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Iowa's Floods: Tragic Lesson in Business Continuity

For security administrator Deb Hale, the recent tornadoes and floods in Iowa hit close to home and provided a sobering lesson in business continuity

By Bill Brenner, Senior Editor

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You mentioned that the tornado that hit the Boy Scout camp was closer to where you are. Does your company have any kind of preparedness plan for how to protect employees and infrastructure in the event of a tornado or other event?

The location of our company has many potential hazards, being close to a highway, major interstate system, airport, military facility, railroad tracks, rivers, and so on. We are very fortunate to have leadership that understands what disasters are all about. Many of our employees are volunteer EMTs, firefighters, response personnel, and one of the owners is a member of our USAR (Urban Search and Rescue) Team. We attempt to be on top of things and have much of our equipment spread out in different locations throughout our service area. We are currently working on a comprehensive plan which will include a bunker facility. The bunker facility will house redundant equipment and resources. With that we will be providing offsite backup service to businesses within our customer base.

That said, are there any fresh lessons you took from the disaster in terms of your own business continuity plan and any weaknesses recent events may have revealed?

I am a member of the Safeguard Iowa Partnership. We had a review meeting recently to discuss some of the things that went on during the response phase. A couple of items that have already been discussed is that some partners even though they were on high ground and had no flooding at their facility were unable to get to the facility due to the flood water over all of the access roads. And many of them had residual impact due to their vendors or customers being directly impacted. We will be meeting in the near future to discuss the lessons learned in depth. I am sure that there are going to be many.

To ask the same question you ask in your diary headline, would your business survive?

We have already put a lot of pieces in place to allow us to operate out of one of our other facilities. We still have a ways to go but we are making headway. Would we survive? I hope so, but until our plan is complete, until we have all of the redundant systems in place, until our testing is complete I do not know for sure. Unfortunately there is no way to plan for every possible disaster and there is always the chance that something may go wrong. I certainly hope not but realistically I can make no guarantees. All we can do is develop the plan, test the plan, update the plan, test the plan, update the plan - you get my drift.