The Risk We Wrote Down and Ignored Anyway

The generators ran the whole camp in Nigeria. Lights, power tools, everything. They also ran the water, pumped straight through the same setup that kept the lights on and the tools charged.

Nobody thought twice about that setup, right up until the fuel truck didn’t arrive.

Work stopped. Crews got sent back to their rooms and told to ration whatever bottled water they had left, the kind you’d normally drink through in an afternoon, now expected to stretch across days. Two systems everyone treated as separate turned out to be one system wearing two hats, and when the fuel ran out, both went down together.

“The Country Virtually Drifts on Oil”

Here’s the part that actually bothers me, looking back. This exact scenario sat in the project risk assessment. Fuel shortage, generator dependency, water supply tied to the same source. Written down, signed off, filed.

Nobody took it seriously. The general feeling on site was simple. We’re in Nigeria. The country virtually drifts on oil. What’s the actual chance we run dry?

That’s not risk management. That’s a risk assessment used as a formality, ticked off because the template demanded a line item, never treated like something that could actually happen to us specifically, on this camp, this week.

Turns out the chance was a hundred per cent.

What a Few Days Without Water Actually Looks Like

Hygiene became a real concern fast. Not a talking point in a meeting, an actual concern, with actual people, in actual heat, counting out the last few bottles between them and doing the maths on how many days that actually bought.

Management kept telling everyone they were doing their best to source diesel. It didn’t feel like it. Days passed. The updates stayed vague. The tone stayed calm in a way that felt more like managing the message than managing the problem.

The local community solved what management couldn’t. Word got out fast that the camp had no water, and within days, people from town were walking up to the fence selling us water by the bucket. Not a formal arrangement. Not a contingency plan anyone had written down. Just people who saw a gap and filled it, faster and more reliably than the system that was supposed to be covering us in the first place.

I ended up becoming friendly with a few of the guys selling water. Good people, doing what good people do when they see someone in genuine need and a chance to help while helping themselves too. I still think about that more than the diesel truck that eventually showed up.

When It Ended, Nothing Changed

The diesel arrived. Generators came back online. Water came back on. Within a day, it was like it never happened.

Nobody revisited the risk assessment. Nobody built in a genuinely separate contingency for water, one that didn’t depend on the same fuel supply as everything else on site. The lesson that should have been obvious got filed away with the incident itself, the moment things went back to normal.

The one group that didn’t just snap back to normal was the community. Once our generators were running again, the income they’d been earning selling us water disappeared overnight. We got our convenience back. They lost the only extra income that crisis had briefly given them.

Same Risk. Smaller Room. Same Assumption of Abundance.

IRMSA’s Risk Report ranks critical infrastructure failure fourth nationally. Energy, water, transport, ICT systems everyone assumes will simply keep working because they always have.

That assumption is the actual risk. Not the failure itself; the failure was always possible. The dangerous part is believing abundance is guaranteed just because it’s familiar.

A country that “virtually drifts on oil” still runs dry. A grid that’s always been there still goes down. The infrastructure risk sitting quietly at number four on a national report is the exact same complacency that let a documented risk sit untouched in our own risk assessment, right up until it happened.

We had the fix available the whole time, too, and never used it. A second, independent water supply. Not linked to the generators. Not dependent on the same fuel truck. It would have cost almost nothing to set up in advance, and everything to not have when we actually needed it.

We had the warning in writing. We just never believed we’d need to read it again.