Hurricane Recovery: Restoring Business Operations

If your damage assessment team has found your facility to be unusable, your incident management team will need to find a suitable alternate work location. Mature emergency response programs have prearranged sites selected, either through third party vendors or agreements with sister offices that allow for a ramp up of critical services. Without these prearranged sites, an important task for your incident management team will be to figure out where and how to get the business operating again.

As an organization whose mission is to be a 24/7 support operation it’s vital to have a mature emergency response program. This means an alternate work location (AWL) was already researched and secured that was far enough from the primary location not to be impacted by the storm and close enough for personnel to drive. When Hurricane Ike threatened the company’s primary location, they declared a disaster with the AWL partner two days before the arrival of tropical storm force winds. This triggered a series of actions for the company and the folks at the AWL.

First, the AWL staff made a room available and got supplies ready for the advance team’s arrival. The advance team, consisting of IT personnel, a skeletal operations crew, and a logistics team member, were tasked to set up the AWL so that operations could be quickly transferred from their primary location. The incident management team also booked hotel rooms for the advance team, their families and pets. These actions coupled with thorough internal communication created an AWL Activation Plan.

While the advance team made their way to the AWL, the incident management team coordinated with business management to implement a Phased Return to Work plan. This expanded the identification of needs to include families, pets, transportation and accommodations. Once a deployment schedule was established, the incident management team communicated the AWL Activation Plan with all personnel.

With plans in place, personnel notified and the new location activated by the advance team, the incident management team transferred operations eight hours before the arrival of the tropical storm force winds. Crucially, this gave everyone at the primary location enough time to get to a safe location to ride out the storm. Once the storm passed about 36 hours later, they were able to follow the deployment schedule, report to the AWL and begin planning for demobilization and return to normal operations.

In all, the website was down for two hours and some conference calls had to be rescheduled. Other than these small setbacks, all business operations continued as usual. This was largely due a mature emergency response plan that everyone was aware of a well-practiced in, as well as a close relationship to contractors, vendors and hotels; having often included them in their annual emergency drills.