Says Russell, "The arrival of yet another devastating storm reinforces the need for business continuity features. Business customers need to have a clear understanding of their carrier’s internal architecture for redundancy; they should also take secondary steps for further assurance of continuity. In the tri-state area this is the on-site outsourcing challenge of the century."
Are we ready for the next super storm? A team of CNN reporters and producers have spent the past three months investigating the power and aftermath of super storm sandy.
The hour-long program, titled "The Coming Storms," set out to examine "the factors that made the impact of superstorm Sandy so devastating," featuring "insights from researchers and scientists on climate change. The threat of more frequent extreme weather events fueled by climate.
As it turns out, we came dangerously close to never receiving the early warning of widespread flooding and power outages.
fter Nemo dropped an unprecedented three feet of snow over Connecticut, making road's impassable even days later, Connecticut Light & Power and Yankee Gas are part of a coordinated effort to assist the state and the 1.2 million customers the utilities serve.
CL&P and Yankee Gas will deploy approximately 50 pieces of snow removal equipment, including backhoes, dump trucks and trailers, as well as more than 40 employees to operate the equipment. The utilities are working closely with the Connecticut Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security, and the municipalities to coordinate the most efficient use of these resources.
"We know that responding to Mother Nature's wrath requires a coordinated, community response and working with the state; we're glad we can provide this support to the towns and cities we serve," said Bill Quinlan, CL&P senior vice president of Emergency Preparedness. "We greatly appreciate the willingness of our employees, members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Locals 420 and 457, to help address this urgent need for snow removal
Prior to the blizzard, CL&P activated its emergency response plan, staged employees and materials in locations across the state for immediate deployment in affected areas, and
"Responding to this blizzard has been a community-wide effort and we greatly appreciate the assistance we received from the state Department of Transportation, local Departments of Public Works and emergency responders," Quinlan said. "We appreciate our customers' patience as our employees worked tirelessly in hazardous conditions to make repairs."
[Storms like Sandy] are coming more frequently and more powerfully than they have in the past. We know that," CNN national correspondent David Mattingly, a storm reporter who was on the ground when Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana in 2005, told The Huffington post over the phone on Friday.
The question, he said, is not whether these storms will happen, but rather how often. And when they do hit, will we be ready?
"Anyone who's been hit by a storm like this [knows that] it turns your life upside down," he said. "As a country, are we willing to invest to protect these areas, to make them more resilient? There are plans right now -- [experts have been] promoting them for years… causeways and barriers that are flood-proof, projects that would cost tens of billions of dollars."
But despite the high cost, Mattingly says that these options would be less expensive in the long run.
"These are all difficult decisions and they're all costly," he said. "But it's cheaper to invest in protecting what we have, rather than to fix it after the storm."
Other than the immeasurable cost of the loss of lives and the displacement of families, as well as the destruction of property and other critical infrastructure, the damage borne by the survivors of such disasters is beyond imagination, Mattingly said.
In this clip, taken from the upcoming documentary, Professor Malcolm Bowman of the Stony Brook Storm Surge Research Group, explains to Mattingly that if sand dunes, 30 foot high, had been constructed prior to Sandy's arrival in the New York area, Breezy Point -- a neighborhood in Queens that was decimated during the storm -- may very well have been spared.
After Hurricane Katrina, Bowman recommended that a surge protection barrier (referred to as the outer harbor gateway project) be constructed to protect New York City from a superstorm. Such a project would cost up to $20 billion, says Mattingly, but as a November 2012 Bloomberg report notes, Bowman and other experts in the field believe that such a barrier would have "mitigated much of Manhattan's flooding and lessened it in many other hard-hit areas."
While New York City is undoubtedly in danger of being deluged by other storms in the future, Mattingly says that it's not the only area in the northeast that is under threat.
"Anyone who can see the ocean is vulnerable," he said. "Places like Philadelphia, places like Stamford, Connecticut, Providence, Rhode Island, Boston, Baltimore, Washington D.C... The city of Norfolk in Virginia is considered one of the most vulnerable because of its low elevation... As a country, we have to decide. Are we going to spend money -- tax money -- to invest in these [long-term projects]?"
Mattingly concedes that it won't be easy.
"How do you explain [this] to someone who lives in Nebraska? Or someone who lives up in the Rocky Mountains? This is going to take political will. It's going to have to be worked hard for in the future," he said.
How can business owners boost workforce productivity without incurring additional operating costs?
According to Citrix's Brett Caine speaking to BusinessWeek, "Equip employees with the technology to work from anywhere. As business continues to move beyond the traditional 9-5 day and across borders and time zones, small businesses need to leverage technology to maximize every minute of their time. In addition to mobility devices, simple, affordable online access and collaboration tools will enable even the smallest companies to run their business and engage their workforce and customers from any place. Employees can collaborate in real time with remote co-workers, cut travel costs for unnecessary in-person meetings, conduct remote training and support sessions from anywhere, and keep in close touch with customers more efficiently and cost-effectively."
"Those of us lucky enough to work at organizations that support virtual workstyles—a trend my company calls "workshifting"—already understand the benefits: increased productivity via reduced stress, better work-life balance, increased motivation, healthier lifestyles, and so forth. If you’re looking to boost your workforce productivity and save money in the process, it’s time to start taking a closer look at how workshifting practices can benefit your organization, your employees, and even the economy as a whole."
According to the Economist in an article titled "Making It Through The Storm," "Each new disaster tends to surprise firms that thought they had good plans in place. Hospitals in New York that had moved their back-up generators above ground nonetheless lost power during Sandy because they had failed to put fuel and pumps where floods could not reach. Running disaster-readiness drills regularly, it turns out, is a common-sense idea practised all too rarely."
“Firms are increasingly reliant on networks, but often fail to understand the risks that networks bring,” says Don Tapscott, a management guru. Global supply chains, just-in-time and shifting to the “cloud” tend to bind once unrelated activities ever closer together, making them more prone to failing at the same time. The current fad for moving data to the “cloud” may appear to reduce risk because there is so much spare capacity in the web. Yet some firms offering cloud services have more concentrated operations than others.
Firms are starting to recognise their vulnerability to cyber-attack, but few have much idea what they would do if it happened. Mr Tapscott thinks boards should have a committee explicitly focused on understanding IT and network risks and ensuring they are properly managed.
Dutch Leonard, a risk expert at Harvard Business School, says that the best-prepared firms use a combination of planning for specific events and planning to cope with specific consequences, such as a loss of a building or supplier, regardless of the cause. He also recommends copying an approach used by the armed forces: using a group of insiders to figure out how the firm could be brought down.
Sandy showed that when disaster hits firms depend on how the various arms of government respond. Equally, government efforts can depend on the willingness of private firms to join in. Hurricane Katrina showed that the logistical capabilities of a big private firm, such as Walmart, can deliver essential supplies better than the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Monopolistic utilities are often the least ready for disaster, as Sandy showed. But at least in New York and New Jersey, AT&T and T-Mobile put their rivalry on hold to improve cellphone availability after Sandy hit by sharing wireless masts.
America’s poor physical infrastructure makes the problems worse. Firms should make lobbying government to invest heavily in upgrading that infrastructure a core part of their risk-management strategy, argues Irwin Redlener of the National Centre for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.
Goldman Sachs has long been a leader in disaster planning because it understands that the situations in which it might not be able to function are exactly the sort of events when very large changes in the value of its investments could occur, says Mr Leonard. Yet too many firms underinvest in planning for disaster because they don’t think it will pay, at least within the short-term timeline by which many now operate, reckons Yossi Sheffi of MIT. A boss who expects three or four years in the job may calculate that there is a small chance of disaster in that time and that preparing for it is expensive, “so why not save the money and hope to move to another job before something happens?” Alas, all too often firms will be prudent only if prudence pays off quickly.
Read more: Storm response requires coordinated effort - FierceEnergy
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