How to Prepare Your Business for Extreme Weather Events

8/15/2022 (Permalink)

How to Prepare Your Business for Extreme Weather Events

When a Storm damages your home or property, it's essential to understand that every damage requires a specific solution. However, the process to address this issue, such as cleanup and restoration, remains the same.

Storms and inclement weather can be devastating to any business. Wind damage, heavy rain, and flooding can occur suddenly and cause substantial damage in minutes. There's never a convenient time for flooding or storm damage to strike your business. Every hour spent cleaning up is an hour of lost revenue and productivity.

Heavy rains, tornadoes, severe weather, or a water flood at home can be very stressful to measure and even more stressful to overcome. But it's a serious issue that needs an emergency action plan at home or office. How to be prepared when storm damage cleanup and restoration are required? As you design your plan, here are some key considerations:

1. Potential emergency scenarios: The first step in developing an emergency response plan is conducting a risk assessment to identify possible emergency scenarios. Understanding what can happen will enable you to determine resource requirements and develop strategies and procedures to prepare your business.
2. Emergency Plan: Write a business continuity plan with specific steps to get your operations back on track. Try to include different "what-if?" scenarios with realistic solutions.

• Protective actions for life safety: Every facility should develop and implement an emergency plan for protecting employees, visitors, contractors, and anyone else in the facility. Includes building evacuation ("fire drills"), sheltering from severe weather such as tornadoes, and "shelter-in-place" from an exterior airborne hazard such as a chemical release and lockdown.
• Minimize potential damage to your physical property
• Secure records and data: If your business relies heavily on the bits and bytes on your computers, you need backup plans with multiple redundancies. Scan important documents and include them in your digital backups. Use software to automatically run scheduled backups to external local hard drives and regularly backup to remote servers using a cloud-based service.
• Operate from remote locations
• Communicate with your workforce and customers

3. Create a comprehensive emergency plan that fits your business needs: If a facility is damaged, production machinery breaks down, a supplier fails to deliver, or information technology is disrupted, business is impacted, and the financial losses can begin to grow. Recovery strategies are alternate means to restore business operations to a minimum acceptable level following a business disruption and are prioritized by the recovery time objectives of your business.
4. Schedule regular drills: to test the effectiveness of your emergency plan and keep employees up to speed on what to do – and what not to do.
5. Sheltering: The actions taken in the initial minutes of an emergency are critical. Promptly warning employees to evacuate, shelter or lockdown can save lives.

• Tornado: If a tornado warning is broadcast, a special warning signal should be sounded, and everyone should move to shelter in the strongest part of the building. Shelters may include basements or interior rooms with reinforced masonry construction. Evaluate potential shelters and conduct a drill to see whether shelter space can hold all employees. Since there may be little time to shelter when a tornado is approaching, early warning is essential.
• Thunderstorm: If there is a severe thunderstorm, monitor news sources in case a tornado warning is broadcast. Consider purchasing an Emergency Alert System radio - available at many electronic stores. Tune in to weather warnings broadcast by local radio and television station

6. Stabilization of the incident: Many actions can be taken to stabilize an incident and minimize potential damage. First aid and CPR by trained employees can save lives. Regulations may require you to take action before emergency services arrive. Depending upon the response time and capabilities of public emergency services and the hazards and resources within your facility, you may choose to do more to prepare for these incidents.

Developing an emergency plan begins with an understanding of what can happen. Review your risk assessment. Consider the performance objectives that you established for your program and decide how much you want to invest in planning beyond what is required by regulations.

Assess what resources are available for incident stabilization. Consider internal and external resources, including public emergency services and contractors such as SERVPRO of Martin County.

The SERVPRO Disaster Recovery Team can provide help whether you're dealing with a tornado, hurricane, blizzard, or flood. The SERVPRO System has a network of strategically positioned storm teams on standby should a disaster strike near you. Available 24 hours a day and 365 days a year, we are prepared for the unpredictable.

With the ability to mobilize local command centers and the resources of more than 2010 Franchises nationwide, no disaster is too big. Recent mobilizations of the Catastrophic Storm Response Teams include:

• 2017 California wildfires
• 2017 Hurricane Irma
• 2017 Hurricane Harvey
• 2016 Hurricane Matthew
• 2015 Carolina floods
• 2014 Polar Vortex
• 2012 Sandy
• 2010 Nashville floods
• 2008 Ike
• 2007 Chicago floods
• 2007 Ohio floods
• 2007 California wildfires
• 2005 Katrina/Wilma/Rita

First of all, keep our number handy! SERVPRO of Martin County (772) 334-8762

Second, rest assured that when we are in place, our professionals, specialized in cleanup and restoration techniques and equipment, will overcome storm and flood damage the fastest and the correct way. No matter the day or time of the year, we offer our community advanced water inspection, extraction, and drying equipment to overcome this issue anytime!

Our experience and scientific methods of water removal and cleanup allow us to properly dry and restore your home or property. So when an emergency arises in your business, call us at (772) 334-8762, and we'll be there fast with the help you need.

• 24 Hour Emergency Service
• Faster to Any Size Disaster
• A Trusted Leader in the Storm and Water Restoration Industry with over 2010 Franchises
• Highly Trained Storm and Water Damage Restoration Specialists