Will You be Ready if Disaster Strikes? - Business Continuity Plan

A business needs to be able to react immediately and confidently after a disaster, so it can quickly re-open and minimize loss. Below are plans the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recommends developing to ensure workplaces are ready when a flood, tornado, earthquake, fire, hurricane, or other disasters.

With June 1 officially being the start of the 2014 Hurricane season, a business needs to be able to react immediately and confidently after a disaster, so it can quickly minimize losses and get back up and running. Follow along this week as we provide 5 valuable Emergency plans the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recommends developing to ensure workplaces are ready when a flood, tornado, earthquake, fire, hurricane, or other disaster occurs. 
#3 - Business Continuity Plan
This plan is crucial to help minimize your business’ disruption, reduce financial loss, and retain your customers. When developing a continuity plan, conduct an impact analysis to pinpoint time-sensitive or essential business functions, and the resources and processes they require. Once the initial analysis is complete, write processes for recovering these functions and resources during an emergency. Create a business continuity group that will practice, test, and be trained to implement the plan.

Will You be Ready if Disaster Strikes? - Crisis Communication Plan

With June 1 officially being the start of the 2014 Hurricane season, a business needs to be able to react immediately and confidently after a disaster, so it can quickly minimize losses and get back up and running. Follow along this week as we provide 5 valuable Emergency plans the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recommends developing to ensure workplaces are ready when a flood, tornado, earthquake, fire, hurricane, or other disaster occurs. 

#2 - Crisis Communication Plan

When a disaster happens, your business needs plans that will allow you to quickly and accurately communicate with customers, employees and their families, suppliers, regulators, government officials, the media, the community, and other stakeholders. Each of these audiences will want to know immediately if and how they will be impacted. A crisis communication plan will help your business get the right messages to the right people in a timely and positive fashion. Often this plan will include descriptions of key audiences and their anticipated concerns, assignments for who will communicate with each audience and how, and scripted message templates.

Will You be Ready if Disaster Strikes? - Emergency Response Plan

With June 1 officially being the start of the 2014 Hurricane season, a business needs to be able to react immediately and confidently after a disaster, so it can quickly minimize losses and get back up and running. Follow along this week as we provide 5 valuable Emergency plans the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recommends developing to ensure workplaces are ready when a flood, tornado, earthquake, fire, hurricane, or other disaster occurs. 

 

# 1 -  Emergency Response Plan
 
Planning for how your business will protect your employees, visitors, property, and the environment during and after a disaster includes processes for evacuation, lockdown, sheltering, and other site-specific responses. Safety is the top priority when developing this plan, and it should also include a post-disaster process for cleaning up, evaluating damage, salvaging property, and protecting undamaged property. These efforts will help reduce business disruption and damage.

 

Firms gird for climate change

Reprinted  in part from The Boston Globe

 

While little action is expected from Congress on climate change, many businesses in Boston and beyond are taking matters into their own hands, preparing for a warmer world in which severe weather, rising sea levels, and increased flooding threaten property, operations, and earnings.

Developers have moved electrical units from the basements to rooftops of buildings in the Seaport District along Boston Harbor. Utilities in New England have elevated substations several feet above the ground and replaced wooden electrical poles with steel ones that can withstand powerful winds.

Insurance companies, in response to clients, are testing products designed to protect against varied effects of climate change, and providing more coverage against natural disasters. The Hartford insurance company now offers small businesses policies against losses due to widespread power outages, a growing concern as major storms occur more frequently.

A recent federal study warned that the climate in the United States was changing at a faster pace due to the burning of fossil fuels - such as oil, coal, and natural gas - that emit greenhouse gases blamed for rising global temperatures. The Northeast, the study found, would be particularly hard hit as climate change accelerates, baked by heat waves and flooded by rising sea levels and torrential downpours.