Subject: Transredes Oil Spills: Possible PR Cases for your Wednesday Meeting
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2000 07:18:00 -0700 (PDT)

Mark: 

Although it's oftentimes difficult to quantify or establish a cause and 
effect relationship between PR and Enron's bottom line, the contributions 
that the PR Houston team made in mitigating the effects of the largest oil 
spill in Bolivia's history might be an exception to the rule.  As you know, 
Transredes experienced two oil spills that were classified as crises:  a 29 
thousand barrel spill in January (Desaguadero) and a smaller one (Chorety) 
this past July.  In both instances, PR staff from Houston were dispatched to 
Bolivia to develop an lead a  crisis communication plan. 

The January crisis garnered enormous daily coverage and attention throughout 
the country and region. Under Dennis' leadership, an ambitious 
communication's plan was designed and implemented to mitigate the spill's 
repercussions in the international media and NGO community.  The failure to 
manage expectations was critical considering we were also building the Cuiaba 
pipeline at the same time. During this period, the Enron Stcok price 
continued to grow from somewhere in the 50's to the 70's. Had the team failed 
to communicate effectively to all constituents, this could have adversely 
affected our brand and stock price--since the media and international NGO's 
were tracking our daily performance.   The ability to engage, counsel and 
coordinate across the business groups and organizations had a significant 
result on our ability to execute our plan.  Dennis was recognized by Shell, 
our partner in Transedres, for his leadership and personal commitment to the 
process during the January spill.  I played a similar role with the second 
crisis, which was far less significant than the first one--though it had the 
potential to become damaging.  During this whole period NGO's have tried to 
undermine our financing efforts at OPIC and the Inter-American Development 
Bank, so failure to live up to our enviormental and humanitarian commitments 
could have been disasterous.   

Hopefully, you'll find this useful.   

Keith