Technology Enhances Hurricane Safety: Prepare, Respond, Recover

There’s more to hurricane safety and recovery than simply alerting your stakeholders about the situation. To successfully respond to a hurricane and minimize the damage, cost, and downtime, organizations like schools and businesses need a reliable system that will allow them to prepare in advance, coordinate their response, and recover from the incident.

According to FEMA, hurricanes can occur along any U.S. coast or in any territory in the Atlantic or Pacific oceans. The primary hazards from hurricanes are storm surge flooding, inland flooding from heavy rains, destructive winds, tornadoes, and high surf and rip currents. While hurricanes pose the greatest threat to life and property, tropical storms, and depressions can also be devastating. Flooding from heavy rains can cause extensive damage and loss of life. While many hurricane safety solutions focus on sending warnings out to the people in harm’s way, that is just one aspect organizations should consider when assessing the strength of their hurricane safety resources and protocols.

The more prepared your organization is, the more likely you will be able to prevent critical damage and keep more people safe. As organizations face incoming hurricanes and severe storms, they can proactively leverage technology to more effectively prepare for a severe weather event. Having the ability to use a digital system to audit your facilities and resources, collaborate on complex safety prep tasks and workflows, and report critical information will make your school, business, or organization much better prepared for what comes next. Every hour counts when preparing for a hurricane, and a digital safety platform allows organizations to maximize every minute by making sure your people and key resources are safe and accounted for.   

It’s not surprising that FEMA recommends having an emergency plan for hurricanes. It’s critical to have a continually updated document that will guide your organization through a hurricane emergency, but making sure that the right people have constant access to the information and workflows necessary for emergency response is a separate challenge. A digital safety platform allows your safety leaders and personnel to stay in communication and coordinate a swift and successful response with digital access to interactive emergency checklists that update in real-time and instantly share safety statuses to allocate support where it’s needed most and ensure everyone is safe.

The emergency isn’t over after a hurricane has subsided. Organizations find themselves in a different phase of emergency management as they now must recover from the emergency as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Due to the destructive nature of hurricanes, being able to connect all of the people, information, and resources needed for recovery can be extremely difficult. Many organizations turn to technological solutions to help organize and maintain the recovery effort to keep critical staff able to function and clearing the quickest path to being able to safely resume services.

There are many factors to consider when planning for a hurricane-related emergency. In order to have hurricane safety fully covered, you want to make sure your safety resources strengthen your ability to prepare, response, and recover. If you can’t cover each aspect of hurricane safety, then you are leaving your organization and the people who depend on it in jeopardy. CrisisGo’s digital safety platform has been proven to work in virtually all crisis situations. 

With CrisisGo’s platform, you can:

Prepare

• Digitize your hurricane SOP so everyone has instructions, checklist, map, emergency contacts in the pocket, wherever they are.
• Perform Pre-Hurricane Facility Assessments to identify potential vulnerabilities and produce Site Assessment Report.
• Conduct Pre-Hurricane People Safety Assessments survey to identify potential resource issues and identify risks.
• Make sure your staff are prepared by sending Hurricane safety cards to all employees for SOP reinforcement and training.
• Schedule Hurricane drills, benchmarks, and reports to familiarize your organization with the proper protocols.
• Develop a Business or School Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP). This allows you to plan for the potential loss of business or instructional services so you can mitigate those losses.  The COOP is centered on the premise of what do you need to do, to keep your business or school operational immediately following a disaster,

Respond

• Send instant weather alerts sent to the Safety Team/EOC.
• Instantly report and communicate with faculty and your safety team before, during, and after the hurricane.
• Enable your Safety Team to send Pre-, During, and Post-hurricane alerts (app, SMS, email).
• Escalate emergencies to first responders or designated escalation teams (EOC or others), escalating to 911 with detailed location.
• Screen people to avoid COVID-19 spread while managing hurricanes.

Recover

• Account for people during and after a hurricane with real-time reports and multimedia communication.
• Automate incident reporting with mobile access.
• Monitor safety information organized on a digital dashboard for streamlined decision making.
• Analyze safety information from critical events to make data-driven improvements.

Our team is passionate about helping customers make safer work environments to improve culture and climate in the workplace, and we’d love to show you how our reliable solution can help your organization prepare for, response to, and recover from any emergency.