Writing a Disaster Plan

Safety Officer is one of the many titles I hold at my place of employment, and as such it is my job to write and update the safety plans we have including Fire Safely, Emergency Evacuation, Hazardous Materials, Lock Out/Tag Out, Respirator Safety, and others. New employees are trained in each of the plans before they can go into the production facility, and we update then review the plans with all the employees on a yearly basis. I had become complacent with the status quo.

The recent events in the gulf coast woke me up to the fact that all our safety plans are geared toward getting people OUT of our facility in the event of fire, chemical spill, or other incident that may happen internally. However, we have nothing that addresses other types of emergencies such as earthquake, wildfire, chemical spills from transported materials, long term utility outage, or sheltering in place.

My Advisory Committee agreed that developing a disaster plan for our business was a worthwhile activity. One thing about living in Utah where a majority of people are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is that there is a wealth of experience to draw from it’s members. This church recommends it’s members have a years worth of food storage as well as 72 hour kits for each family member, so several on our staff are familiar at least with this aspect of preparedness. RIght away we dedicated a spot in our warehouse to house some canned goods and medical supplies. This is only a minor step though, as I found out after more research.

I started at the American Red Cross Disaster page for a guideline on how to write a disaster plan. Here I found a wealth of information for both personal and business preparedness. Most of the information is available as .pdf downloads for printing, and much of this information I can incorporate into our plan as is, based on the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” theory. Linking off the American Red Cross page to the FEMA website I found this very comprehensive 65 page brochure, also available in .pdf format. I have decided to use the FEMA brochure as my main guideline, supplemented by the American Red Cross information.

In reading through the FEMA material I found that what at first seemed a daunting task is made easier by the fact that my company already has written plans for emergencies, and all our personnel are trained. However, there is much yet to be done, and I’m grateful for information about procedures, for instance, on how to coordinate with other businesses in our industrial park in the event that one of us could house others in the event of a natural disaster. This one of many types of things addressed in the FEMA brochure that we wouldn’t necessarily think of ourselves.

Other information from the American Red Cross website that we will incorporate include an emergency contact information sheet for each of our employees that lists contact information for family members, an out of town contact for each employee, names of children and their school contact, established meeting place for the family and current medications. This information will be kept in a sealed envelope to be opened only in the event of emergency to protect each employee’s privacy.

These two examples are typical of the type of helpful information we found. I could go on, but each business is unique and what is applicable for ours may not be applicable for yours. Fortunately the information we found is easily customizable. Do you know how your company is prepared for disaster? If not, this may be a good time to find out. Frankly, this is not fun stuff to think about, let alone write and implement. But if not now, when?

It is much more personally entertaining to write about silly stuff, or political opinions, or Macintosh computers in this blog. Heck even writing about writing these plans is much more enjoyable than actually writing these plans. But, I uh big gurl now, and we are preparing our business, our employees, and working with our community in the unlikely event that we will suffer a disaster of the proportion that will require implementing our plan. We hope it never happens, but if it does, we’ll be as ready as we can.