to fully sanitize the bakery while the engineers worked to get equipment running again. Many
times in crisis situations, you find help in unique
places. Several insurance companies held the policies
on the bakery, but thankfully, they all hired the same
consultant to oversee the cleanup and ultimate startup
of the bakery.
During that time, I would often dream about missing
a key area of the bakery or not having all the equipment
"clean enough." Those were nightmares indeed because
we were working so hard to protect our brand and get

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