Do you have an Emergency Archive?

September is National Preparedness Month. Each year National Preparedness Month is recognized to promote family and community disaster and emergency planning. This year’s campaign is called “Disasters Don’t Wait. Make Your Plan Today“.

If  2020 has taught us anything, it has taught us that disasters come in all forms with relative unpredictability. A community’s ability to respond quickly to a wide range of issues is often key. The concentration of most disaster preparation is typically on the first responders side of the response. But city hall plays an important role as well.

Emergency-related proclamations, resolutions, and ordinances need to be prepared. City hall also often becomes the non-emergency call center for issues. It’s also the source for notices, social media updates, and other public updates. City hall’s also often the main point of contact for state and federal aid.

Yet, many communities will not have a fully equipped and staffed FEMA RV sitting out front of city hall to help them through emergency response and recover process. Depending on the impact of the emergency, city hall itself may not be available.

Information for Official Actions

Your state’s emergency management agency may have various templates that your community can utilize to declare disasters or direct actions like curfews in times of emergency. Getting these templates now give you the base verbiage that you modify into the format your own community utilizes. Hence, once a disaster strikes, you are not wasting precious time looking for the appropriate wording and drafting these documents from scratch. Simply filling the details necessary in their time of need saves time and stress.

Contact Information

This one is obvious, but not often completed. If completed, it is often not updated. Collecting a list of emergency contacts is entirely important for quick reference when time is short. This is not just the state’s emergency management agency, department of transportation or other state government offices. It should also include all local utility contacts, hospital, schools, and senior centers. This information should not be general. It should have a specific contact person’s name and all related contact information. Phone numbers, emails, even social media information as sometimes announcements from these individuals are mass broadcasts rather than direct contacts.

Information for Funding

Your community may have someone at the ready to write an application or submit the necessary information for recovery funding. But will they have sufficient information at the ready to submit the application quickly and with enough data to make it successful?

Having the right information available in a quickly accessible form will be important to the speed and completeness of your applications. Some information, like number of properties impacted, cannot be obtained until the event happens. But others like population, socio-economic statistics, and overall number of households can be compiled well-ahead of any event. With this information at the ready it is easy to look it up and drop it into an application.

Look to the Clouds

As important at it is to collect the data, it is just as important to keep the data safe. In the past it had been necessary to keep a paper file that you lugged around with you if evacuation was necessary. With the emergence of the internet, and especially cloud storage, this task as become much easier. Almost all the information that you need to keep on-hand can now be held in the cloud. Census data and other statistics, pre-made resolutions and press releases, almost any data or document that you’ll need in a time of crisis can now be accessed easily once you are in a safe and secure location.

Secure is an important aspect. In case it is hacked, there may be some critical information that doesn’t get included in your cloud emergency archive until something happens. It is also important to keep access secure. Using a password keeper that assigns a difficult password helps keep the archive safe.

Update the Archive Regularly

Compiling this information now is important. Sure resolutions and press releases will likely need a good amount of altering for each specific event, but having much of that stuff at the ready will be a godsend. But don’t forget to update your archive on a regular basis. Population characteristics change. Housing and commercial statistics change. There’s also changes in political leadership that can change what information is in your emergency archive.

Set a reminder in your calendar to remind you to look through the archive an a semi-regular basis. But don’t just look to update the numbers, look for ways to improve it. Looking back on the time since the last update of this archive, what else comes to mind that needs to be included?

But as 2020 has taught us, don’t delay in creation of your own emergency archive. It doesn’t need to be complete on day one. Get started and set regular reminders to take a look at it and add to it. You’ll thank yourself later.