Gas Shortage In the South Creates Panic, Long Lines – washingtonpost.com

Gas Shortage In the South Creates Panic, Long Lines – washingtonpost.com

I was emailing with my buddy Doug in Charlotte, NC yesterday and he said that people were sleeping in their cars to get gas. A situation like this, which he refered to as a ‘mini gas crisis’, really brings home just how precarious our daily routines can be. This gas shortage is exactly the type of circumstance that highlights the need for a business continuity plan. Don’t wait until you NEED remote work tools and strategies to implement them, because by then the damage has often already been done.

September is National Preparedness Month – get involved at http://www.ready.gov

Listen to the FREE audio recording of our teleseminar Riding the Storm Out for advice and tips from experts about how to establish a business continuity and/or disaster recovery plan.

Hannah, Gustav, Ike, Chicken Little, and The Boy Who Cried ‘Wolf’

We’re mid-way through the 5th Annual National Preparedness month and the 2008 Hurricane Season is starting to reach maturity. Living in South Florida puts you in a heightened sense of awareness around storm season. So far this year we have been very fortunate; but I have been following the news around the last few named storms and just this morning on the news they were saying that 20,000 people did not evacuate Galveston, TX even though the language of the evacuation order said, ‘Leave or face certain death.’

I also watched reports of Ike making landfall in Texas and a rain drenched reporter was showing a street full of businesses and pointing out that only about 1 in 15 had boarded up their windows.

It’s that fundamental human impulse that says, ‘I’ll play the odds’ or ‘it won’t happen to ME’ that leads some people to defy these types of warnings and shirk common sense preparation. Unfortunately,  it happens to people just like YOU and the annoyance of something as mundane as boarding up some windows can mean the difference between a storm being an inconvenience and a catastrophe. Read more

Disaster Recovery and Hurricane Preparedness Planning – ‘Define Your Day After’

Tomorrow is the last day of Hurricane Preparedness Week 2008 and a recent Mason-Dixon Poll shows that 2 mild storm seasons have lulled many people into a false sense of security. Among the poll results emergency management officials find most alarming are these:

• 54% don’t feel vulnerable to a hurricane or related tornado or flooding,
• 56% have no family disaster plan,
• 67% have no hurricane survival kit,
• 85% have taken no steps to make their homes stronger since the last hurricane season,
• 13% said they might not or would not evacuate even if ordered to do so, leaving thousands of residents at grave risk in the path of any given storm.

And these statistics don’t even address what people have or have not done to prepare their businesses for the eventuality of a hurricane or other emergency.

Well, this year The Department of Homeland Security is urging small businesses to ‘Define Their Day After’ through new public service advertisements and their Ready.gov website. Read more

Travel Delays Highlight the Need for Virtual Team Strategies

Flights delayed for hours by Northeast storms – CNN.com 02/22/2008

We’ve been seeing headlines like this all winter, and we see them EVERY winter; even cavemen knew it was going to snow in winter. But the difficulties imposed on business travel have gone beyond the inevitability of weather delays (which aren’t even always weather events according to CNN 5 Things Airlines Won’t Tell You About Weather Delays), they are compounded by a floundering U.S. Airline industry. Consider this report from the AP wire released earlier this month:

2007 Airline Delays 2nd Worst EverFeb 6, 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) — A quarter of domestic flights failed to arrive on time in 2007 — the industry’s second poorest performance on record — and analysts say it is likely to get worse. More than 26 percent of commercial flights in the U.S. arrived late or were canceled last year as rising passenger demand and an industry preference for smaller planes intensified congestion in the skies and on runways. The air-travel logjam, reported Tuesday by the Department of Transportation, comes as a growing number of air traffic controllers near retirement age — a trend the controllers’ union says will magnify the problem.

Pile on top of all this lost time and frustration the rising cost of travel and it seems pretty clear that something, somewhere has to give. Putting into place some simple virtual office and virtual team strategies can not only serve as a business continuity plan when you or one of your people is stuck on the tarmac in the snow, they can also increase your organization’s communication and collaboration abilities while decreasing the amount of required travel every day.

Let’s face it, at least the cavemen adapted the way they worked to deal with the changes in their environment – it’s called evolution people. Isn’t it time we came in out of the cold?

To explore some of the premiere tools and services related to virtual teamwork download a FREE copy of The Anywhere Office Toolbox. We have been playing in this sandbox a long time and the Toolbox details the service providers we believe are the best in their respective businesses. Most of them offer free trials and special discounts.

Free Business Continuity Teleseminar for National Preparedness Month

This September marks National Preparedness Month 2007, a nationwide coordinated effort encouraging families to take simple steps to prepare for emergencies in their homes, businesses, and schools. During National Preparedness Month, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is working with a wide variety of organizations to highlight the importance of emergency preparedness and promote community involvement across the nation through various events and activities.

This year each week of National Preparedness Month has a different focus. The second week of National Preparedness Month (September 9 – 15) focuses on business preparedness.

During this week ourselves and several other National Preparedness Month Coalition Members are hosting events and activities to help businesses get prepared. We invite you to take this opportunity to listen to a FREE hour long Audio Seminar we are offering called Riding the Storm Out: don’t wait until it’s too late to form a business continuity plan. We hosted this teleseminar and recorded it live during National Preparedness Month 2006 and features a panel of 4 small business experts discussing tools, strategies, and best practices relating to Business Continuity and Disaster Preparedness.

Beginning with National Preparedness Month and continuing until the end of this year, this hour-long seminar can be listened to on-line, on demand – or downloaded; there are also downloadable handouts and resources provided by each panelist.

For more information about National Preparedness Month visit http://www.ready.gov/america/npm07/

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