National Tsunami Awareness Week: How to Prepare
By: Kat Wilkerson, Content Marketing Specialist, Alertus Technologies
There has never been a more critical time to prepare for natural disasters.
Although the end of National Tsunami Awareness Week is approaching, raising awareness and ensuring your organization has an emergency preparedness plan for this natural disaster is still important.
By definition, a tsunami is a long high sea wave caused by an earthquake, submarine landslide, or other disturbance.
Tsunami preparedness is becoming more prevalent in the 21st century as people migrate toward the coast, and climate change causes sea levels to rise. High-risk states in the U.S. include Oregon, Alaska, Hawaii, California, and Washington. However, preparedness measures shouldn’t be limited to these states alone, and people everywhere need to know how to protect themselves from a disaster of such magnitude.
Tsunami Safety Protocols:
Prepare Before – Develop a training and response program and regularly test employees and plans, including evacuation routes, shelter options, and recovery strategies. If exercises don’t go as planned, reevaluate and retest as needed.
Survive During – Listen to the warning signs. If you are in a tsunami area, implement the training you learned and follow evacuation authorities.
Be Safe After – Wait until authorities confirm the natural disaster is over. Stay away from damaged buildings, roads, and bridges, and avoid wading in flood water.
When faced with an emergency, it’s critical to deliver site-specific, fast, and detailed notifications to the people who need them the most. Organizations must communicate quickly and effectively to mitigate harm and destruction, so outfitting your community with a mass notification system (MNS) will provide quicker communication and ensure you are more protected.
Alertus solutions to help you stay safe
Mobile & Personal Notification
Requesting help or reporting an incident should be easy. Alertus’ Recipient App allows users to share their location, attach a picture and a customized message, or use preset incident buttons to notify local authorities of multiple incident types.
High Power Speaker Array (HPSA)
Quickly launching long-range spoken messages to a broad audience during a natural disaster can help mitigate risk and save lives. Alertus’ HPSA offers key mass notification features for outdoor environments where a giant voice is needed to make announcements concerning severe weather, evacuation details, or general reports.
Weather Monitoring
While it may seem like severe weather is occasional, it’s happening more frequently than you think. Alertus ThreatWatcher™ can automatically broadcast real-time weather updates and up-to-the-minute, site-specific warnings to multiple Alertus alerting modalities. These automatic broadcasts ensure accurate notifications for safe and timely sheltering during a natural disaster.
The most important natural disaster preparedness step is familiarizing yourself with your area’s hazards. With reliable plans and a better understanding of the hazardous weather likely to impact your unique location, you will be more prepared for tsunamis and prevent unnecessary loss to your communities.
Additional Resources
Blog: Prepare Your Business for Severe Weather Threats
To help you prepare for any situation, we’re diving into some of the most common emergencies: severe weather, emergency evacuation, emergency lockdown, and fire.
Guide: National Preparedness Resources
View numerous resources for maintaining business continuity before, during, and after emergencies.