Nashville is faced with record flooding!

Today Nashville experienced 7.21 inches on top of the 6 plus inches that fell yesterday.  Parts of downtown are being evacuated and tonight the Opryland Hotel is evacuating 1500 guests to a nearby high school.  In suburban areas, homes and businesses are under water. 

Right now all eyes are on evacuation and disaster response, but come tomorrow we will turn our attention to recovery and salvage.   I will be using this blog and tweeting on some key things that need to happen from salvage to crisis communications and decision making.  My particular focus will be upon small and mid-size businesses.

Here are some things to keep in mind right now:

Tonight:

1. Safety first. 

2. Communicate with your staff about their safety.  Communicate with them expectations about reporting to work.  Use a call tree.  Create a wikki site to communicate key information.  Use your hotline if you have it.  Tweet. 

3. Create an incident action plan.  (This will be the subject of my next blog.)

Tomorrow:

Businesses will start turning attention to the matter of salvage:

1.  Assign an individual from your organization the role of working with your insurance company. 

2. This person needs to make and maintain contact with your insurance agent through the recovery and restoration.

3. Photograph all damaged areas as soon as possible for potential insurance claims and before you begin salvaging. 

4. Prior to performing any salvage operation contact your insurance team to coordinate with possible insurance claims requirements and appraisal issues. 

5. Salvage furniture and equipment.  Focus first upon your most important equipment and materials needed to perform you CRITICAL business functions (i.e. computer servers, key production equipment, etc.). 

6. Use your existing inventory list or create one when you are salvaging your materials.  It will make things so much easier when it comes to insurance claims.

Next blog will be on Incident Action Plan.