Business

Our goal is assist your business in achieving disaster resilience. We must begin with the premise that in Idaho, hazards such as earthquakes, winter storms, or even aging infrastructure can affect our communities and impact our economy.

Consider the following:

  • Almost 40% of small businesses that close due to a disaster event never re-open.
  • 91% of Americans live in places at moderate to high risk of earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, high-wind damage or terrorism.
  • 85% of the U.S. critical infrastructure is owned by private industry.

Plan

Can your business bounce back from the impacts of an earthquake, flood, or severe weather storm? Does you business continuity plan include redundancy strategies to ensure your business can continue operation in the case of a power outage or phone interruption?

According to the Institute for Business and Home Safety an estimated 55% of businesses fail within two years of a major disaster. Building a continuity plan and taking proactive steps toward preparedness will reduce this risk, protect stakeholder’s interests, and ensure continuation of services.

Business Disaster Poster

Prepare

Employees that can worry less about their own safety and that of their families make for more productive workers. Preparing ourselves, and our neighborhoods, for disaster is an act of good citizenship. Every community has serious limits on the amount of emergency resources available to help people in real need. Economists calculate that every dollar spent on preparing for a disaster saves seven dollars in response. In short, preparing is an investment worth making.

The five steps in developing a preparedness program are:

  1. Program Management
    • Organize, develop and administer your preparedness program
    • Identify regulations that establish minimum requirements for your program
  2. Planning
    • Gather information about hazards and assess risks
    • Conduct a business impact analysis (BIA)
    • Examine ways to prevent hazards and reduce risks
  3. Implementation - Write a preparedness plan addressing:
    • Resource management
    • Emergency response
    • Crisis communications
    • Business continuity
    • Information technology
    • Employee assistance
    • Incident management
    • Training
  4. Testing and Exercises
    • Test and evaluate your plan
    • Define different types of exercises
    • Learn how to conduct exercises
    • Use exercise results to evaluate the effectiveness of the plan
  5. Program Improvement
    • Identify when the preparedness program needs to be reviewed
    • Discover methods to evaluate the preparedness program
    • Utilize the review to make necessary changes and plan improvements

Respond

Business Continuity will become your major focus in the hours, days, and weeks following major disasters. Prompt action and well-planned responses can save lives and help your business recover quickly from the impact of a disaster.

Resume

Resumption of ‘business as normal’, or recovery, includes activities undertaken after an event to return vital economic systems to minimum standards (in the short-term) and all economic systems to normal or improved levels (in the long-term). These activities can include:

  • Crisis Counseling
  • Damage Assessment
  • Data Recovery
  • Debris Removal
  • Public Information
  • Reconstruction
  • Temporary Housing