Are your premises at risk of flooding ?

As the UK and local businesses slowly begin to recover from the significant disruptions to cashflow and programme forced by last week’s  last week’s heavy snowfalls and freezing temperatures it’s easy to forget that there are problems still to come as the snow melts and rivers test their boundaries over the coming days bringing the potential for further loss and disruption to business critical activities.

Floods happen so quickly

I vividly recall walking the Pennie Way as a schoolboy and seeing first-hand how quickly the smallest of quietly meandering moorland streams rose in seconds to become powerful raging torrents that would knock you off your feet if you didn’t have an eye upstream and weren’t agile enough to clear their path.

Can you see around corners?

What’s your equivalent process for keeping an eye upstream – how do you see around the corners.  It’s too late to crane your neck around at the corner when the situation changes that rapidly and the potential for damage and loss is so high.

The ability to forecast likely events or “horizon scan” and plan ahead lies at the heart of all business continuity success.

So what should you do to prepare for the thaw?

Please don’t rush out and buy insurance.  That won’thelp you in the immediate aftermath and we want to prevent the problem not struggle for weeks convincing loss adjusters that we really did have all of that kit when we’ve lost the up to date inventory (or never had one in the first place).

Here’s a couple of bullets to start you thinking:

• Daily monitoring of the weather up to 5 days ahead
• Registering for the Environment Agency flood alerts at your postcode
• Checking whether you business is in a flood plain
• Checking whether your business is in the deluge path of a reservoir
• Checking where the water mains are – mechanical failures are equally likely to cause a flood
• Checking where the stop cock is and that you can access and operate it
• Transferring critical papers to higher shelves (you can store separate copies elsewhere but sometimes originals are needed)
• Making plans to re-locate if all or part of your premises is denied or lost

Have you written and tested your fallback premises plans?

If you have a substantial business and need to put together fallback premises plans we can do that for you in a matter of weeks from concept to live exercise.

Imagine how good it feels to know that come hell or high water (sic) you can continue to operate seamlessly from another site within a few hours of Armageddon?  What’s that worth?

It’s got to be worth a phone call to find out more hasn’t it?

Call Us on 08456 434775 for a free consultation or e mail your questions to info@veterusconsulting.com

@Veterus

Portsmouth

11 Jan 2010