Ask the Experts: Preparing Your Organization for Natural Disasters
By Stephanie Osorno, Marketing Copywriter at Alertus Technologies
While National Preparedness Month (NPM) is coming to a close, preparing for any crisis — from active shooter incidents to severe weather events — should be a continual and year-long goal to keep our communities, families, workplaces, and schools safe.
Throughout September, we identified business continuity strategies and explored a severe weather preparedness checklist. This week, we round out our NPM blog series with a special natural disaster Q&A featuring two emergency preparedness experts.
Gil Zavlodaver, Director of Professional Services at Alertus, and Ken Carter, Emergency Manager at Ventura County Sheriff's Office of Emergency Services (OES), talk to us below about how organizations can effectively and proactively plan ahead to better prepare for natural disaster events.
Emergency Preparedness Experts
Name: Gil Zavlodaver
Title: Director of Professional Services
Name: Ken Carter
Title: Emergency Manager
Organization: Ventura County Sheriff's OES
Could you share some of your emergency Management background?
Carter: I have almost 34 years of fire service experience. I’m a retired battalion chief from the city of Torrance Fire Department where I was assigned numerous positions, including working operations in the fire station, managing hazardous material administration, and being a fire marshall. I also specialized in incident management for a few years.
I’ve been with Ventura County Sheriff's OES for just over 10 years now in a supportive emergency services role. As former OES colleagues, Gil and I worked together on different preparedness projects and helped to respond to various incidents.
Zavlodaver: I’m currently the Director of Professional Services at Alertus. In this role, I help customers develop or enhance their emergency management programs.
During my ten-year tenure at Ventura, I started as an intern and worked my way up the ranks. There were different aspects of the job within the OES. Administratively, I oversaw the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and Ken was instrumental in helping me get the facility up and running, as well as identifying the cadre of EOC team members and training them. Ken and I also worked closely together on managing the training and exercise program, which was county-wide and included 10 different cities. In addition, I oversaw the alert and warning program and served as a duty officer for incidents ranging from wildfires to hazmat events and flooding. Between Ken’s fire service background and my general emergency management experience, we were able to offer extensive emergency preparedness and response expertise at the OES.
What constitutes a natural disaster? Does it differ from severe weather and if so, how?
Zavlodaver: Depending on the natural hazard, it could be driven by severe weather. With high winds of up to 60 mph, for example, a utility pole might blow over and then that utility pole could spark a wildfire. Because of the hazardous wind, this wildfire is likely going to be a catastrophic disaster and there’s nothing that can be done to stop it.
Carter: Here in Southern California, we are in an especially vulnerable position for wildfire incidents caused by severe weather. It comes from a culmination of lack of rain, summer heat, Santa Ana winds, and scorching 30-40 mph gusts. Then once a wildfire event does occur, the area which has been burned out is now more susceptible to flash flooding and debris flows.
Zavlodaver: The causes for natural disasters can be broken up in different categories. Some are simply caused by mother nature, like earthquakes and volcanoes; some strictly come from severe weather; and then there are some natural disasters that can be caused by other natural disasters. For example, let’s say an earthquake occurs right off the coast — that earthquake could create a tsunami.
Can you touch on the importance of organizational emergency preparedness when it comes to natural disasters?
Zavlodaver: From an organizational standpoint, there are three goals when it comes to emergency preparedness: save lives, protect property, and limit the degradation to our environment. Everything we do for preparedness is to make sure we can accomplish those three things. It’s all about increasing your organizational capability to respond to these disasters and prioritizing your sometimes limited resources based on the threat. Disaster preparation lets you do all of that planning before the incident happens.
Any level of preparedness that you do today will help ensure you are better prepared than you were the day before. It’s almost impossible to be fully prepared, but every little thing you do beforehand, including employee training and exercise, makes a difference.
Aside from causing potential harm to organizational communities, what are some of the operational impacts of natural disasters?
Carter: You have to account for different disaster-based effects such as losing power and water. Without those key things, your day-to-day organizational operations shut down. Most larger organizations such as hospitals have generators that can operate for a certain period of time after a power outage, but then it becomes a matter of maintaining the fuel needed to keep the generator running. Organizations need to think past not only having a generator, but also sustaining the generator fuel.
In my experience, I’ve also dealt with large businesses that have lost their water supply to their sprinkler system, leaving them with no fire protection for the building. Businesses need to improve operational resilience by making and continually working on a business continuity plan, maintaining operable equipment for disaster alerts, and conducting employee preparedness training.
How can organizations start to prepare? In your opinion, what is the most important step of natural disaster preparedness?
Carter: Organizations need to better assess how to prepare for a natural disaster. They can start by first identifying their unique vulnerabilities and threats. You have to look at the complete picture and conduct an internal assessment to better understand how your unique organization could be impacted.
Sometimes those vulnerabilities can come from personnel loss amid a natural disaster event. What happens if your personnel can’t come to work? Can you outsource or operate from home? Those are the kind of vulnerability aspects to consider, in addition to critical resource losses.
Zavlodaver: Relationship building is also a really important aspect of preparedness that often gets neglected. If an organization has a good relationship with vendors and local government (fire service, EMS, hospitals, non profits) to help them get certain resources and services during a natural disaster event, things will work much smoother for response and recovery.
It doesn’t matter how much money an organization has; without those relationships, cooperation, and coordination, it will be hard to get through natural disasters. That’s why plan development is key.
Could you elaborate on the EMERGENCY PREPARATION planning process? Which key stakeholders should be involved?
Zavlodaver: It’s not the final product of the plan that’s so important, it’s more about the journey to get there. You’re coming together as an organization to map out your threats and vulnerabilities, seeing where your capabilities match up, and strategizing on ways to fill in necessary gaps. Throughout the journey, you learn so many different things about your organization that are going to help in the event of a disaster. Not every plan is going to withstand the test of the hazard, but you gain critical preparedness insights while developing the plan.
The key stakeholders will vary depending on the organization, but you should include as many departments as you can, because a natural disaster is going to impact the entire organization. Each person will bring in their expertise, and then collectively, you can come up with emergency disaster preparation solutions and activities. Based on roles and responsibilities, it’s important to identify the leading department or entity that’s going to drive or own the planning process.
Once a natural disaster preparation plan is in place, what can organizations do to successfully carry out that plan?
Carter: You need to exercise that plan. Don’t just leave it on the shelf or buried in a thick notebook somewhere where nobody will be able to find it — pull it out, review it, and exercise it. A great way to start reviewing and exercising the plan is to test out different aspects. Obviously, you won’t be able to test out the whole plan at once, but you can break up the testing by focusing on different parts of the plan. For example, during one test you may test the flooding section, the next day you could test the utility section of the plan, and another day you may opt to test the workplace injury section.
Making a plan is a small part of the preparedness process — the most important thing is to actually exercise the plan and put it to the test. It’s during testing that you’ll be able to pinpoint areas that don’t work or are in need of improvement.
Any last tips for organizations looking to enhance their natural preparedness efforts?
Carter: As Gil mentioned before, building relationships is essential. In my line of work within the county, our positive relationship with the fire department goes a long way. Giving them an opportunity to get to know who we are and what we can bring to the table — so they don’t just see us for the first time during a crisis — makes a huge difference.
It can be as simple as going to coffee or inviting them to visit your organization. It provides an opportunity to meet, touch base, and learn about each other. We’ve invited fire personnel to participate in our training activities and they really appreciated that.
Zavlodaver: You need to have an all-hazards approach, you can’t just pick one hazard you have the most knowledge about. A lot of hazards have certain things in common, so an all-hazards approach will allow you to more easily identify those common denominators that will transcend all disaster situations.
Again, I want to emphasize that one ounce of preparedness today is more than you had yesterday. It can be intimidating and overwhelming to think about everything that goes into disaster preparation, but just remember that any little preparedness action you do today will get you closer to effectively preparing for future disasters. It’s about gradually building those preparedness blocks.
Learn more
Alertus Virtual Seminar
To hear more insights from Zavlodaver and Carter, check out Alertus’ on-demand virtual seminar, “How to Prepare for All-Hazards Disasters,” here.
Additional Preparedness Resources
Alertus’ Preparedness Blogs:
Natural Disaster Guidance
Be sure to check out ready.gov, which offers preparedness guidance and resources for various natural disasters including: