Does Your Business Have a Flood Continuity Plan? | SERVPRO® of Piscataway

If recent years have shown business owners anything, it’s that you must be prepared for both likely and incredibly unlikely scenarios if you want to survive the modern business landscape.

You may not be able to predict a pandemic or a global event like the COVID-19 crisis, but there are a few things you know each year you need to be ready for, such as natural disasters. And one of the most common disasters every business owner faces is flooding.

Floods are an unfortunate part of cultural reality, as well as an unfortunate part of business reality. If you own or run a business, particularly if that business is on the first floor of a building or in a sub-level, flood awareness has to be on your preparedness list, and part of your flood plan should be a continuity plan.

The NOAA estimates $8 billion in damages due to flooding annually, and businesses take their share of that hit. To avoid disruptions in service and/or your supply chain, a continuity plan can be vital in the life of your business.

What Is a Continuity Plan?

A continuity plan is a business owner’s playbook for dealing with disaster—for avoiding service disruptions and customer satisfaction issues and being able to stay up and running during a moment of crisis. It consists of three basic components:

Disaster preparedness. Look ahead at events, such as floods, that you can reasonably predict. You may not know when, but you know that it’s always a possibility. Assess the specific threats to your company and your building, and identify the things that are at risk in a flood. This could be computers, electrical lines or components, or anything flood waters might endanger. This step also includes identifying alternate business sites, or developing a plan for working from home or using alternative means to keep your business running during outages or downtimes.

Emergency response. Develop a set of procedures that you can enact when disaster strikes or becomes imminent. Have a chain of contact for employees and coworkers, so you can alert and contact the team and stay in contact with everyone until it’s clear everyone is evacuated and safe. Make sure each team member knows their role in the emergency preparedness plan.

Business recovery. What now? Identify mission-critical elements of your business. What needs to be back up and running first so that the next layer of the business can get going, and so on? Define the procedures that will stabilize and restore your operations to pre-disaster efficiency.

There are more resources for putting your plan together, but these are the basic steps to at least take some of the sting out of the next flood-bearing rain or emergency situation, and keep your business connected to your clients and customers.

If your business suffers water damage from floods or emergency events, fires or biohazard situations, we are here to help 24 hours a day. We are locally owned and operated, with the resources of a national network, and we have the technology and the technicians to get you on your feet again when disaster strikes. Contact us today.