If You Can’t Stay Connected

By Guy Robertson

Little things can overwhelm even the most sophisticated disaster plan. For example, your plan is based on the assumption that after an emergency, your power might fail but should return within three hours. But perhaps it will not be restored for several days. Never fear! At a substantial cost, your organization has purchased a state-of-the-art emergency generator. But will it work?

Don’t Assume Anything

The recent Rogers outage, which shut down telephone service and other essential online functions for two days, reminds us that such systems can fail. You cannot take operational continuity for granted. To do so is to risk serious inconvenience and possibly threats to personal safety, loss of reputation, and higher recovery costs. It can take months to resolve the problems that can arise after a telephone outage, during which your prime contacts, partners and clients might give up on you and seek alternative providers of products and services. After all, if another organization remains in communication with the public, why should people wait for you to recover your telephone lines and to deal with backlogs of messages, orders, and requests for information?

Staying Connected

During Disaster Your disaster plan should include backup options for all essential systems and business processes. Take nothing for granted. You realize the importance of backing up vital data, and your IT manager backs up all of the data that your organization needs for ongoing operations. Your property manager has reserved emergency office space for you and your staff at an accessible and secure offsite location. You have made arrangements with insurers, tradespeople, and temp agencies to deliver what your organization needs after a disaster. But what about telephone service? If confusion and frustration prevail after a two-day Rogers outage, what should you do after a disaster that causes serious losses, downtime, and chaos over a much longer period?

Stay Put, Stay Safe

After a natural disaster such as an earthquake, windstorm, or wildfire, it is difficult to determine when telephone service will resume. Media updates can be vague. As well, there could be substantial damage to your local infrastructure—roads, bridges, power lines, and water supplies—that makes travel for even short distances dangerous. Thus, an effective disaster plan will include provisions for you to stay where you are, as long as you are safe and secure. Your office may be cold and dark after an earthquake, and you may be unable to communicate with your family by telephone for days, but at least they will know that you will not put yourself at risk by attempting to make your way home. And they will stay home and not go searching for you. Staying in a safe place is frequently best for everyone after a natural disaster, at least until the situation is stable and local authorities are confident that travel is no longer risky.

Learning from Rogers

As for your telephone service, it will resume eventually. One positive outcome of the Rogers outage is that telecommunications vendors will need to consider backups and alternative options more seriously and strive to make their networks less vulnerable. There could be big solutions to the little things that threaten your operations.

If you’d like to comment on this article or explore these ideas further, contact me at [email protected]. This article was originally published in The TMC Advisor. advdoc.php (tmcadvisor.com)

Guy Robertson is a senior planner at TMC and an instructor at the Justice Institute of BC and Langara College. He has written five books and numerous articles on corporate security and disaster planning, and offered workshops and lectures at conferences across North America and in the UK.