Everyone will remember where they were and what they were doing shortly before 9 a.m. on September 11, 2001. While most of the world watched in shock at the seemingly unending horror, business continuity planners at “ground zero” went into high gear; implementing plans designed to save employee lives and business operations.

Paul Honey, Merrill Lynch’s Director of Global Contingency Planning, was in the company’s world-wide headquarters in the World Financial Center, across the street from the World Trade Center, when the attacks occurred. “From the moment the first plane hit it was a very chaotic scene,” recalls Honey. “Everyone was in disbelief and shock. It was certainly a very unbelievable event to happen in downtown Manhattan.”

Though, like most, Honey was in shock, he quickly focused on the task at hand. Within three to five minutes Merrill Lynch had its command center up and running.

“We had the bridge lines open within minutes of the planes hitting. All the various key people joined in and gave their status reports and started to really take coordination and management of the events.”

Honey’s top priority during the first hour was getting employees out of the buildings and making sure everyone was safe. With four buildings within 100 meters of the area, Honey estimates that approximately 9000 employees had to be evacuated. Amazingly, just months earlier, Merrill Lynch had reviewed its evacuation plan with employees. When the planes struck, everyone knew the evacuation routes.

As dictated by the emergency plan, employees were evacuated to the Hudson River area and out of lower Manhattan. “At one stage it felt as though we were running a transportation company. We rented ferryboats to get people across the river.”

“There were just thousands of people from that area – people trying to get out of lower Manhattan. The thing that really sticks in my memory is that it was very quiet. People didn’t go running, screaming. There was no panic. It was just complete silence.” Calling it an “eerie feeling,” Honey says he doesn’t think people could really comprehend what had happened.

Meanwhile, as the events unfolded, Merrill Lynch’s Corporate Response Team was managing the situation from the command center in New Jersey. Honey says it wasn’t necessary to place calls to the site in order to organize the recovery effort. “Despite the chaos,” he says, “people knew what they needed to do.”

This past May, Honey and his team put the entire company through a massive two-day simulation of a corporate headquarters outage. Although it wasn’t based on a terrorist event, it was a substantial planning exercise. “We were pretty well prepared for what we needed to do,” he says.

Highlighting the overwhelming importance of testing, Honey says that without the test in May the outcome could have been very different. “When we ran the big disaster drill for the headquarters, the value that came out of putting 80-odd people in a room for a couple of days to work through a very serious issue was enormous.”

“Knowing the plan and your responsibilities are one thing. But actually running folks through a simulation really jelled us together. We all knew what the process would be. How it worked and what to do.”

Once Merrill Lynch’s downtown employees were evacuated and moved to a safe location, Honey stayed in another of Merrill’s downtown offices close to “ground zero”.

“I stayed in one of our primary data centers with executive management. We had the firm’s senior management checking in and finding out what was going on, providing us with the appropriate direction.”

In the hour following the attacks, obtaining accurate information was a challenge. With the condition of the surrounding buildings becoming increasingly uncertain, Honey relied on media reports to keep him up to date. Within a few hours, Honey says his team was able to go from an employee evacuation and accounting mode to a standard business recovery mode, prioritizing resumption as dictated by the continuity plan.

“Obviously we don’t have a hotsite that would hold 9000 people so we had to take a look at our entire real estate portfolio. We worked out what functions could be transferred offshore prior to the disaster. The businesses that could be redirected offshore went offshore. In areas where we had to get staff locally, we figured out who would go where. And by the end of the first day, we pretty well had our game plan in place and activated,” he explains.

Merrill Lynch mandated the use of LDRPS for all business units worldwide after Y2K. “We’ve had the system about four or five years but it’s only in the last year or so that we really made it a corporate standard and put the effort into training people and making sure we’re using it properly.”

In light of the terrorist attacks, Honey says that mandating LDRPS throughout the company was a “good move. We’re in 42 countries and have some 66,000 employees. It’s quite a challenge with the very different business groups; institutional trading, private client, asset management, a whole wealth of support groups that work to support those businesses. One person’s plan might be different from another’s, but LDRPS did enable us to bring a certain degree of standards and consistency across all plans.”

With a tremendous amount of data and information to coordinate in even normal circumstances, Honey says LDRPS is a “powerful data repository” for Merrill Lynch. Plans built in LDRPS are based on “our corporate entity structure,” Honey says. “So very much a part of my job is making sure the plans that are developed and the polices that are worked toward are consistent throughout the firm.”

Honey praises Merrill’s top management for its strong commitment to continuity planning. “It is absolutely vital,” he says of that support. “To give you some idea of the numbers we’re talking about—we probably have 1,200 LDRPS users around the globe. At last count we had some 6000 critical business processes. So there’s a tremendous wealth of information now in the system that we were successfully able to use to help us recover.”

It’s also a tremendous amount of information to keep current. Honey praises his “very skilled” planning team for doing just that. “They pretty well know every trick in the book to make sure stuff gets done. The trick and the challenge is actually making sure it’s getting enforced at the local level.”

Honey says his team relies on “a very comprehensive reporting system that goes up to the firm’s senior management and through a series of milestones and activity checklists.”

“We can pretty much tell where people are in their planning activity and to what level and capability,” he says. “And that report is reviewed monthly by senior management. Generally any roadblocks that come up are resolved rather quickly.”

In the days following the attacks, Merrill Lynch’s top priority was the “safety and well being of our employees. Looking after their well being is paramount.” As part of its contingency plans designed for traumatic events, Merrill Lynch provides counseling for its employees. That week counselors experienced with the Oklahoma City bombing were brought in and made available to employees.

The second priority was to resume as many business processes as quickly as possible. “That entire week was really just making sure that the business areas that needed to be up and running had everything they needed to satisfy clients,” Honey says.

Despite the enormity of the attacks, Merrill Lynch stayed up and running across the United States and the world. Remarkably, Merrill Lynch reopened in the debt market the following day. “That was a tremendous achievement given the enormity of what had happened,” says Honey. The equity markets opened the following Monday with the rest of the industry.

Although Merrill Lynch’s plans worked masterfully, Honey explains that successful business continuity plans require constant re-evaluation. “Every part of our planning and everything that we thought should be in a plan got thoroughly exercised. There are lots of things we’ll take back and improve upon during various reviews.”

“The area that I want to focus on is from more of a procedural perspective. The actual production of our plans, the printing, storing, and management of them; making sure people have them in home locations, and office locations. I want to make sure that everyone has a copy of the plan at home.”

As Merrill Lynch continues to recover, Honey says LDRPS helped in several ways. “Our employee database is hooked up to LDRPS so we always know where our employees are. People who had their plans with them knew all their employees’ home numbers. With that tremendous wealth of information we were successfully able to use it to help us recover.”

“It’s important” reminds Honey, “to bring out that this was a great team effort. Everyone needs to join in to recover from something like this and they did.”

“From a personal standpoint,” he adds, “I really couldn’t believe that we were looking at recovering our entire headquarters operations. Losing a building or a floor on a building is one thing, but to lose six buildings plus the World Trade Center is just absolutely unbelievable.”