| Hurricane planning updates
FEMA hurricane checklist FEMA offers the following tips to business owners: * Clear out areas with extensive glass frontage as much as possible. If you have shutters, use them; otherwise, use precut plywood to board up doors and windows. * Remove outdoor hanging signs. * Bring inside or secure any objects that might become airborne and cause damage in strong winds. * Secure display cases. Use plywood to protect glass display cases or, if possible, turn the case's glass side toward an inside wall. * Store as much merchandise as high as possible off the floor, especially goods that could be necessary to survival and in short supply after the storm. * Move merchandise that cannot be stored away from glass and cover it with tarpaulins or heavy plastic. * Secure all goods in warehouses off the floor, and place sandbags in spaces where water could enter. * Remove papers from lower drawers of desks and file cabinets and place them in plastic bags or containers on top of the cabinets. * Turn off water heaters, stoves, pilot lights and other burners.
MessageOne offers CIO’s top ten actions to prepare for hurricane season During Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans-based law firm Adams and Reese relied on MessageOne solutions to quickly ensure the safety of its employees and also to secure temporary real estate for its inaccessible offices. According to Adams and Reese CIO David Erwin, “The most important thing is to have a way to communicate effectively in a disaster. Our people were productive, they could communicate, and our clients could email us and have no problem reaching us. That communication was important to continue our business as normally as possible.” Besides the obvious safety concerns, a lack of planning can affect critical business operations and emergency communications channels. Companies need to be prepared to address both business continuity and emergency communications during the storm’s impact, and disaster recovery after the storm’s passing. Top ten actions 1. Make Sure You Can Communicate: Remember that if you can’t communicate, you can’t recover. It is impossible to predict which systems may be affected by a hurricane or what technology staff will have access to at any given time. Make sure your crisis communications system is flexible and enables multiple communication channels. 2. Retain Up-to-Date Contact Information for your Employees and Key Constituents: Your HR system, email system, or other corporate system of record can be used as the source for current contact data and be synchronized to the crisis communication system. Develop a process to collect staff’s preferred method of contact and make sure you have several different channels to reach each employee. 3. Plan Post-Storm Roll Call: Don’t be caught with an emergency broadcast system to employees that only does half the job. Make sure that your crisis communication system enables a roll call and features two-way communications so that you can locate all employees and identify any that may need help. 4. Plan for a Remote Recovery Facility: Your organization may find that your physical facilities are incapacitated for a long period of time. Plan in advance for a move to a temporary workspace with access to critical business systems and ensure that your company’s documentation is securely archived and accessible from a remote location. 5. Protect Your Email – You Will Need It: If there is one application that you must maintain in an emergency – it is email. The continuity of your business depends on having email up and running. Employees must be able to communicate with each other and key constituents to keep the business operating – even if that means working remotely from their homes or a remote facility. 6. Maintain Compliance and Audit Trails: If the corporate email system goes down during a hurricane, your employees may use personal email accounts as an alternative to keep conducting business. Unfortunately, by doing so, the email messages will be out of compliance and unrecoverable to your primary system. Make sure you have a system in place that will maintain email service, while also ensuring compliance and an audit trail in a crisis. 7. Complete a Disaster Recovery Audit of Your Vendors: If your website is or your DNS is hosted locally, it is likely to go down during any storms impacting your company. Consider hosting some of your key services in other geographies to minimize the impact from a regional disaster. 8. Test Your Emergency Plan Off Hours: Practice your emergency plan with some of the key staff members out of the loop to make sure the backup staff is able to administer the plan. Verify that you can get a hold of key staff members through multiple channels (cell phones, pagers, home phones, remote office phones). 9. Plan to Not Stick to Your Emergency Plan – Expect the Unexpected: It is important to have a plan that is executable; however, in real crisis situations, circumstances can change rapidly and in unpredictable ways. Your leadership needs to be able to change instructions quickly and to notify employees with the latest information. 10. Identify Key Operations and their Recovery Priority: While conditions may dictate the availability of business operations, the overall business impact of operations and processes can be established before the storm. Prioritize and publish recovery sequence plans to minimize the outage effects on the business, customers, suppliers and employees.
New hurricane technique continually monitors landfalling storms "With this technique, meteorologists for the first time will be able to monitor the strength of a hurricane every few minutes as it approaches landfall and quickly alert coastal communities if it suddenly intensifies or weakens," says NCAR scientist Wen-Chau Lee. The technique is known as VORTRAC, which stands for Vortex Objective Radar Tracking and Circulation. VORTRAC uses the Doppler radar network established by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the 1980s and 1990s. About 20 of these radars are scattered along the Gulf and Atlantic coastlines from Texas to Maine. Each radar can measure winds blowing toward or away from it, but no single radar could provide a 3-D picture of hurricane winds before now. Lee and his collaborators developed a series of mathematical formulas that combine data from a single radar near the center of a landfalling storm with general knowledge of Atlantic hurricane structure in order to map the approaching system's winds in three dimensions. The technique also infers the barometric pressure in the eye of the hurricane, a very reliable index of its strength. Forecasters using VORTRAC can update information about a hurricane each time a NOAA Doppler radar scans the storm, which can be as often as about every six minutes. Without such a technique, forecasters would need at least two coastal radars in close proximity to each other in order to obtain the same information. But most of the network’s radars are too far apart to qualify. Because of the limited range of Doppler radars, VORTRAC works only for hurricanes that are within about 120 miles of land. Depending on a hurricane's speed, that could enable forecasters to monitor it for the critical 10-15 hours or so before landfall. The National Hurricane Center will test VORTRAC during this year's hurricane season, which officially starts on June 1. To monitor the winds of a landfalling hurricane, forecasters now rely on aircraft to drop instrument packages into the storm that gather data on winds and pressure. But due to flight logistics, the aircraft can take readings no more than every few hours, which means that coastal communities may not be swiftly alerted to changes in approaching hurricanes. In 2004, parts of Florida's southwest coast were caught by surprise when Hurricane Charley's top winds increased from 110 to 145 miles per hour in just six hours as the storm neared land. "Our research shows that this technique can capture sudden intensity changes in potentially dangerous hurricanes," says NCAR scientist Michael Bell, a coauthor of the article. In time, VORTRAC may also help improve long-range hurricane forecasts by using data from airborne radars to produce detailed information about a hurricane that is far out to sea. Forecasters could input the data to computer models to improve three- and five-day forecasts. To see whether there are Doppler radars in your area that will be used for monitoring hurricanes, view the map at http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2007/radar.shtml
Storm size, intensity, key to evaluating potential hurricane damage The April issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a study by Mark Powell, a research meteorologist at the NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in Miami, describing what he calls a new Hurricane Destructive Potential classification. This metric associates a numerical value similar to the Saffir-Simpson scale to each storm, and reflects potential damage due to wind, storm surge and waves. NOAA has not proposed modifying the current Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale. Powell’s goal is to provide a better measure of the threat posed by a hurricane. He suggests revising classification of hurricanes to include other physical characteristics of the hurricane such as the overall size of the storm and the area affected by winds exceeding certain threshold values. “By incorporating both size and intensity, I see this system as a better way to allow people to assess the true potential impact of an approaching storm,” Powell said. “If people knew that Katrina had a much higher damage potential than Camille, the Mississippi residents who chose to stay might have evacuated.” Powell and his co-author, Timothy Reinhold, a scientist and engineer with the Institute for Business & Home Safety, acknowledge that people who decide to leave or stay in response to a hurricane warning make decisions based on perceived vulnerability. Past hurricane experience is one of several influences on this perception. The authors propose that many coastal Mississippi residents may have decided to stay during Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 hurricane 24 hours before landfall, because their location had not flooded during a previous Category 5 storm, Hurricane Camille in 1969. This decision was made despite skillful forecasts from the NOAA National Weather Service. While Hurricane Camille’s winds were stronger at landfall, Hurricane Katrina’s wind field was much larger, resulting in significantly greater coastal flooding and damage. “The Saffir-Simpson scale has been a very valuable tool in warning people about hurricanes, but we have known for some time that the level of surge and surge-related damage is not well correlated with the maximum wind speeds at landfall,” said Reinhold. “The proposed methods may well lead to more consistent warnings of damage potential both for wind and surge. It could follow in the footsteps of NOAA’s recent adoption of the Enhanced Fujita Scale for classifying tornadoes and provide the foundation for an enhanced Saffir-Simpson Scale.” To develop a scale that incorporates destructive potential due to storm surge and wind, Powell used kinetic energy calculations to classify small and large storms, ranging from Tropical Storm strength to Category 5 using data from NOAA’s H*Wind experimental product that effectively describes the variations in the size and shape of the wind field of a given storm. H*Wind is currently the best tool available to evaluate the extent of damaging winds based on all available observations. Hurricane season begins June 1 and ends November 30. NOAA will release its official outlook for the 2007 season on May 22.
•Date: 18th May 2007 • Region: US •Type: Article •Topic: DR general
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