Every business, family needs emergency plan

Local News

November 21, 2008

By Bill Robinson The Richmond Register Fri Nov 21, 2008, 08:33 PM EST

“Hope is not a strategy.”

Carl Richards, director of Madison County’s Emergency Management Agency, offered that advice to participants of the “Survive the Crisis” conference Friday sponsored by the Richmond Chamber and Eastern Kentucky University.

“Businesses that have a disaster plan and practice it are 15 times more likely to recover from a major incident than those that have no plan,” he said.

“Every business, school, hospital and family needs an emergency plan,” said Shelly Boone II of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

While devising plans for a business or institution, managers may overlook what a large-scale disaster can do to their employees’ families, he said.

“If a disaster strikes, your employees are first going to look out for their families’ first. If their families’ are in jeopardy, they won’t be available to help their employer cope with an emergency,” he said. “If their families are safe, however, employees are more likely to report to work and help the business begin to recover.”

He suggested some questions for businesses as well as families to consider:

If disaster strikes, does mom know where the kids are going to be?

Do family members know how to contact each other if phone systems are down?

“After families get done with Thanksgiving dinner and count their blessings, they should also ask these questions,” Boone said.

“After this conference is over, go home, go back to work and be a champion for preparedness,” Boone told participants. “Regardless of your position in an organization, you can make a difference.”

Widespread disasters can have “funny, long-term economic effects,” he said.

After Hurricane Hugo devastated the Atlantic coast of the Carolinas in the 1980s, almost every home had to replace its washer and dryer.

“A clothes dryer typically lasts from eight to 10 years,” he said. “After everyone replaced their appliances, nobody needed a new one for the next several years. Appliance dealers in that area had a rough time, and some went out of business.”

Andrew Cline, director of protective medicine for the University of Louisville Medical School, outlined the likely effects of an influenza pandemic on Kentucky.

Each year, a small number of people around the world die from avian flu.

“So far, the virus is spread only from animals to humans,” he said. “If the virus mutates and begins to spread from human to human, it could mean a global disaster.”

The world’s last pandemic occurred in 1918-19 when the so-called Spanish flu began to spread near the end of World War I.

“That is still the event on which most pandemic scenarios are based,” Cline said.

His outline began with a Kentucky businessman boarding a plane in Hong Kong, just before health authorities close the airport.

“By the time he gets to Los Angeles, he’s not feeling well. When he gets home, he has a big dinner with his family prior to the Thunder Over Louisville event that precedes the Kentucky Derby,” Cline said. “He goes to bed, but encourages his family to go to the riverfront where they are among 800,000 spectators.”

Days latter the man is dead, but people infected with the virus attend the Kentucky Derby, where they spread it to people from across the country and around the world.

Even a mild pandemic could overwhelm hospitals, morgues and mortuaries, Cline said.

Businesses could suddenly be without employees and managers.

“Does your business have a line of succession for key people who could be made ill or die from a pandemic or other emergency?” he asked.

Cline, who had worked in the past for the health department and emergency management agency in Madison County, said he had been guilty of not practicing what he preached.

“I lived in Lexington then, and our home was struck by a tornado,” he said. “We had never created our own emergency plan or discussed what we’d do if disaster struck.”

When the tornado approached, instead of going into an interior room, such as a bathroom, Cline said he and his wife went into a closet on an exterior wall.

“That’s how I got hit by a two-by-four,” he said.

“We had a shelter-in-place kit in case of a chemical weapons leak at the Blue Grass Army Depot, but we didn’t have a standard emergency kit with water, flashlight and radio, etc.”

Boone said FEMA has sample emergency plans for businesses and families on its Web site: readyamerica.gov.

Bill Robinson can be reached at brobinson@richmondregister.com or at 623-1669, Ext. 267.

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