Posts Tagged ‘tropical storm’
Are you ready for …. everything?
September 6th, 2011Normally this time of year, I’d be thinkin about being ready for football season, the NASCAR chase or the kids to all finally be back in school - but over the past few weeks there’s been a number of events which have occured which brought out my “are you ready for anything that can happen?”. There’s been 3 earthquakes, a hurricane, flooding, 2 tropical storms and then the usual plethora of man made chaos in the world. So the question here is – what you are doing to be prepared.
September is National Preparedness Month (ready.gov) and typically focuses on natural disaster preperation especially as severe weather season is upon us. But the real question to any family or business is – What are you prepared for? Do you have a plan for an event which causes you to leave your house or office? Do you know who all your utility providers are and how to contact them? What about critical information around letting friends and business associates know what is happening and how to get in touch with you. There a loads of great information out there along with templates to use around organizing information and gathering all of details necessary. All of these are great ways to get oranized, but sometimes you just don’t have the time to keep up with all of the changing information. Here’s a couple of simple ways to deal with all of this:
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Make sure your computers are backed up somewhere off-site – we call this cloud based backups – there are even some free backup plans if you have only a small amount of data, all automated
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Use an inexpesive scanner to digitize all of your statements, receipts, etc - along with the backups, this gives you easy access to the information and allows you to get rid of the overwhelming load of paper you’ve been keeping.
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Make sure you have a couple of essentials like cash, flashlights and gas in your car – I know it sounds simple but a lot of people just expect ATMs and gas stations to be open – the recent flooding in New Jersey towns prove how easy it is for these things to be knocked out.
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Have a communication plan – know who to call when you have an emergency and let friends, family and business assocaites know something is going on – this way people who are worried about you at least know you have a plan and when you will get back to them.
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Have a backup communication plan – with the east coast earthquake, the cellular network was overwhelmed and people were unable to contact others. Everything from BlackBerry Messenger, Skype, email, FaceTime, etc were all up and running as normal even though the major carriers where unable to connect phone calls.
So as you can see, almost anything can happen in a very short time frame, but if you take just a couple of minutes and make some preperations in advance, you can be ready for almost anything.
