National Preparedness Month: Prepare, Plan, and Stay Informed
By Kara Stamets, Content Marketing Specialist at Alertus Technologies
September is National Preparedness Month (NPM), and there has never been a more critical time to prepare for natural disasters. This year, severe weather-related emergencies have wreaked havoc worldwide – intense heat, wildfires, and drought in southern Europe; damaging floods and tornadoes in the United States; and significant flooding in Australia, just to name some.
Launched in 2004 by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), NPM intends to educate Americans on preparing for and responding to natural disasters and other emergencies. FEMA and The National Weather Service (NWS) recommend that organizations should:
Stay informed. Sign up to receive wireless emergency alerts, listen to NOAA Weather Radio, and check social media for updates from local authorities. Plan for natural disasters and other hazards, understand your risks, and research evacuation routes and shelter locations.
Make a plan. Develop an emergency response plan for your organization to utilize as soon as a disaster occurs.
Build supply kits. Organizations should urge employees to assemble emergency supply kits. Natural disasters may cause power outages, so it is essential to add food, water, and other supplies to kits that will be useful in an emergency. Check out this recommended supply kit.
Get involved. Help prepare your local community for natural disasters. Volunteer with local organizations active in disasters, such as the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and others.
To kick off NPM, we spoke to Gil Zavlodaver, Director of Professional Services at Alertus and an emergency preparedness expert, to learn more about how organizations can better prepare for natural disasters and emergencies.
Please tell us about your experience in emergency management.
I have over 12 years of experience working as an emergency manager in the public and private sectors. I spent most of my career working for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office of Emergency Services (OES) in Southern California in emergency preparedness and education, mitigation, response, recovery, plan development, and grant administration. At OES, I worked my way up the ranks and oversaw dozens of disasters, from wildfires and hazardous material releases to mass shootings and the COVID-19 pandemic.
I currently serve as Director of Professional Services at Alertus Technologies, where I help customers develop and enhance their emergency management programs.
How can organizations better prepare for disasters?
There are several emergency preparedness activities organizations can engage in to better handle any type of disaster, whether that be natural, human-caused, or technological. First and foremost, organizations should invest time and resources into developing an all-hazard emergency management program that addresses all phases of emergency management, including preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery.
An emergency management program should involve developing:
An Emergency Operations Plan or Emergency Response Plan
An Emergency Notification System Plan
A Business Continuity Plan
Hazard/Threat Identification and Risk Assessments
An Exercise and Training Program
Organizations should then identify gaps and weaknesses in their program and invest resources into closing those gaps.
How can organizations ensure business continuity when emergencies occur?
Organizations should develop business continuity plans that address their approach to handling all-hazard threats that could significantly disrupt their day-to-day operations.
When developing a business continuity plan, companies should:
Identify risks and hazards
Conduct a business impact analysis
Develop recovery strategies that focus on saving lives and identifying and restoring critical functions and services
Develop a training and exercise program and regularly tests their employees and plans
Implement corrective actions from real-world events and exercises to evaluate their plan, make changes, and update their plans as needed
How should companies organize their disaster preparedness plan? What should be included?
Initially, organizations should conduct a threat, hazard identification, and risk assessment (THIRA) to identify and prioritize risks that may impact their organization. Hazards must be ranked high to low to help organizations prioritize and determine their response capabilities to handle these hazards or threats.
There is no better way to test your capabilities than to develop a comprehensive and robust emergency training and exercise program. Organizations should regularly train their employees and conduct exercises to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their emergency management programs and make plans to improve where needed.
Organizations should also include an Employee Education and Awareness Plan in their program to ensure that their employees are each personally prepared to handle disasters. If employees and their families are unprepared, how do we expect them to return to work and help the organization recover? Time and resources must be invested in these programs to advance employee preparedness.
How often should you practice and update your disaster preparedness plan?
Organizations should hold regular training and exercises to test, evaluate, validate, and improve their emergency response plans, processes, procedures, and agreements on a yearly basis, whether quarterly, bi-annually or annually. They should update those plans when they have lessons learned from real-world events. If exercises don’t go as planned, reevaluate and retest as needed. Have a schedule that all employees know of, and commit to consistently updating your programs.
In Ventura County, we were required to update specific plans, such as our Emergency Operations Plan, every three years and a local Hazard Mitigation Plan every five years. I suggest that organizations examine their plans annually, even if they are not required to do so.
How should leadership communicate the plan with employees and management?
Open dialogue and communication from the leadership team to employees is critical. This can be accomplished by developing an emergency preparedness and education program to include regular outreach activities with employees.
Organizations can use NPM to educate and train employees on what to expect during an emergency, such as receiving Emergency Notifications, understanding evacuation procedures, or sheltering-in-place. Questions to consider while developing safety procedures can be:
If employees must evacuate the building, where are they going to go?
How are you conducting employee accountability and safety?
How will your organization communicate critical information to employees during an emergency, and how should they communicate back to you?
What protective actions (evacuate vs. shelter-in-place) and instructions should employees follow to safeguard their lives?
The leadership team should be proactive, regularly communicate the aspects of their emergency response plans, be honest with employees about threats, and what to expect during an emergency, and empower employees to take action to save their own lives.
Webinar
In this on-demand webinar, “September: National Preparedness Month – Training & Exercise Program,” you’ll explore how a training and exercise program is a vital emergency preparedness activity that organizations should incorporate to test, evaluate, validate, and improve their emergency response capabilities.