Even if your company has not been affected by tornados, tsunami waves, or wildfires, all employers need to be prepared for the mayhem that natural disasters cause. In a new report, “Eight Steps Employers Should Take to Prepare Their Workplace for a Natural Disaster,” Waukesha, Wisconsin-based Empathia offers specific tips to improve workplace disaster recovery and readiness plans.

“It’s a mistake to think natural disasters can’t happen to you,” says Joseph J. DesPlaines, an enterprise risk management expert at Empathia and author of the paper. “The end result of natural disasters can be devastating, both in terms of how a blackout or unsafe building can impact the workplace, as well as the emotional toll of the disaster on employees. Don’t wait until a disaster strikes to start preparing your emergency response.”

Empathia notes that over the past ten years, in the wake of several large-scale man-made and natural disasters, many organizations have vastly improved their disaster recovery and readiness plans. Recent incidents, such as the East Coast earthquake and hurricane, have provided lessons for risk management professionals that improvement of disaster recovery and readiness plans is needed.

Read more @ homelandsecuritynewswire.com

Sixty-three percent of Americans have a feline friend, canine companion or other type of pet, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. And when disaster strikes, most pet owners are reluctant to leave those pets behind. That’s where partnerships with local animal welfare groups can help, as they did during the 2011 Joplin, Mo., tornado, the Iowa and Memphis, Tenn., floods and other natural disasters nationally.

Through partnerships with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), American Red Cross and local chapters of the Humane Society of the United States, Joplin, Iowa and Memphis received the help they needed to implement disaster preparedness and response plans that include animals.

Read more @ emergencymgmt.com

Following the severe catastrophes experienced around the world in 2011, organizations now have an opportunity to learn lessons from these events and reduce the adverse impact of future incidents on their balance sheets.

These are the conclusions of a new paper published the other day by Marsh. The paper says that the scale of the catastrophes experienced in 2011 exceeded previous loss-modeling predictions and has challenged established thinking on the nature of risk. The paper says that, post-2011, companies need to re-examine their risk management strategies and introduce new methodologies to strengthen their operational and financial resilience.

Read more @ www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com

A new study published in the Journal of Family Issues of a systematic analysis of how families communicate when faced with serious health issues brought on by ‘slow moving technological disasters’ poses important issues for policymakers, according to the University at Buffalo (UB), The State University of New York. One of the university’s professors, Heather Orom, was the lead author of the paper.

Assistant professor of community health and health behavior at the UB School of Public Health and Health Professions, Orom said the paper, A Typology of Communication Dynamics in Families Living a Slow-Motion Technological Disaster, explores the negative effects of environmental disasters within families. Those effects have significance in the larger community and should be taken into account by policymakers.

“If there are real social and financial costs that result from … disasters and their effects on family relationships, for example, if divorces increase as a result, then maybe this kind of research can help move policies in a direction of being more protective of communities,” Orom said.

Read more @ hstoday.us

Recent hurricanes Ike and Katrina may rank among the three costliest storms in U.S. history, but in preparing for disasters the federal government must think bigger still, says America’s top emergency planner.

“As devastating as those two hurricanes were, they’re not as bad as it gets,” said Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Fugate told reporters Tuesday at the National Hurricane Conference in Orlando, Fla., that his agency has been preparing for realistic worst-case scenarios – not just natural disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes, but terrorist attacks, as well.

In crafting a strategic plan to guide FEMA through 2014, Fugate said he charged his organization to consider maximum devastation when it comes to disasters.

That includes dealing with catastrophic events in which medical care would be needed for 265,000 casualties, restoring and sustaining basic services for an affected area of 7 million people within 60 days, and helping communities of 1.5 million disaster survivors recover within five years.

Read more @ chron.com