Harvard program helps leaders in crises know how to get ‘out of the basement’
In 2010, Peter Neffenger had his “summer of getting yelled at.” As a U.S. Coast Guard rear admiral and the government’s deputy national incident commander for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Neffenger was the focal point for the government’s response — and for a lot of angry people. Over 87 days, the crippled well spewed an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, vastly dwarfing the nation’s previous largest spill, the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The oil flowing into the gulf meant a moratorium on both new drilling and fishing, and hundreds of thousands of people were out of work. The spill had the rapt attention of five unhappy governors — whom Neffenger spoke with daily — worried about environmental disaster on their shores. It was a lot to manage, so Neffenger turned to Leonard Marcus at the Harvard National Preparedness Leadership Initiative (NPLI), who...