Preparing business for disasters like hurricanes

Are You Prepared For Disaster?

How often do you think about a disaster hitting your business? Most people don’t and yet it’s one of the most important things you should consider when you are buying things like business insurance and setting up your health and safety policies. Your employees are important, as is the space in which you occupy for your business. If you are not protected properly, the tornado alarm going off or the fire breaking out are not going to be easy to overcome. You need to know how to handle an earthquake, a storm so bad you lose power and even a bomb going off. Disasters happen every single day, and if you’re not preparing properly, it’s lives that are at stake. Are you willing to be the business that takes that risk? Of course, you’re not.

Disasters are not something that happen with plenty of warning to get you to a safe space. They happen out of the blue, and while you can prepare with Diesel Generators to reboot the power when the main lines go out, you need to do more and be more prepared for your staff if not for yourself. Every single business needs to have an emergency plan, a “just in case” so that they can get themselves ready for anything that may come their way. 

It starts with having the right plan in place for your business. The disaster preparation that you get will depend on your business type, with retailers more likely to have tighter disaster plans than smaller businesses. You need to assess the worst case scenarios for your business and know exactly where the problems may be. Once you do this, you can work out your appropriate response and identify the hazards that will directly affect your business. You need these policies to be written out properly and your staff need the right training, too. If you do this you’re going to be able to educate everyone on what to do should disaster strike. 

Along with an education seminar, you should also have emergency notification systems installed in your business. As you would with tornado alarms, you need to let people know exactly what’s going wrong and when. It can be anything from a company text message to a very loud alarm signal to notify that there is an emergency occurring. Each business has to have their own chain of command for these alerts, with a hierarchy to ensure that people are told what to do and when. Putting people in charge is a must and you must let people know that they have somewhere safe to go, which is why you need leaders to take groups of people to dedicated evacuation sites.

The safety of your staff is so important, so make sure that you have an emergency plan in place and you’ll be able to keep everyone in one piece should a disaster hit. Your people and your business deserve safety and security, and you can offer it to all.