Hurricane Preparedness Plan for Businesses

A hurricane preparedness plan begins with understanding how hurricanes are classified. All hurricanes fall into five categories, 1 to 5, where the intensity and damage caused is relatively lowest for Category 1 hurricanes, and highest for Category 5 hurricanes.

Categories and wind speed range

1 – 74 to 95 mph

2 – 96 to 110 mph

3 – 111 to 129 mph

4 – 130 to 156 mph

5 – More than 157 mph

Staying Prepared

• Design, deploy and test your hurricane disaster recovery plan
• Take regular data backups
• Safeguard your work location
• Provide remote access as an alternate work option
• Create an in-house support team
• Outsource recovery, partly or fully, to an external DR services vendor
• Roll out alert warnings and notifications well in advance
• Outline strategy for internal and external communications
• Stay prepared for the worst case scenario
• Ensure the health and safety of employees
• Identify mission critical systems, applications and processes
• Keep a list of all company assets and resources, as well as their locations
• Setup cloud based systems
• Put together emergency response teams with their respective roles & responsibilities, and training requirements
• Classify assets based on their vulnerability to damage during hurricanes and how mission critical they are after hurricanes

Recommendations while creating a Hurricane Preparedness Plan

• Create unique plans for each location, including requirements such as:
  • Personnel
  • Equipment
  • Technology
• List out assets and resources to be transferred to the backup site
• Segregate the hurricane preparedness plan into
  • Stages such as:
    • Before the hurricane
    • During the hurricane
    • After the hurricane
  • Protective measures for:
    • Edifices
    • Information
    • Files
    • Appliances &
    • Equipment
  • Establish resource availability, especially for critical operations such as evacuation, as well as suitable workarounds for constraints
  • Create a chain of command for the organization’s personnel at a macro level
  • Create an emergency contact list for all key personnel that is accessible 24/7
  • Reach out to local authorities for additional inputs and location specific planning guidelines

Sharing Information with Personnel, Vendors and Customers

• Ensure that emergency contact lists in the hurricane preparedness plan are always up to date and shared with all concerned personnel
• Choose, implement and test a feasible alert system
• Make use of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter
• Create strategies for communicating with the press and media
• Assign a spokesperson who handles all external communications
• Information content should be classified based on intended recipient such as
  • Staff
  • Vendors
  • Stakeholders
  • Customers
  • Public and so on
• Create communication training and on-boarding programs for new recruits
• Have a plan for updating customers on the status of deliverables, workarounds, expectations and compensations

Keep track of external news for the latest updates