by Joy Dike, PhD

Do you ever feel like you're in an episode of The Simpsons when it comes to conducting drills at your place of business or school?

People just don't seem to take these things seriously - people hiding in the bathroom during a fire drill, administration singing off that a drill has been done when it hasn't, or a drill being conducted at 3am on a Sunday when no one is in the building or on campus. There are too many ways to disregard the serious nature of emergency drills.

The fact is, though, that DRILLS SAVE LIVES. It is well documented that in times of severe stress your body goes in to auditory exclusion (your hearing worsens severely), you get tunnel vision (you lose vision on the periphery), you lose fine motor skills, and your thought process declines. By drilling and practicing what to do in the event of an emergency - whether its fire, tornado, active shooter, etc. - you are training your body and mind to perform the correct tasks when the time comes.

Imagine you're an elementary school teacher. You've taught in the same classroom for years. You've looked at the same fire evacuation plan on the back of your classroom door for years but never actually walked the path and practiced an evacuation. An actual fire occurs and all of a sudden your body goes into panic mode - you get auditory exclusion, tunnel vision, and decreased motor skills; now you literally can not follow the directions on the fire evacuation plan. Your students are looking at you to lead them, and you are frozen in panic, quite literally unable to think clearly. This is where drill save lives - if this teacher had practiced evacuating the classroom multiple times, over and over, month after month, year after year, her muscle memory would have allowed her to lead the children on the correct path to safety (even with auditory exclusion and tunnel vision). 

Please, take emergency drills seriously. They are not a waste of time; they are not planned as a way to make your day more difficult; they are not irrelevant. Practicing what you would do in an emergency could save your life.

With that said, let's end this very serious issue on a lighter note:

by Joy Dike, PhD

After Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, many office buildings were flooded. Flooding is bad. Flooding with seawater? Even worse. You want to know why? Because a lot of these office buildings had all of their servers and electrical distribution equipment in the basement. With all of your systems located in the basement, a flooded basement becomes more like a business crisis. Also? After 6 months of no power getting to these units, batteries start to leak toxic gases. A bad situation became even worse.
 
Now we’re not saying that your business continuity plan or business impact analysis can do anything to prevent or account for something like this. If you have a business continuity plan, it surely covers dealing with the aftermath of a natural disaster like a hurricane. The issue with these particular hurricanes wasn’t that the buildings themselves were structurally damaged. The issue was that tenants couldn’t move back in for over 6 months because the electrical equipment in the basement was a hazard, and it needed to be cleaned up, replaced, remediated, etc.
 
A business continuity plan that covers just the bare bones of IT (like Mr. Smith works remotely, Mr. Grey works at home, Ms. Franks is on call, and Mr. Boot moves to the Chicago office) isn’t going to cut it here. These people may be out of the office for half a year. They may need new computers, phones, supplies. They need a place to work for the next 6 months. Do your business continuity plan and business impact analysis take extended evacuations into account? The IT aspect of your business continuity plan and business impact analysis needs to go beyond which of your IT guys works from home after a hurricane.  
 
Continue to follow us as we wrap up this extended discussion about business continuity plans and business impact analyses. Hopefully you have realized that there are unusual situations that most business continuity plans and business impact analyses don’t take into account.