Similar to building a winning team before football season, having a well-thought out and practiced disaster preparedness plan helps ensure businesses and local governments have the strength and power to successfully recover in the event of an emergency.
I'm still deployed in Alabama, assisting in the response and recovery following April's storms and 63 tornadoes. Looking forward to September, National Preparedness Month, we are working on a statewide Chamber of Commerce campaign to push out businesses across the state. Is your business or government agency ready if a disaster comes? Have you had a nagging feeling that maybe it isn't?
Off yesterday (finally a Sunday off), I did my weekly shopping and picked up a copy of "O" magazine. This months feature is about intuition. I found the following quote interesting to ponder: Intuition is knowing, without knowing. It's instinctively, knowing something that you don't know how you know.
Have you ever had that feeling you should do something, though at the time it isn't perfectly clear why? A great example about disaster preparedness happened to one Alabama mayor.
Interviewed this past June, Tuscaloosa Mayor Maddox said he'd thought a lot about what could happen in the event of a disaster. He focused mostly on homeland security as thousands of Alabama fans pouring into Tuscaloosa for football games on select Saturday's during the fall. Never in his dreams did he imagine that listening to and then following through with a gut feeling about getting his city staff trained in Incident Command would become a real-life disaster in the form of the worst tornadoes to ever hit the state of Alabama.
Mayor Walter Maddox and his staff took Incident Command System training at the Emergency Management Institute (EMI) one year before the April 27 tornadoes hit the Alabama city of some 180,000.
The exercise scenario that that city officials were presented with in training was almost identical to the real-life storms that devastated much of the university town. The actual tornado took almost the same path - off by maybe a quarter mile the width of the storm as what was practiced in training. Much of what they envisioned would be destroyed - the Emergency Operations Center, the communication tower, the police department and the fire department.
The exercise scenario that that city officials were presented with in training was almost identical to the real-life storms that devastated much of the university town. The actual tornado took almost the same path - off by maybe a quarter mile the width of the storm as what was practiced in training. Much of what they envisioned would be destroyed - the Emergency Operations Center, the communication tower, the police department and the fire department.
Though taking the class at EMI is a very valuable experience, but budgetary constraints right now are making off-site training a challenge for governments and businesses due to the economy.
Even if you don't go to EMI, training is available online for free beginning with IS-100.b - Introduction to Incident Command System to more advanced and specialized classes for different types of businesses, organizations and governments.
I have taken these classes, written disaster preparedness plans, been trained to work in for all types of disasters and worked on the ground in crisis management, disaster response and recovery for the private sector as well as for local and federal governments.
To my coastal friends...this is hurricane season! Don't wait until a hurricane is on the way to write a plan. It is too late then.
And remember that regardless of where you live, emergencies of any kind can and will happen. It is a matter of when not if.
Let me know how I can help you and your business get ready today!
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