Part 3 – Creating an Emergency Recovery Plan For Your Community

Any emergency situation puts a lot of pressure on all community members.  The safety of all community members and staff, and returning to daily tasks are the most important.  In our previous two blog posts, we discussed how to evaluate the current emergency plan and how to create a new plan or update it.  In this post, we discuss considerations to make in a post-emergency and recovery plan.

Post Emergency & Recovery

The role of management after a has gone through a catastrophic event is critical for restoring stability in quality of life for residents and continuing daily managerial operations for staff.  The post-disaster and recovery plan should aim to assist residents in getting back to their daily routines once everyone is safe.  Cover the following in your plan:

Staff Roles

Once it is safe to operate again, ensure that roles and responsibilities are made clear to all employees.  Create a protocol for how communications, maintenance, building inspections, insurance, and other activities should be handled.

Communications

Devise a strategy on how to best communicate with residents in the aftermath of the event.  Evaluate the effectiveness of your communications strategy of the emergency to identify strengths and shortcomings.

Community Properties

Natural or man-made disasters can cause severe damage to buildings.  The maintenance process in place should include an efficient way to fix all building structures and internal equipment to make it safe for residents and staff.  The system your management uses to handle maintenance of community properties should be able to organize all service requests/work orders, assign vendors, and communicate to internal staff and residents.  

Financial Assistance

Provide information to residents on where they may gain additional financial assistance locally.

Community Insurance

This section should specify the process for contacting and working with your businesses’ insurance agents. Take photos of building structures before the storm or emergency situation and after once it is safe to do so.  

Resources for Residents

Work with local agencies to help restore the quality of life back to the community members.  Provide contacts to local food and clothing resources, shelters, blood banks, hospitals, hotels, counseling, etc.  This information should be conveyed to residents before and after the storm or emergency situation.  Furthermore, you can build a team of community volunteers to assist residents.     

Revising your recovery plan draft

Once the emergency recovery plan has been drafted, reviewed by your team, and revised for any required changes, share the document with your team through a document-sharing service.  As your plan changes due to new internal or external circumstances, update the document and re-upload it.  

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About Pilera

Pilera Software is a premier community management solution that provides managers with a simple way to communicate with residents during an emergency.  Send phone, email, or text; choose one out of 90 languages to send automated email and text messages to residents; deliver emergency messages via  Reverse 911, and schedule messages up to two weeks in advance.  Contact us for more information.