Preparing for the Inevitable: A Guide to Hurricane Season Resilience

As I know many of you already know, it is the start of another Hurricane season. So, as crisis and emergency managers who are trying to manage resiliency programs in hurricane-prone areas, it is time to get ready and prepare for the inevitable.

What is Risk Resiliency advising their clients at the moment? Here is my current list of actions you can take now to put you in good stead for the 2024 season.

Site list with basic information

Work with your operations team to identify all of your sites within the hurricane impact area. Now is the time to have basic site information like address, jurisdiction, response team points of contact, square footage, etc. All the better if you have done a risk assessment on each site and can identify your priority facilities in the potential impact area. You can also take time now to review your site plans and ensure that they align with any global escalation and support plans.

Remediation vendors and MSA contracts

With finance and procurement, sit down and review all of the current remediation vendors onboarded and ensure there are established and approved billing rates for response. You do not necessarily need a contracted response time, but to avoid price gouging, you should have a contract that lays out billing rates. Invite your vendors to tour a site or two and discuss needs and requirements before their arrival post-hurricane. In addition to remediation vendors, you should also contract with a structural engineering firm, as they will be invaluable if you have damage to your facility and need an engineer to provide mitigation guidelines and certification of safe occupancy before you can resume operations at the facility.

Rapid hazard assessment

You cannot return to a facility and conduct any hazard mitigation or remediation until you fully understand the hazards impacting the facility. If you do not have a comprehensive process for Rapid Hazard Assessment (RHA), you will be potentially exposing your employees and vendors to life-threatening hazards. RHAs typically start on the outside of the facility and work inward to create a thorough assessment of all identified hazards and issues. Risk resiliency can help you develop an RHA if your organization doesn’t have one.

Rapid damage assessment

Once you have completed your RHA, it should drive your Rapid Damage Assessment (RDA) hazards, define the damages, and damages define what repair, mitigation, or remediation strategy you are going to execute. You cannot re-energize critical equipment if there is a foot of water on the floor any more than you can return to operations with a large portion of the roof missing. The RDA will provide the roadmap for partial and complete operational recovery as well as establish recovery metrics: How long will it take given the current resources (Time), how much is it likely to cost as we implement our repair and remediation strategies (Cost), and finally what compromises do we need to make that may impact how we operate and the services we provide our customer (Quality). A comprehensive RHA and RDA allow the crisis and emergency manager to provide a comprehensive narrative to senior leaders on what decisions and resources are needed to fully return to operations.

Practice with your team

Before the first impact from a hurricane is a great time to have field personnel practice the current processes and procedures before a hurricane impacts. This can include reviewing escalation expectations, revising current contact numbers, and reviewing current inventories of response materials.

Conduct an activation call with the response team

This will allow you to test your current call system, team roster, and existing support technology and refresh any hurricane-specific roles and responsibilities. This pre-testing will allow the old and new team members to re-familiarize themselves with the process and procedures.

Conduct a review of last year’s after-actions and lessons-learned reports

This will ensure no gaps and issues from last year that have not been addressed before the 2024 season is in full swing.