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It’s important to talk to your friends and family about how you will communicate before, during, and after a disaster because they may not be together if and when a disaster strikes. It’s important to know how you’ll contact one another and reconnect if separated. Establishing a family meeting place that’s familiar is essential for making it easy to find one another. Below are four steps for you to create a plan today.

Make sure to update your plan based on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommendations due to the coronavirus.

Step 1: Put a plan together by discussing the questions below with your family, friends, or household to start your emergency plan.

  1. How will I receive emergency alerts and warnings?
  2. What is my shelter plan?
  3. What is my evacuation route?
  4. What is my family/household communication plan?
  5. Do I need to update my emergency preparedness kit?
  6. Check with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and update my emergency plans due to coronavirus.
  7. Do you have cloth face coverings (for everyone over 2 years old), and disinfectants?

Step 2: Consider specific needs in your household.

As you prepare your plan, tailor your plans and supplies to your specific daily living needs and responsibilities. Discuss your needs and responsibilities and how people in the network can assist each other with communication, care of children, business, pets, or specific needs like operating medical equipment. Create your network for specific areas where you need assistance. Keep in mind some of these factors when developing your plan:

Step 3: Fill out a Family Emergency Plan

Download and fill out a family emergency plan or use it as a guide to creating your own.

Step 4: Practice your plan with your family/household

This article was repurposed from the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA website “https://www.ready.gov.” To view the original article, visit https://www.ready.gov/plan

As tenants and employees return to commercial sites for work. Building owners and managers are implementing new office procedures and protocols to promote social distancing and exposure prevention for the “new normal”. Now is an important time for property management professionals to consider how to handle emergency situations for maximum preparedness to their tenants and building sites.

Here are a few best practices to consider from the BOMA International – New Guidance Document: Emergency Evacuations Amid COVID-19. During this critical period it is imperative to evaluate and update your current evacuation procedures.

Tips to Consider for Emergency Preparedness

Train, Adapt, Train Again. Remember that everybody is a new to this situation. No matter how long you’ve been in the business, you’ve never dealt with recovering from a pandemic that impacted the entire country. We are all going to be learning new things, assessing the situation, and adjusting our response accordingly.

It is vital that frontline employees be given regular and helpful updates. Keep it simple when possible, focusing on what procedures or protocols remain the same, and which have changed.

Know Your Neighbors. Now is the time to get to know the property managers and security directors at the buildings next door and across the street. These informal networks can prove extremely valuable in the event of a secondary incident, and may building valuable long-term relationships with fellow professionals.

Imagine the fire alarm sounds at your site in the middle of a thunderstorm. Where are your going to evacuate your already nervous tenants? Having a neighboring building willing to offer their lobby as a temporary shelter and emergency assembly location could be priceless. Start the conversation.

Build That Stockpile. As the supply chain gets back on track, it allows us to begin rebuilding a stockpile of emergency supplies for your teams. This may include items such as bottled water, gloves, masks, or hand sanitizer. Slowly adding materials to internal stockpiles at your buildings will make you better prepared for any future incidents.

Distancing Under Duress. Remember that under best practices for coronavirus, social distancing is key. During a secondary crisis or emergency such as fire or flooding, it will be extremely difficult to maintain physical distance between building tenants and staff as they move away from a given threat.

Nevertheless, security and building personnel will be tasked with doing their best to re-establish order and assist this diverse population with dealing with two separate – and sometimes contradictory – hazards. Once tenants, guests, and staff are in a safer location, they will need to maintain six feet of separation whenever possible. This may require an area of shelter that is larger than might have been needed previously.

Call For Help. Even during such incidents, frontline employees must remember that they are not “on an island.” They should of course call 911 for assistance from first responders when needed.

Evacuation Drill Considerations

Compliance with state and local fire codes requires building personnel to have a fire safety and evacuation plan that follows International Fire Code (IFC) requirements.

For many commercial office buildings, evacuation drills must be conducted annually unless localities amend their code to a more frequent basis. If a building has ambulatory care facilities, educational (K-12) or institutional operations, evacuation drills may be required to take place on a monthly basis. Check with your local fire officials for further guidance on required drill frequency.

While it is important to plan for fire drills, it is even more important to be prepared if an actual fire emergency arises. Evacuating a building during a fire emergency needs to be the primary objective and social distancing should be considered a secondary concern. In those cases where evacuation protocols conflict with social distancing requirements, exiting the building during a fire emergency should be given priority. The following recommendations explore other ways to mitigate exposure to COVID-19 during an evacuation:

Questions?

Titan’s emergency planning services capabilities include the creation of a facility-specific, all-hazards emergency plan. Every one of our current emergency services clients has a core pandemic response guide included as a portion of their emergency operations plan document. Contact Titan’s Director of Emergency Management, Tom Henkey at [email protected] if we can provide additional insight or assistance.

Additional Resources

As always, if you “See Something, Say Something”. For life-threatening emergencies, call 911. To report suspicious activity, call 855-RPRT-2-S4 (855-777-8274).

Thoughts and Analysis by Tom Henkey
Director of Emergency Management, Titan Security Group

The ongoing coronavirus outbreak has had an enormous impact on American businesses. The overall economy, and the private sector in particular, is resuming operations in fits and starts. This uncertainty has sent the stock market into an unprecedented state of whipsaw ups and downs.

Much has been written about the disease itself, about mitigation and containment efforts, and about where to find the most current information on the outbreak. There can be no question that we are still in midst of an extended coronavirus outbreak that is likely to include one or more additional waves of widespread illness.

And yet it is not too early in this crisis to begin considering what the recovery phase will entail. Like all disease outbreaks before it – even worldwide pandemics – this coronavirus will reach a peak before its impact begins to decline. That decline could be due to the virus going dormant, to new and more effective treatment of symptoms, or ultimately due to an effective vaccine. Or our society could simply learn to live with it, adapting to a new seasonal risk to public health with social distancing and other mitigation measures.

This much is clear: at some point, we’ll need to get back to some semblance of normal. Kids will return to schools and employees will return to work. Store shelves will be fully restocked and supply chains will realign.

But what will that “normalcy” look like? And how do we get there?

The recovery process begins long before such steps actually occur. It is born during preparedness and prevention phases, and during continuity planning efforts prior to any emergency, such as a disease outbreak. It continues through the mitigation and response phases of emergency management, gaining steam as stakeholders express a need and desire to resume full operations.

The recovery process truly begins with taking an honest assessment of current status and needs. This has already begun even while the response phase is ongoing, still very much in the midst of the crisis event. Yet it might be best thought of as an “exit strategy” for transitioning towards normalized business operations in a controlled manner. Even if an organization has lagged behind in making such preparations prior to an incident or disruption, much progress can be made even late in the game. A few considerations:

Finally, when it is time to go full-speed once again, you’ll likely require further assistance. Helpful federal resources include:

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) continuity planning
https://www.ready.gov/business-continuity-plan

https://www.ready.gov/business-continuity-planning-suite

Helpful professional organizations include:

Business Resumption Planners Association of Chicago
https://brpa.wildapricot.org/

Business Continuity Planners Association
https://www.bcpa.org/

Disaster Recovery Institute
https://drii.org/

As always, if you “See Something, Say Something”. For life-threatening emergencies, call 911. To report suspicious activity, call 855-RPRT-2-S4 (855-777-8274).

Thoughts and Analysis by Tom Henkey
Director of Emergency Management, Titan Security Group

Long-term and systemic disruptions of any kind are quite rare. Hurricanes, terrorist attacks, and wildfires can be devastating to surrounding communities, yet almost never negatively impact the entirety of the American economy. They are, instead, largely regional events with some national implications.

A communicable-disease pandemic has proven to be an exception. COVID-19 has made immediate and extensive impacts on our economy and on our social behaviors. Perhaps the only analogs we may envision are a large-scale bioterrorism attack, or a widespread and extended failure of the electrical grid.

Such massive disruptions must be addressed by prevention, preparedness, and mitigation. If they are allowed to take place, and we find ourselves in a largely reactive respond and recover mode, then we are acknowledging that such massive social and economic impacts are inevitable.

Author Michele Wucker coined the phrase “Gray Rhino” to refer to events such as pandemic disease. At its core, the concept is the opposite of the widely referenced “Black Swan” event – a disruption so unexpected and unpredictable that it remains essentially unforeseeable. A gray rhino is a different type of animal entirely. In her 2016 book of the same title, Wucker defined the term as “the big, obvious thing that’s coming at you.” It is the risk that is entirely predictable, but fails to be acted upon.

Such as a pandemic.

Public health experts have been warning society for literally decades that a widespread outbreak of communicable disease was a “when” and not an “if.” It was a gray rhino bearing down on us, yet getting very little attention in terms of planning or preparation. We got gored because we failed to be proactive.

And yet this collective mistake offers us all an opportunity to absorb several critical lessons learned, and to improve our prevention, preparedness, and mitigation efforts for the next time. Because there will be a next time. Some obvious takeaways:

Put a subject matter expert in charge. The RAE concept works. The person with the responsibility, authority, and expertise to make educated and actionable decisions is the person who should be in charge of the overall effort. For a pandemic, this points to a senior Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) official, a highly regarded former Surgeon General, etc.

Establish a clear chain of command. The pandemic response in the U.S. showed us what a confused and ineffective mess our society becomes if no formal system is established to address a crisis. Aligning federal, military, state, local, and private-sector resources into a formal, efficient structure is vital to success.

Structured logistics and distribution. Perhaps the most important lesson from the coronavirus outbreak is that logistics are everything. The systemic lack of planning and structure that led to a chaotic and counterproductive bidding war among state and local governments and medical providers for critical supplies serves as a perfect example of how not to manage a supply chain.

Cross-sector collaboration is mandatory. Another obvious shortcoming in the preparedness for and initial response to this pandemic was a lack of collaboration. Involving unique and varied resources and skillsets including the private sector and military is absolutely mandatory for future crises. It is vital to have such agreements in place before a crisis emerges.

Fixed and reliable communications channels. During this pandemic, confusing and contradictory messaging from the federal government caused unnecessary inefficiencies and cost lives. The designated subject-matter expert placed in charge of the nation’s response must be the key conduit of concise, reliable, and truthful information during a period of crisis.

Identify the other rhinos. Just because you’ve tamed one beast doesn’t mean there are not others roaming around. We cannot afford tunnel vision. For example, hurricane season begins in the U.S. in less than two months, and climate change has created sea levels and weather patterns we simply have not seen before. We need to be proactive in our assessment and planning for predictable large-scale hazards in the future.

In essence, now is the time and place for unified, decisive, and innovative leadership across all sectors. A vital portion of that responsibility lies in performing an honest after-action review of our preparation for and response to the coronavirus pandemic, and rapidly applying the lessons learned to the next crisis. And there is always a next crisis.

As always, if you “See Something, Say Something”. For life-threatening emergencies, call 911. To report suspicious activity, call 855-RPRT-2-S4 (855-777-8274).

What can be done right now to prevent the spread of the coronavirus? Per guidance from subject matter experts such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Chicago Department of Public health (CDPH), hygiene and social distancing are the best tactics for individuals and organizations to undertake at this point in the outbreak. Wash your hands frequently, utilize approved cleaning products and sanitizer on high-contact surfaces, do not touch your face, do not gather in groups of ten or more and keep at least six feet of distance from others when possible.

How do we tell rumor from fact at this time? There are certainly a lot of rumors and misinformation circulating about coronavirus and the governmental response. Trusted resources and subject matter experts such as the CDC and CDPH can be referenced via the links listed below. Announcements by senior elected officials and public safety authorities can be considered reliable sources. Forwarded text messages or emails and social media websites have proven to be extremely unreliable sources of information during this outbreak and should not be further forwarded or shared.

What has Titan done to prepare for a pandemic? Aligned with industry best practices, Titan has written and implemented a corporate emergency operations plan (EOP) and a business continuity plan. Both documents assist senior leadership in decision making and asset allocation during crises such as a pandemic.

What is Titan’s policy for staffing during a pandemic? Titan will work with our Clients to meet baseline security requirements for a given facility. In the event of a widespread or other major disruption Titan may implement the following measures:

What does the Governor’s “stay-at-home” directive mean? Travel restrictions for non-essential personnel were put in place by Governor Pritzker effective March 21. For security professionals, this has very little impact. Public transportation, roads, hospitals, grocery stores, and gas stations remain open. We are approved to travel to and from our workplaces and will continue to provide a safe environment at our buildings. Other vital functions such as police, fire, property management, engineering, and delivery drivers are also authorized to travel as needed.

Is there a credentialing system to get back into the city? It is highly unlikely that City authorities will place extreme access-control measures on the CBD. If any such restrictions were applied, law enforcement would coordinate reentry to this area once the Incident Commander had deemed it safe to return. Chicago utilizes the FIMS/CP3 system to identify critical infrastructure partners, and the emergency contacts listed in the system would be prioritized for reentry.

What comes next? The current viral outbreak could be disruptive to businesses for weeks or even months. Many companies will continue or expand their work-from-home policies, and expand their use of technology such as remote videoconferencing. Security and property management professionals should continue to:

Online Resources

In these uncertain times, jurisdictions across the country are considering what steps they are going to implement to stop the spread of transmission of COVID-19.

As you contemplate additional policies and procedures to implement within your organization, consider these tips to help you prepare for and mitigate future impacts:  

Titan’s emergency planning services capabilities include the creation of a facility-specific, all-hazards emergency plan. Every one of our current emergency services Clients has a core pandemic response guide included as a portion of their emergency operations plan document. Contact Titan’s Director of Emergency Management, Tom Henkey at [email protected] if we can provide additional insight or assistance.

COVID-19 Resources


COVID 19 Preparedness Checklist for Property Professionals

Business and Workplace Resources

Employment Laws and COVID-19 Health Emergencies