Here are some ways you can begin your organization’s disaster planning:
Risk Assessment: Identify the types of natural disasters most likely to affect your region(s) or industry. This could include hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, wildfires, tornadoes, etc. Assess the potential impact of each type of disaster on your organization’s operations, infrastructure, and personnel.
Emergency Response Plan: Create a detailed emergency response plan that outlines specific actions to be taken before, during, and after a natural disaster. This plan should include evacuation procedures, shelter-in-place protocols, communication strategies, and designated roles and responsibilities for employees.
We recommend you also collaborate with local emergency management like first responders, allowing your organization to create more realistic and effective response strategies. This collaboration can provide valuable resources and support during a natural disaster and help streamline response efforts.
Organizational Engagement: Having an emergency plan is great; however, it’s crucial to involve all levels of the organization in the planning process. This helps to ensure everyone is prepared for the disaster and allows for more insightful planning. For example, custodial and maintenance staff often have a deeper understanding of a building’s intricacies and potential issues than the CEO does, and they may provide valuable input for emergency planning procedures.
Communication Plans and Protocols: Build and implement robust communication protocols to ensure timely dissemination of information before, during, and after a natural disaster. This may involve setting up an emergency notification system, establishing communication chains, and providing employees with multiple channels for receiving updates and instructions.
Individual Family Plans: A thorough disaster plan should also include family disaster education for employees. Prioritizing the well-being and safety of staff and their families during a disaster will help ensure that they can continue their work for the organization. All disasters are local.
FEMA’s latest National Preparedness Report indicated that there are “ongoing individual and household preparedness gaps.” Only 42 percent of respondents plan to prepare for identified threats and hazards in the future but have not started, and the percentage of survey participants indicating they did not intend to prepare decreased from 17 percent in 2017 to 9 percent in 2020 but rebounded to 14 percent in 2022. People are experiencing fatigue from preparing for emergencies and disasters.
For more information on how to prepare yourself and your family visit https://ready.gov/be-informed.
Backup Systems and Redundancies: Invest in backup systems and redundancies to minimize the impact of natural disasters on critical operations. This could include backup power generators, redundant data storage systems, and alternative communication channels.
Supply Chain Management: Assess the vulnerability of your supply chain to natural disasters and develop contingency plans to mitigate risks. This could involve diversifying suppliers, stockpiling essential materials, and establishing alternative transportation routes.
Infrastructure Preparedness: Implement measures to enhance the resilience of your facilities to natural disasters. This could include retrofitting buildings to withstand high winds or earthquakes, installing flood barriers, and securing loose objects that could become projectiles in high winds.
Community Engagement: While we expect local and federal governments to maintain robust emergency operations centers, these often aren’t large enough to handle major disasters alone. Prioritizing community disaster education and collaborating with community partners during the planning process significantly enhances disaster response efforts. Many communities are now creating Business Emergency Operations Centers (BEOCs) which highlight the importance of private-public partnerships.
For example, following a disaster, grocery stores play a crucial role in helping the community return to normal. By quickly restoring essential services such as grocery, telecommunications, and banking, a community’s recovery time can be substantially reduced. When these businesses are included in disaster planning, they become integral to community preparedness efforts, allowing the government to be reimbursed for related planning expenses.
Review and Exercise Plans: Regularly review, update and exercise your emergency response plans based on lessons learned from drills, real-world incidents, and changes in your organization or operating environment.
The Importance of Experience: Experience plays a significant role in our preparedness activities. While preparedness is sometimes driven by organizational requirements or regulatory compliance, it is often shaped by past experiences. In hurricane-prone areas, small businesses near the water, which are susceptible to flooding, are typically well-versed in emergency preparations. They are usually the first to sandbag and shutter their windows. In contrast, businesses located further inland may not perceive the threat as urgent.
In some hurricanes, heavy rain and flooding cause more damage than the storm surge, even though the storm surge remains the primary risk. For example, 27 inches of rain fell in a short period during Hurricane Ian in Florida in 2023. Rivers rose 10 feet in just 8 hours, leaving people who planned to evacuate the next day unable to exit their homes due to the high water levels.
