| D I S A ST E R P R E PA R E D N E S S |
While business and building owners
must respond quickly to mitigate addition-
al damages, the hard truth remains that life
— and business — must go on.
“Especially in commercial, people need
to carry on working and doing their thing,
so we’ll have to contain the area so busi-
nesses can carry on with their daily lives,
and we work behind the scenes,” Camara
says.
She offers a dialysis center as an ex-
ample: “They need people on dialysis to
come in the morning and be hooked up to
the machines and running the whole day,
so we’ll accommodate by working in the
evening.”
But it’s not just physical property that
is at risk during a disaster. Digital data is
perhaps most essential to the continuity of
a business.
Chris Milligan, senior director for
sales in the south region for Consolidated
Communications, explains, “Some of the
data we’ve looked at is astonishing — 93
percent of companies that suffer an IT
disaster will file for bankruptcy within a
year, and 60 percent can expect to be shut
down within six months.”
But digital data is, or should be, the
easiest to protect and retrieve.
“We’re talking about within minutes of
a natural disaster being able to turn that
customer back up with little to no impact
on their business,” Milligan says of the re-
trieval process. “animal feces is also a big one, like may-
be bats, or if an animal that dies in a wall,
which is really hazardous,” she says.
Ultimately, Verbaera says, knowing
how to prepare and respond to potential
disasters has applications beyond the
commercial world. Those skills, she says,
whether it’s at home, in the theater or in
the grocery store, “They’re more relevant
than just at your office surroundings.” n
BEWARE OF THE LITTLE THINGS
It doesn’t necessarily take a record-break-
ing wildfire or devastating flood to end a
business. According to experts, more of-
ten than not it’s the seemingly minor things
that lead to catastrophic consequences.
“It doesn’t have to be a big disaster to
impact your business,” Verbaera says. “I
think water damage is probably the worst
one because it doesn’t take long for mold
to grow, and that’s one that people gener-
ally don’t think about.”
Camara offers other common prob-
lems, such as frozen pipes bursting, or Jordan Venema is a California-based writer
who enjoys gin and teaching himself dead lan-
guages. He received a master’s of liberal arts
from St. John’s College, but swears he’s learned
more from his precocious son, Cassian, than he
ever did from a book.
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