With the severe weather that has been around, I thought this would be a good time to talk about weather related emergencies, training using tabletop scenarios prior to an event and the use of Blazemark® pre plans for your facilities.
Often times, we hear great concern from clients for “Hurricane” events. The difference between a “Tropical Storm” vs. Hurricane in wind speed is about two miles/hr. and often times tropical storms do more damage! A key point with hurricane or tropical storms, we almost always have weeks of advance notice to plan and prepare.
What about a “no notice event” like a tornado? We might have minutes to prepare or seek shelter.
I think a good place to always start thinking about managing a response is with Incident Command System RefresherTraining (ICS):
What’s ICS buy us in the corporate or first responder environments?
- Gain Further Understanding of ICS and incident management concepts
- Enhance Size-up and Communications Skills Specifically Field to Management
- Practice Skills in Tabletop Exercise Involving Multitasking
– Refresh staff ability to respond to credible site emergencies safely and effectively
The online basic FEMA classes are good and they don’t cost anything! We recommend NIMS 100, 700 and 800 https://training.fema.gov/nims/
What are some Tabletop Exercise Goals:
- Practice an integrated response involving both site operations and management team personnel along with outside responders if possible. Most municipalities like to have a partnership with their tax paying businesses. I always tell folks, “You don’t want to be meeting your fire or police chiefs for the first time when something is going wrong.”
- Enable responders (Emergency Response Team) to size up a situation, and assess needs in a “no notice” tornado event and then a “notice” hurricane event.
- Enable ERT responders to command and coordinate a response involving several aspects involving both a “back shift” and a “day time” response.
All of the response and planning above, ie., “Emergency Response Plan” and “Crisis Response Plan” typically occurs before the business continuity plan kicks in. One goal of having a good pre plan is to keep whatever incident is going on at the lowest possible level.