Disaster Preparedness Blog

Entries in Business continuity (7)

Thursday

18Feb2010

Plane Crash in Palo Alto Causes Many Businesses and Community to Activate Disaster Plans

Thursday, February 18, 2010 at 11:34AM

As I often say, business disruptions come in many forms, not just from earthquakes, tornadoes and hurricanes.

This point made clear again from the events yesterday morning when a small plane struck a tower that was a single point of failure which carried electricity to the Palo Alto power grid.

The loss of power disrupted roughly 28,000 customers which included, 240 startups and high tech companies such as Facebook headquarters (the Facebook site was unaffected), VMware, and HP. At least Two medical facilities were on back-up generators and had to cancel elective surgeries and re-route emergency patients to other area hospitals.

At least two cell towers were not working, and some land-line services were disrupted, and the areas banks had to activate their contingency plans.

Authorities were asking people not to call 911 regarding the outage, and to reduce water usage.

You can see more on the City of Palo Alto site.

Tesla Motors suffered the worst loss. The three people who died in the plane were employees of the company, and my thoughts and prayers go out to them, their business, and family members who are affected by the loss.

If any good might come from such a tragedy I hope that it makes people aware how vulnerable we are to events such as this, both in our personal lives and from the point of view of business.

AP News Video

Keith Erwood |

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Monday

07Dec2009

Free Report: How to Create a Corporate Culture Dedicated to Business Continuity

Monday, December 7, 2009 at 2:25PM

This is a recent article I created and give to my clients through my business website at Continuity Corporation. Recently people have doing some relevent searches here on my blog so I thought I would make a few small changes and share one of them here.

How to Create a Corporate Culture Dedicated to Business Continuity -

If you would like more of these please let me know.

Keith Erwood |

Disaster Tip of The Week: Have A Battery Powered Radio and Extra Batteries

Monday, November 2, 2009 at 5:00AM

When a catastrophic disaster occurs it often results in the loss of power. However, many radio stations will still be able to transmit information over the air waves.

In order to hear this information, and hear news about highways, rescues, orders to evacute and other important information you will need to have either a battery powered radio, a solar powered radio or a radio that works when you wind it up.

The radios I personally use work with both batteries and through winding it up, but everyone has there own preference.

One important thing to remember though is if your radio uses only battery power, make sure you have plenty of extra fresh batteries on hand.

Also excellent and highly recommended are the NOAA weather alert radios that you can set to come on during an emergency.

No matter what type you prefer just choose something and keep it in your disaster kit.

Keith Erwood |

Bay Bridge Closure and How to Mitigate Workforce Disruptions

Thursday, October 29, 2009 at 12:00PM

Workforce disruptions can be caused by a large number of different events such as strikes, protests, workplace violence, absenteeism due to illness (think pandemics and epidemics like the current H1N1 virus) and even transportation issues.

Typically the impact of these events can be mitigated, but to do so requires planning for the event ahead of time. Including these types of events in your continuity planning and enterprise resilience will certainly put you ahead of the game when these incidents arise.

In the past I have witnessed several of these types of disruptions in both large and small scales and in many of these cases the businesses that had plans in place fair far better than those that do not.

In the last two months the Bay Bridge has been closed down twice for repairs. The first was a planned shut down during a holiday weekend, but extended due to discoveries of needed repairs. The second occurred after the recent repair job failed.

There are many ways to mitigate the impact from these events ranging from staggered and flexible work hours for employees, making arrangements for key employees to stay in other locations, having some employees work from home, car pools, planned shuttle services, utilization of other transportation services, etc.

Each of these can help your business reduce impacts from these types of events and each of these also presents their own problems which is why you should be planning these things in advance and making them a part of your continuity management programs.

Knowing what you will do in these types of events will also assist you for planing other events that may also cause workforce disruptions. If you are considering creating a plan or would like other solutions to supplement what you are already doing please give us the opportunity to assist you. Visit our site at: Continuity Corporation or give as a call 877-565-8324

Keith Erwood |

The Loss of a Key Employee Can Be Devastating To a Business

Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 5:00AM

Many businesses have Key Employees who are the only people responsible for specific duties, and often these are critical, core functions to the business. Often these employees will also have the only access to certain information that may be needed to perform some of these critical functions and operations.

The impact on the business after the loss of a key employee can be severe and can include but are not limited to the following:

The distraction of other employees, resulting in missed opportunities and deadlines, deteriorating morale, and internal conflicts

The loss of confidence from employees, managers and financial backers of the business and can include both suppliers and customers

The business may suffer a weakening of their credit rating.

The financial cost (in time and dollars) to find, hire and train a replacement.

A need for immediate cash to fulfill promises made to the deceased employee's spouse or family, such as salary continuation or deferred compensation or other incentives promised.

The business might also fail to capitalize on important business opportunities because cash reserves are being used to recruit and train the new employee(s) or pay out compensation.

Fortunately there are a number of things you can do to mitigate these issues the first of which is consider key employee insurance. Documenting the processes acurately that the Key Employee is responsible for is another.