Navigating Emergency Solutions in Oil and Gas

00:00:03 Chris Garcia
This episode of the Energy Pipeline is sponsored by Caterpillar Oil and gas. Since the 1930s, Caterpillar has manufactured engines for drilling, production, well service, and gas compression. With more than 2100 dealer locations worldwide, Caterpillar offers customers a dedicated support team to assist with their premier power solutions. 

00:00:28 Russell Stewart
Welcome to the Energy Pipeline Podcast with your host, Russell Stewart. Tune in each week to learn more about industry issues, tools and resources to streamline and modernize the future of the industry. Whether you work in oil and gas or bring a unique perspective, this podcast is your knowledge transfer hub. Welcome to the Energy Pipeline. Hey, everybody. As always, thanks for listening. I'm a little, you know, I don't know if I want to say excited about this show, but this show may be a little bit different because I've invited a. A couple of rookie firefighters as guests on this show. So this is going to be. Going to be kind of interesting. I have Chris Garcia and I have Terry Amaro on the show. Chris. Terry, thanks for coming on the show. 

00:01:17 Terry Amaro
Thanks for having us, Mr. Stewart. Well, thanks for having us. 

00:01:20 Russell Stewart
You bet. 

00:01:20 Terry Amaro
It's. 

00:01:21 Russell Stewart
It's my pleasure. So with you guys not having a whole lot of firefighting experience, why don't you tell us a little bit about that? 

00:01:31 Chris Garcia
We've had a couple of years behind us, Terry and I. We share between us 60 years in the fire service. We've been doing it since we were teenagers, really, with different fire departments or in the greater Houston area and got in Houston roughly about the same time and we started working together. What, Terry, about three or four years ago. We kind of missed each other's path as far as stations that we worked worked together. You were at District 46, I was District 68 and in District 10. And then Terry, super driven and he promoted through the ranks fairly quickly. I did not. I stayed as a first line supervisor. We got to work with each other at district, realized that, you know, we lived down the street from each other. Oh, wow. Yeah. 

00:02:18 Russell Stewart
And didn't even know it. 

00:02:19 Chris Garcia
No, we didn't. We kind of had this one day, hey, let's meet for lunch and have some beers and. And that turned into a every other week, week thing. And in those conversations was how we could get in the business together. Terry's a successful business owner or used to be a successful business owner and sold it and in the construction world. And I kind of had some experience in oil and gas and, and with our firefighting. We were looking at just something to do and, you know, try to, try to move forward, you know, life after the fire service. Terry can elaborate on life after the fire service. He's had a lot of good, good mentors retire recently and he, he kind of looks at that in a different light than, than I do. I don't have too many people that I know that has retired. I'm up neither. 

00:03:03 Russell Stewart
Neither of you guys have retired, is that right? 

00:03:06 Terry Amaro
No, sir. We're still both on active duty. 

00:03:08 Russell Stewart
You're still both and you got 20 something, what with Houston Fire Department? 

00:03:12 Terry Amaro
For the last 25 years, I've been working with the Houston Fire Department. I came in in 2001. Okay, so I just have a few more to go. I could leave now. 

00:03:23 Russell Stewart
I was going to say Everybody goes after 20, don't they? 

00:03:25 Terry Amaro
You can leave after 20. If you stay another 10, it gets a little more lucrative. And with the schedule that allows us all to do other things, including what we're doing today, spending time here with you today. 

00:03:37 Russell Stewart
Okay. All right. So I should have mentioned you guys are co owners of Phoenix Emergency Solutions. 

00:03:44 Terry Amaro
Yes, sir, that's right. 

00:03:45 Russell Stewart
Okay. And Chris, tell us a little bit about how that got started. You mentioned you had some oil gas experience. Take it from there. 

00:03:55 Chris Garcia
Yes, I was working all firemen and police officers. We have side jobs and one of the side jobs I had the privilege of having is a safety director for a roofing construction company, Primary roofing. They did a lot of roofing in the downstream world with big companies like Exxon Mobil, Baker Hughes and Dow. And it was owned by a fireman. And he hired, you know, firemen that had the flexibility with the schedules and their, their knowledge and skills and abilities that they could bring to the table to help his company grow. And it did. It grew rapidly. And it was, it's a successful company. And so I had the opportunity to work with health, safety and environmental list with Exxon Mobil and bakeries and Dow and just really get a feel about what that all was and how important safety was with them. We. And so that was where the, the idea started coming from, was how can I do this? If my firemen can open up a roofing company and work in oil and gas companies, why can't another fireman do the same thing? So Terry and I had our lunches and we were building an idea, putting a bunch of posted notes on or really napkins on the table there. And you know, we came up with an idea from an opportunity that we, that we got from one of our customers, Dave from Kraken Oil and Gas, to build a emergency preparation incident management team and review Emergency response planning for their company. It was a pilot program that, that we instituted and it's been very successful and we are, we are just getting our name out there to, to do more. 

00:05:41 Russell Stewart
Well I'm happy to, to get it out there for our audience. So what we're actually talking about here is aligning emergency management with HSE objectives. Tell me how those two go. Hand in hand. 

00:05:54 Terry Amaro
So with Phoenix we work side by side with HSE people with our customers that we currently have, we have shared goals, continuing to help protect the personnel, minimize environmental impact and ensure regulatory compliance. That's all HSE stuff. Right. So we add together with that an emergency management, a 10,000 foot view for our customers so they can continue on doing their day to day business. HSC can continue to do their day to day business. Um, and also we add to it an incident management assistance team that we can deploy on a six hour response window to anywhere in the United States with people that are very familiar with working in a unified command structure. And that's what these incidents will end up being if your company loses well, control and where one of your customers will deploy up to six people to your incident and cover the five major command structure positions. And in that process now you have somebody that's not just read a book, not just taking a couple tests, not just role played it. The resource pool of people that we have, they all come from the Gulf Coast. And so the people that work with us and the resource pool of people that we use are used to working in a unified command structure in an incident command system. They're used to working in notice and no notice of events. We also have a couple folks from California and everybody knows California, the wild lion fires are out of control. So we're used to working with other agencies like Homeland. We're used to working with other agencies like the FBI, the dea, local police, local fire, state level agencies like here in Texas we have tceq. At the federal level you have the epa. All those people are going to show up at your incident if you lose well control where you have a large sill. And so what we do is we provide a nice little angel on your shoulder. We call it an incident management assistance team. And this works here in Texas and it works in other states. Currently a model that's already been proven over the last 25 to 30 years. Texas has an agency called Texas Task Force One. And that's kind of where the idea came from. I don't know if you remember a couple years ago there was a small town Called West Texas. And they had a fertilizer plant explode. 

00:08:29 Russell Stewart
Yes. Yes, they did. That's been more than a couple of years ago. 

00:08:32 Terry Amaro
Yeah. And so in that incident, that county, that town got overwhelmed by that incident. It overwhelmed their capabilities. It overwhelmed everybody to the local fire, local police, even the county itself. Their emergency manager was overwhelmed. And the state already had employed an agency called Texas Task Force 1, which Chris was a part of, and some of our other employees are still a part of. And what they do is they go out there and assist these people. And we don't take their scenes over, but what we do is assist them. People that aren't familiar with Mark being a planning section chief or being in the finance section department or an incident commander, pio, or lazy on officer. The people that we have that come out to your incident are used to working with these agencies and are comfortable doing these things. It's just another walk in the park for us. So it's kind of like having the A team show up when your B team is just getting overwhelmed and overran. And that's what we provide to our customers currently. 

00:09:34 Russell Stewart
Okay, so you call this an incident management system. Ims, I think is the acronym for. 

00:09:40 Terry Amaro
It, but then actually called an Incident Management Assistance Team. That's kind of the technical term for it. We have our own personal term for it at Phoenix. But the idea of it is, is that we send people out there. If you're not comfortable with your people running incident command and a unified command structure with 10 other agencies, some of them being federal, state, or local, then we'll send somebody out there to be your incident commander. We'll send somebody out there to run your operations or your planning section or your finance section or your logistics section. If you need a PIO, we send PIOs out there. These are all packages that we sell separately. 

00:10:14 Russell Stewart
Okay, now, pio, what is that? 

00:10:16 Terry Amaro
Public Information Officer. 

00:10:18 Russell Stewart
Okay. All right, I got you. Okay. All right, so you guys know how to work with them and keep everybody out of trouble with the and the Buvic. 

00:10:26 Terry Amaro
Correct. So we have a couple PhDs that are very well along the lines with incident management and emergency management. And they're used to being the spokesperson for different governmental agencies, whether it be the state department, whether it be a federal agency. We have somebody currently that's working hand in hand with Abbott, our governor at the state here in Texas with the busing of the migrants to the different states. He was in charge of that, and she was a lead PIO for his office. 

00:11:00 Russell Stewart
Oh, wow. Okay. So you are on contract you're on retainer with the company or with the operator or with the refinery or how does that work? 

00:11:11 Terry Amaro
Yeah, so we sign it. We, what we do is we sign. 

00:11:13 Chris Garcia
Up a yearly MSA agreement with them. 

00:11:17 Terry Amaro
Yes, thank you. For us. 

00:11:19 Chris Garcia
Yeah, we'll sign an MSA agreement with the companies and basically we're at their beck and call on uncertain on the response part of it. And then in between that we have, you know, trainings and drills and full skill exercise that we provide for their company from the executive level all the way down to the field. 

00:11:37 Russell Stewart
Okay, so that was exactly my next question. Okay. So it's one thing to get an MSA with, with a company, but I'm sitting there thinking, you know, I can appreciate all Yalls experience and everything, but you, you still show up in the, in the middle of chaos with like you said, all these different pieces of the puzzle. And so it's got to be some, some plan to coordinate this or some kind of battle plan in place or something where you've done some training and drills. Is that right? 

00:12:10 Terry Amaro
Yes, sir. So when we first get a contract with the company, the first thing we do is see if they have an emergency response plan. If they don't, then we'll write one for them. We'll go through the process with their legal department and once Sleevel approves it and we're good with it, then it goes online. Then once that's online, then we start training the employees on the emergency response plan that we have written for them. If they already have one, we'll review it. Most companies have their own and minor tweaks here and there. We also provide a reverse 911 system in an app. That way people get notified reversely backwards. 

00:12:48 Russell Stewart
Flesh that out for me. You have a what now? 

00:12:50 Terry Amaro
We call it a reverse 911 system. Reverse 901. Okay. Yeah. So if you lose. Well, control in town, in North Dakota, in the Balkan region. 

00:13:01 Russell Stewart
Right. 

00:13:02 Terry Amaro
We have an app that our companies use and they'll use the app to notify whether it's a level one, level two, level three, and that's up to the each individual company on how they want to categorize the levels of response. But if it's like a level one, they notify everybody within the company that there's an incident going on. And in real time, within a few hours, we can get tethered drones up and they can get a full 360 degree view of the incident itself. And then we can start working on our command post and setting up our incident Command system so they can start dealing with the problem or we can start dealing with the problem. 

00:13:43 Russell Stewart
So you have some kind of technology that you use to notify, primarily with HSE folks, I guess. 

00:13:51 Terry Amaro
Yes, sir. So who gets notified and who's able to notify, that's up to each individual customer on how they want to run that. But we do have the technology in place. So it's an app because we originally started with text messages. And we learned very quickly as we were new into this industry, that the guys in the field get overwhelmed with text messages and even automated text messages so much that they just ignore them. So to avoid a loss of well controlled text message that needs to go out that people are ignoring, we created our own app over the last year. That way people do pay attention to it because you're much more likely to pay attention to a push notification from your phone from a company that's there to help you, versus a 5, 10, 664 text message that you're not. 

00:14:42 Russell Stewart
Yeah, right. 

00:14:43 Terry Amaro
It's just saying you just kind of hit delete or try to block it or whatever. 

00:14:47 Russell Stewart
These people are not in my contact, so I don't answer. 

00:14:50 Terry Amaro
Right. 

00:14:50 Chris Garcia
And it's similar in the fire service take for Houston. Houston's the fourth largest fire department in the, in the, in the nation. And if we got an alert on every single incident that was going on, over 1200 incidents, we would, we wouldn't listen. So they, so you have, you call 91 1, there's a fire at walk and don't walk. And that 911 system just goes through the dispatch system and it dispatches the appropriate fire stations and district to respond to that. So in, in a, in a company, we do the same exact thing with the, we call it the reverse 911 system to where we notify the proper personnel, depending on their tier level within their company in order to get this, this notification and the response and the key people in place. 

00:15:37 Russell Stewart
Okay. All right. So this would be your HSE teams that, that have this app, or everybody has it, or how does that work? 

00:15:47 Terry Amaro
So that's just based on what the company wants. Obviously, the HSA people have the app. The technicians in the field, the people that are operating at the task full and task level have the app. And then the board members, all the shareholders, SVPs, VPs, have the app because these are the people that need to be notified to get to our quote, quote, unquote war room here in Houston so that we can start moving to start mitigating the emergency or incident or the disaster. 

00:16:16 Russell Stewart
Interesting. So you've, you've learned from what the fourth largest fire department in the nation does and to, to deal with, with fires in the city of Houston. And, and basically you can come in and, and implement that same process for, for the fires, quote, unquote, that that occur, you know, with an oil and gas company. Is that right? 

00:16:36 Chris Garcia
Well, a lot of, yes, exactly. And a lot of response entities, disaster response teams, use a similar type technologies. Terry mentioned. Texas Task Force 1 is the state of Texas Urban Search and Rescue Team, primarily structural collapse team. And they have to get notified. It's made up of personnel all through the state, doctors, canine handlers, paramedics, technical rescue guys, communication guys, logistics guys. And so they get notified. The same similar technology as we're notifying people internally within a company be able to respond to that disaster. For example, like West Texas. I, I, I responded to that and the, the, the town was very overwhelmed. There was nobody in charge at the, at the, the time. And this is what we've learned over the years from emergency management's perspective is who's in charge, how do we delegate, how do we mitigate the incident, how do we help people respond to their, to their disaster? And this is all what we've done. Terry and I have been in emergency management probably the last 10, 15 years of our career here in, in the last, we both have degrees in emergency management and we are, we, this is really all we, we do every single day. And, and you, you think about it from a, from a civilian side, people do it within their own world, you know, and they have a baby and they have to go to grandma's house or they want to go to the park, they got to pack a diaper bag and a stroller and do all these things. And they're, they have a, an objective, Bring all these things, notify everybody we're coming. And it's the same thing. It's just this is at a very 10,000ft as Terry's. 

00:18:22 Russell Stewart
Exactly. And with some very serious situations involved where there's safety concerns, there's compliance concerns, there's environmental concerns involved in all that. And you guys help enhance that, right? 

00:18:36 Terry Amaro
Yes, sir. Like, if you're not comfortable working around navigable waterways, we can help you with that. Like I was saying before, if you're not comfortable calculating what your burn rate is per hour or just share it with your stakeholders or the CEO of the company, we have people that do it for a living, either at a government level or at a different levels. So if the people within your organization, your company aren't comfortable representing those key functions, the ones that I was talking about earlier. Logistics, planning, finance, operations, the incident command structure altogether. We provide that for you and we provide people that are from the Gulf Coast. Like I was telling you, it's important that we mention that because not to poo poo too much on other departments in middle America, but the fire departments that work along the Gulf coast and in California are hands and above better at dealing with multi agency unified command structures. And this is what oil and gas is going to end up dealing with. When they do have an incident where they do lose well control or they have a pipeline rupture, it's not just going to be Company X dealing with. There'll be some local people that will come out and respond and they'll get overwhelmed and the state's going to get involved and they'll get overwhelmed and then the federal government will get involved. And what we bring is to the table is that we're used to working in many these environments. This is what we do. Not every single day, but when hurricane season comes around here on the Gulf coast, we get ready for it. We're used to dealing with notice and no notice events. So it's not just another guy telling you this is what you need to do as an operations section chief or a planning section chief is actually somebody that has many years of experience dealing with these types of incidents. 

00:20:29 Russell Stewart
Okay, so let's. Well, obviously being able to navigate the waters, so to speak, on, on all that has a tremendous impact on whether or not like that happens, whether or not people are safe. That's a, that's a key concern. And then you're talking about blowouts and pipeline leaks and things like that. Then there's also the environmental aspect. Would you get involved in that too? 

00:20:56 Terry Amaro
Yes, sir. So we don't just do response, we also do recovery. That's kind of what you're alluding to there. We're very well versed in that aspect as well. And so that's part of the package that when we do for people, for companies, this help with the environmental aspect as well. I mentioned Nava Waterways because we have a couple companies we work for in North Dakota up there in the Balkan and everybody knows the Missouri river runs up there and there's wells that are near there. So that's like something that we deal with on a daily basis and we're comfortable dealing with that kind of stuff. 

00:21:32 Russell Stewart
And you can help them get through things like compliance and and I guess cleanup and going forward and stuff like that. 

00:21:43 Terry Amaro
So we don't actually work at the task level. We don't touch or pick up. We work more at the strategic level where we help them strategically decide what to do and what should be done. And then we get with logistics and planning, then we coordinate together to get those tasks done at the task level. But we don't physically go out and do those things. 

00:22:07 Russell Stewart
Okay, all right. But. But you're. You know how to more or less supervise this? 

00:22:12 Terry Amaro
Yes, sir. That's why I was staying. 10,000. 

00:22:14 Russell Stewart
Yeah, right. Okay, I got you. Okay, well, there you have it, folks. Phoenix Emergency Solutions. I'm happy to introduce them to our OGG and audience. Guys, I appreciate you coming on the show. Did I ask the right questions? Did I miss anything? Anything else you want to add before we sign off here? 

00:22:35 Terry Amaro
No. Russell, I appreciate your time. Thank you so much for having us. We really appreciate the opportunity to talk on the podcast. Thank you so much. 

00:22:43 Russell Stewart
Okay, so if folks want to get in touch with you, I'm sure you have a website and your own LinkedIn, all that good stuff. 

 00:22:50 Chris Garcia
Yes, sir. It's okay. Phoenix emergency solutions.com and can look us up on LinkedIn. Terry and I are phone calls away. 

00:22:59 Russell Stewart
Okay. All right, well, we will. And I guess that's 24 7, huh? 

00:23:03 Chris Garcia
It's kind of what. It's kind of how we're bred. Never say no. 

00:23:07 Russell Stewart
Welcome. Welcome to the fire department and welcome to Oil and Gas. You know that's. That's correct. That's exactly how it works. Okay, well, we'll put that information in the, in the show notes. And as always to everybody out there, we appreciate you listening just on LinkedIn. Tell your friends to listen. And again, thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time. Thanks, Russell. 

00:23:28 Terry Amaro
Thanks, Russell. 

00:23:29 Russell Stewart
You're welcome. 

00:23:30 Terry Amaro
Thanks for listening to oggn, the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. If you like this show, leave us a review and then go to oggn.com to learn about all our other shows. Don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. This show has been a production of the Oil and Gas Global Network. 

00:23:49 Russell Stewart
Sam.