Being Prepared for a Natural Disaster

When disaster strikes, how ready are you, personally and professionally? When Hurricane Sandy hit New England last year we were thankful that no one in our Fairway family experienced any damage or loss.

But our office was without power for three-and-one-half days. By the end of that first day every employee was set up to work from home. Some already had company provided laptops, others reached out to our IT department and got their home computers outfitted with the correct software and security to work from home. In one case we had a computer shipped overnight so that our underwriter could work the next day.

We were thankful that this power outage had occurred later on in the winter when we had some bad snow days. Having had the opportunity to prepare everyone to work from home already, we told the staff to stay home until they heard from us so that we didn’t have to sweat that terrible process of determining if we should open the office in bad weather. 

Part of being prepared for a major storm is knowing how you are going to manage your business, your employees, and respond to and communicate with your clients. Having a plan and strategy will take away a lot of the anxiety that comes with storm warnings. Unfortunately, many times we wait until we are in the middle of the crisis to figure out how to respond. 

Luckily, there is a lot of helpful information to guide your emergency planning.

Below is an emergency planning form for businesses that you might find helpful, covering everything from contact information for the primary decision maker, to handling information systems back-up plans and convening with other groups, organizations and agencies.

http://www.ready.gov/sites/default/files/documents/files/sampleplan.pdf

The next part is insuring that you and your family will be safe and comfortable as well. The CDC suggests that you have enough supplies, especially water, to last from three days to two weeks depending how remote the area you live is. You can find more home emergency preparedness information here:

http://emergency.cdc.gov/preparedness/kit/disasters/

Click here to donate directly to the Red Cross in Oklahoma to support the tornado relief efforts there.

As we are entering hurricane season, this week is officially Hurricane Preparedness Week! Click here for more information and a downloadable app for real time hurricane safety tips.

As Benjamin Franklin famously said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” Harsh but true in this day and age of increasingly dramatic weather events! Now is the time for us all to spend some time “preparing.”