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Oroville Dam Flood Claims Filed

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Concrete continues to be placed on the lower chute of the Lake Oroville flood control spillway in Butte County, California. Photo taken Aug. 7, 2017, by Dale Kolke/California Department of Water Resources.

California residents in the path of water spilled from the Oroville dam in February had until Aug. 11, six months after the incident, to file claims.

The Mercury News reported that Butte County farmer George Onyett, manager of J.E.M. Farms and Chandon Ranch, filed a $15 million claim, saying that after the flooding in February, about 25 acres of walnut trees were washed away by the Feather River. He said that 1% to 2% of the trees in his walnut orchard were lost and that his land is now “irrecoverable.”

Because of the near-collapse of the Oroville Dam in northern California, communities as far as 100 miles downstream were at risk of flooding. Problems at the dam began when its main water channel, or sluice, was damaged after a winter season of record rain and snowfall after five years of drought. Torrential rainfall caused water levels to rise so quickly that large amounts of water needed to be released to prevent the dam from rupturing and inundating the communities below.

But when the force of the cascading water created a large crater in the main spillway, use of the emergency spillway was required. This safety backup, however, also nearly failed because the dirt spillway, which had never been fortified by concrete, began to erode, increasing the risk of damage to the dam. In anticipation of a possible disaster, almost 200,000 residents living in the shadow of the dam were temporarily evacuated.

Niall McCarthy, an attorney representing the farm, said the spillway crisis was “entirely avoidable.

” He pointed to waived concerns about inadequacies of the emergency spillway raised by nonprofit groups in 2005, as well as recently released reports by UC Berkeley Professor Robert Bea, of mismanagement by the state Department of Water Resources, according to the Mercury News.

“There was a certainty of failure with respect to the Oroville Dam,” McCarthy said. “The state chose to make band-aid repairs.

The state failed to do its job. (This was) not caused by natural conditions, (but) by human error.”

State officials have maintained it is unclear whether the fluctuation in water releases from Oroville harmed the river and those who farm along it between the shore and major flood protection levees. They argue that some bank erosion would have occurred this year, regardless, given Northern California’s record rainy season, according to the Sacramento Bee.

A number of other business owners and individuals have also filed claims with the state Department of General Services. The Sacramento Bee reported that there were 11 claims at the beginning of July and that there are now a total of 92 claims filed by residents.

A list released by DGS showed claims totaling $1.17 billion. However, that includes a $1 billion claim filed on behalf of “all affected parties” owning land along Northern California rivers where flows were affected by sudden water releases from Oroville. That claim, filed by a Woodland lawyer named James Nolan, added that actual damage amounts aren’t yet available.

Construction efforts at the Oroville Dam spillways are underway and are focused on repairing and reconstructing the gated flood control spillway, also known as the main spillway, by Nov. 1, according to the California Department of Water Resources.

Can You Have Too Many Coffee Shops?

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The collective mood among Starbucks (SBUX) shareholders may have been dark and intense on Wednesday, following a 1% downgrade of the coffee company’s share price by BMO Capital Markets due to “store overlap.” BMO analyst Andrew Strelzik wrote: “There are now 3.6 Starbucks locations within a one-mile radius of the typical Starbucks in the U.S. relative to 3.3 and 3.2 stores in 2014 and 2012 respectively.

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”

That statistic does not factor in competitors, and implies that too many franchise cafes are located too closely together and are fighting for the same $2 per tall coffee.

The warning signs of overlap were acknowledged and dismissed by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz in 2010, when he told the Harvard Business Review: “We’re not nearly close to saturation in North America, despite what the cynics or pundits might say…”

At the time of that interview, Starbucks total store numbers neared 17,000 and by the end of 2016, there were 25,085. Was seven years close enough to the saturation point to heed the warnings? Or does the old cliché about hindsight apply?

The overlap may have led to what’s known as risk failure, which Risk Management explored in a 2016 article, “The True Character of Risk.” Article author Michael J. Mazarr would characterize Starbucks’ market oversaturation as a “gray swan”—a danger that is “known, discussed and even warned about, but then discounted.”

Mazarr noted: “When senior decision-makers become immune to outcome-oriented thinking, they will not give serious consideration to risk. They may continue to give it rhetorical emphasis, talking about what could go wrong, but the trajectory of their judgment will never substantially vary.

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”

McDonald’s learned this same lesson the hard way in the 1990s. Although it had 19,000 worldwide locations, upper management wanted deeper market penetration and kept expanding. Cannibalization didn’t hurt the corporation at first, but investments in new locations outpaced the profits earned from increases in total sales. That led to the fast food chain closing 100 stores and unveiling the popular, but risky, offer of 55-cent Big Macs to attract and retain customers.

Unlike in 2008, when Schultz closed 600 locations overnight because he felt they weren’t meeting the Starbucks vision, the current problem is not reportedly a result of poor management or the inability to offer upscale imbibing experiences. Starbucks has just provided customers with too many options near their homes, workplaces and hangouts to get their next sandwich or caffeine fix.

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Going Lo-Fi At Sea May Mitigate Cyberrisk

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Cyberthreats have become seaborne in recent years, and preventative measures are on the radars of governments and the shipping industry.

GPS and other electronic systems have proven to help ensure safe and accurate navigation, but they have also put digital bullseyes on ship decks. These technology upgrades have unwittingly exposed ships to cyberrisk because their signals are weak enough for remote perpetrators to jam.

When ships and crew members rely solely on GPS systems, they can be at the mercy of a cyberhacker seeking to provide wrong positions (or “spoof”), endanger the crew and their cargo, or hold the crew, cargo or sensitive information for ransom.

These risks are exacerbated by the fact that ships typically do not have automatic backup systems, and younger crew members are increasingly reliant upon the newer electronic navigation tools.

Allianz’s Safety and Shipping Review 2017 highlighted the growing threat of cybercrime in the sector, and noted the increasing level of activity in the last five years. For example, World Fuel Services fell victim to an online bunkering scam in 2014 when it agreed to participate in a tender for a large amount of fuel from what it believed to be the United States Defense Logistics Agency. Cybercriminals collected $18 million from that successful impersonation. In 2016, hundreds of South Korean vessels had to return to their ports after North Korea allegedly jammed their GPS signals.

The report noted that most maritime cyberattacks have been aimed at breaching corporate security, rather than taking control of vessels, but warned that such attacks could occur.

Captain Rahul Khanna, head of marine risk consulting at Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty, noted in the report that more, larger-scale attacks are imminent if the risks are not appropriately addressed. “We can’t put IT security on the backburner,” Khanna said. “Just imagine if hackers were able to take control of a large container ship on a strategically-important route. They could block transits for a long period of time, causing significant economic damage.”

The report also stressed that “crew education and identifying measures to back up and restore systems should be implemented” to reduce cyberrisk.

Looking Back For a Signal Forward
Some companies and governments have heeded the warnings and are identifying these indicators of attack. Preventative measures may lie in a maritime tool that had taken a backseat to the prevalence of GPS—a backup radio technology called Enhanced Long-Range Navigation (eLoran), which was developed in the United States in the mid-1990s. It has continental reach, emits strong signals via a low-frequency and relies on land-based transmitters that reveal a limited number of fixed positions. These once-limiting traits could be the automatic backup systems ships need in the event of jamming or spoofing.

On July 20, 2017, when the Department of Homeland Security Authorization Act (H.R. 2825) passed the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, eLoran’s importance was stressed. The act includes a section titled “Backup Global Positioning System,” which features provisions for the U.S. Secretary of Transportation to initiate an eLoran system. H.R. 2825 proposes that eLoran be made available as a “reliable…positioning, navigation and timing system,” with the purpose of providing “a complement to, and backup for the Global Positioning System to ensure availability of uncorrupted and nondegraded positioning, navigation and timing signals for military and civilian users.”

Reuters this week reported that South Korea’s Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries is looking to establish the technology in a test form by 2019.

Time will tell if eLoran is the most practical and cost-efficient method to mitigate cyberthreats at sea. It seems if companies want to mitigate maritime cyberrisk now, the first steps would be to look to the technology of the past and turn on the radio.

The ERM Value Connection

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Research has shown that enterprise risk management (ERM) adds value. One research paper showed that ERM adds to the value metric called Tobin’s Q. Other award-winning research has shown that ERM enables better decision making. The authors of that research state:

“Specifically, as companies implement an ERM process, the new knowledge it provides them about objectives, risks, oversight, information and communication, and the internal environment leads to enhanced management, as evidenced by increased management consensus, better-informed decisions, better communication with management regarding risk taking, and increased management accountability. This enhanced management, in turn, leads to improved performance.”

ERM and Reputation
As an extension, it would make sense that there would be some impact on reputation risk if a company does ERM well, is sophisticated at ERM, and has developed a mature process. While this common sense may prevail, empirical data and testing is lacking. This is primarily because measuring both ERM and reputation risk is not so easy. But the questions remain:

  • Is there a relationship between ERM effectiveness and reputation?
  • Furthermore, does this relationship show up in performance metrics?

While we cannot answer these questions here, we can explore some simple relationships and at least gain a few insights. Admittedly, reputation risk and ERM are still young disciplines and more data is needed to explore these and other questions. Any attempt to answer these questions with current data carries some caveats. First, this is complicated data from nonfinancial firms and all data was before the year 2014. Second, these are simplistic looks at the data as split into the upper and lower percentiles (split at 50%).

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Third, the information discussed below reveals levels that have not been tested for statistical significance. In spite of these, let’s examine what may be obvious to some business risk experts.

What data reveals about ERM and Reputation Level
The big question might be, “Do we see higher reputation levels associated with better ERM?” The answer is not yet (at least in this data at this point in time). Companies in the sample with lower reputation scores have higher ERM effectiveness scores than companies with higher reputation scores.

Other Explanations
A good researcher knows to develop the theory first and also to consider alternative explanations. It is wise to follow that process.

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For example, in this sample companies with greater reputation are bigger than the lower tier reputation companies. It might be true that larger companies have more difficulty building a more mature ERM capable company because they are so large and spread around the globe. It could also be true that smaller companies are over confident in the ERM processes. Either theory (and others) could explain why the high ERM and high reputation levels do not match up.

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This testing is left for future research.

The Volatility Theory
An alternative theory (what academics explore and test) is that the level of reputation is not what’s important because the company already had their long-standing (developed over many years) reputation when they established ERM. Instead, it might be true today that the real reputation value of ERM is that it helps manage the volatility around reputation because the company is better prepared, sees the reputation risk, correlated risks, helps get the companies ahead of the risk events, and helps them understand how these events might play out and impact the organization’s reputation.

Examining the data shows that the answer on volatility is that this could be true. The data show that at set reputation levels (meaning when the data is split on high and low reputation volatility levels), better ERM leads to lower volatility in reputation at both levels and that is probably a very good thing for most organizations. It appears that ERM does have an impact on reputation but the impact is likely on reputation volatility.

Conclusion
Prior research shows ERM adds value and helps improve decision making. With further testing, future research may be able to confirm another obvious truth, that better ERM improves reputation. But it may be doing so in a surprising way via reduced volatility of reputation.