Not all the scary media interviews are on 60 Minutes. Think about this.

You're working late one afternoon when the windows in your building start shaking. When you look out to see what happened, all you see is smoke, fire and a vapor cloud.

Your boss is on vacation, the plant's "designated spokesperson" is attending a seminar, and the receptionist calls to tell you there are two television crews in the lobby that want to talk to "someone."

It may sound like a bad dream, but at chemical processing plants, it could very well be reality.

Facing the news media in the midst of crisis - whether it's a major explosion or a minor chemical spill - is not easy for anyone. For the inexperienced or ill-prepared, it can be a real-life nightmare.

While we can only do our best to try to prevent spills, explosions and environmental problems, we can do a lot more to prevent the public relations nightmares that are often associated with them.

It takes a combination of serious planning, training and testing, but it can and is being done at chemical processing plants around the country.

In a Chicago suburb, a chemical process industries (CPI) company had grown up beside its residential neighbors for almost four decades with hardly a problem. Then, within a matter of just a few weeks, it experienced three releases, including one release of formaldehyde that resulted in the evacuation of the surrounding neighborhood, including a nearby school.

The news media were soon on the company's doorstep. Unfortunately, there was no crisis communications plan for that particular plant and only one of the company's employees had ever attended a media training workshop.

With the help of outside consultants, the company formed a crisis team, trained a dozen of its "most likely" spokespersons and initiated a pro-active plan that involved local governmental leaders and neighbors as well as company officials. Once the immediate crisis was over, the company developed and initiated a long-term community relations program. Media and crisis management training continued.

Two years later, when another release sent nearly a dozen local residents to the hospital, the incident was handled so well - from the news media's viewpoint - that it resulted in an editorial praising the company's actions.

But good crisis management programs are not evaluated by just bad headlines and good editorials. A program that works well in one situation may fail in another. Any truly good program is flexible enough so it can be adapted to any situation and recognize that trained, experienced people are its key to success.

Too often when organizations begin putting together crisis management programs, they rely too heavily on supposedly all-inclusive crisis plans. But it's a fact of life that it still takes people to manage a crisis. No crisis plan to date has yet been able to think on its feet, make tough decisions or face reporters and television cameras in the midst of a controversy or disaster.

At their best, crisis plans are just one-half of an equation that has no value without a trained crisis team. If you seriously want to prepare for crisis situations, you must devote equal attention to both.

The best place to start on building or expanding your organization's crisis management capabilities is to develop a program that can be used to both train - and test - those individuals who would be essential in dealing with a real crisis.

First, it's essential that your team has a strong leader who either has the authority to make vital decisions or has an unobstructed path to someone who can. You'll also need representatives from public relations, operations, safety, environmental and human resources. And, if you're putting together a crisis team for a chemical processing plant, its a cinch your team will have to have at least some chemical engineers on it.

If you already have a crisis team designated, take a look at its members. Does it really make sense? Is it too top heavy? Do you need to replace or add members? Would the members really have the time they would need to devote to handling a real crisis?

Once you've decided who should be on your team, set up a full-day, or more for intensive media training, including on-camera mock interviews and realistic role-playing in simulated disasters.

Remember, if you really want the media training to be an important part of your crisis management program, it has to do more than just have you get up in front of a television camera and answer questions posed by someone "playing" reporter. That might help you get rid of the fear of being "on television," but it won't help you and your colleagues handle a crisis.

A good program should spend at least as much time training you to develop messages as it does on delivering them.

To be most effective, the media training should be tailored specifically for your organization and offered in an environment in which frankness is encouraged and confidentiality totally protected. It's usually best to hold the training away from your plant in a neighboring hotel or conference center so participants won't be interrupted or tempted to return to their office whenever there's a break. Workshops should be kept relatively small, even if it means breaking up the crisis team into more than one group for media training. If the group's too large, there's not as much opportunity for individual participation and active participation is a key to learning in media training.

The program itself should include a "baseline" interview from which the instructor and participants can determine the areas that need the most work. The ultimate direction of the workshop is often based on the results of those initial interviews.

Participants need to have some working knowledge of the news media, but the primary instruction should be based on determining the message you need to get out, packaging it in a way the media will use it and people will understand it, and delivering it in a way that people can believe what you're saying.

You should learn something about so-called "performing for the media" such as how to stand or where to look and even how to dress for an interview. But what you say and how you say it is a lot more important than how you dress when you're a plant spokesperson at a chemical explosion at 3 o'clock in the morning.

Media training should include on-camera interviews based on simulated incidents that are pertinent to your operation. Once you know the scenario, you should have at least a few minutes to determine the message you want to get across as well as the kinds of questions you might be asked and how you will answer them.

It should be a realistic experience and not just a lecture and televised interviews. It should prepare you to handle telephone interviews and dealing with newspaper and radio reporters as well as the dreaded television interview. The instructors should be knowledgeable of your industry, if not your particular plant. The more they know about your operation and the individuals being trained, the more you'll get from the training. The instructors themselves should have hands-on experience in answering questions in crisis situations, as well as past news media experience in asking tough questions.

Objective critique of your performance is critical if you are to learn anything from your media training. It doesn't have to be an intimidating experience, but you should learn - under some degree of pressure - how to respond to questions, get your points across and avoid rambling and volunteering negative information.

At the very least, an initial news media training session should separate the "probable" company spokespersons who may need advanced training from the "never" company spokespersons who should work quietly behind the scenes and far away from reporters and television cameras. Not just anyone should be cast in the role of company spokesperson and media training is a mechanism to find out who should and who shouldn't.

Finally, media training should provide you not only with skills in handling interviews, but with the kind of information you need to help develop your operation's own crisis plan and crisis management strategy.

It's a chance to test and often burst theories on how you think you should react to a real crisis.

Armed with the skills and background you can learn from media training, you can develop or revise your crisis plan, hopefully realizing now that even the best of plans will only be a resource and not a magic formula with an answer for every question you may face in a real disaster.

For starters, most corporate crisis plans - if they even exist - probably are in need of a serious overhaul. Too often, they are obligatory responses to a corporate mandate. Some look nice. Others even show signs of remarkable ingenuity. Overall though, most seem to be so comprehensive, bulky and overly detailed that they may be of little use to anyone during a real crisis.

Too often, they've been written by people other than those who will be handling the actual crisis. Too often, they deal with well-intentioned theories of what should be done in a crisis rather than what can be done.

A good crisis plan should make at least three major assumptions:

1. When a crisis hits, most of the crisis team will either be on vacation, or on a business trip out of the country.
2. Your designated spokesperson has a case of frazzled nerves or laryngitis.
3. No one will be able to find the crisis plan, or even worse...no one knows you have a crisis plan.

Realizing first that no crisis plan is a substitute for a well-trained crisis team, here are some pointers on putting together a document that could be of help during a real crisis:

• Keep it simple. In a real crisis, no one has time to read a philosophical thesis. They want to know what they're supposed to do and they want help.
• Arrange it in logical sections with directories and index tabs so you can find exactly what you need without having to read the entire document.
• Give some thought to design. Use plenty of headlines, subheads and large type. This is a document that will be updated from now on, so use a three-ring binder that can accommodate changes as well as wear and tear. Print it on water/soil resistent paper.
• Don't be hesitant to use flow-charts, contact trees and check lists of all types. Anything that makes the plan easier to understand and easier to use makes it more valuable to you.
• Think of the various types of disasters you might encounter at your facility, i.e., chemical spill, fire, explosion, environmental incident, etc. Have statements and news releases dealing with each written before the crisis. Use facts from the real incident to fill in the blanks.
• Identify team members and alternates and know where you can locate them. Outline each member's responsibility.
• Have an established procedure to make sure that everyone who should be notified in a crisis is notified.
• Make sure it has an up-to-date media contact section with names, affiliation and phone numbers. A similar directory is necessary for regulatory and emergency departments as well as civic officials.
• Don't forget fact sheets on the company, what you make and how you make it and background information on the various types of chemicals you use.
• Include procedures for notifying neighbors in the event of danger or an evacuation. Make sure someone is in charge of community notification and knows exactly what needs to be done. Don't count on the crisis team leader. In a real crisis, the leader will have his or her hands full with handling the crisis itself.
• In addition to the crisis team, assign someone to be in charge of the crisis center and another person assigned to work with the news media, not as a spokesperson, but as a coordinator between the reporters and the company.
• Designate one primary spokesperson for each facility, but make sure all crisis team members are trained as potential spokespersons.
• It's not a pleasant task, but you'll need some one designated with instructions on notifying next of kin in the event of serious injuries or fatalities.

If you want to see if all that training and planning will really work in a real crisis, it needs to be tested in the next best thing to a real crisis....a mock crisis.

While mock crises or disasters have become almost standard for training emergency crews, few are designed to effectively test a company's crisis communications capabilities. To do that, you may have to expand your standard emergency drill, or create a new one with the specific purpose of testing crisis communications.

The problem with too many mock disasters is they aren't realistic enough, don't have enough media involvement, too many people know about them in advance and there's not an effective method to gauge their success.

If you really want to test your crisis plan and your crisis team, you have to be more imaginative than just staging a fire or an explosion and see how people react to it. A certain degree of Murphy's Law has to be built into it. In real life, things do go wrong...at the worst time.

First, plan your disaster for the worst time possible and keep its date and time a secret. If you stage it at night or on a weekend, it can be a real test of your notification procedures.

When a Midwest company recently staged a simulated major disaster on a Sunday morning, management was chagrined to find out less than half the crisis team was ever notified.

Hire former professional journalists to act as reporters, have plenty of them and let them do their job. Record the whole event on television videotape so you can critique it later.

Effective mock disasters are never easy. It can take six months or longer just planning one and more than a year implementing changes in your crisis plan and training program that result from it. In one recent mock disaster, there were more than 100 recommendations for improvement that resulted in priority implementation. One recommendation: an overhaul of the company's crisis plan. Another: a complete revamping of the company's security system.

Yet despite the time and effort that can be spent on a mock disaster, it may well be the only way short of a real crisis to test your organization's crisis management capabilities.

It's probably a safe bet that if something doesn't work the way it is supposed to in a mock disaster, it won't work in a real one either.

Crisis planning, training and testing can be time consuming as well as expensive, but as long as there is a potential for crises, chemical companies have to be prepared to deal with them. That means continually revising crisis plans, not just updating contact lists, but making sure the plans are pertinent to the company's current operations and are meaningful and helpful to the current crisis team that will use it.

More importantly, it means a serious and continuing commitment to training and retraining, practice drills and mock disasters.

When you consider the potential public relations fallout from a mishandled crisis, increased emphasis on planning and training may be a small investment.