Category Archives: Disaster Preparedness

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Multiple Risks to Watch Out For at 2018 World Cup

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Above: Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow 

The 2018 World Cup tournament began on June 14 and lasts until July 15. Thousands of fans will travel to Russia for the event, which consists of 64 matches and 32 teams in 11 cities. Like other mega events, it presents countless challenges for a number of industries including construction, travel, hospitality and security.

Circuit Magazine for security specialists reports that threat for terrorism is high, as there have been attacks in Moscow and the North Caucasus and most recently, a suicide attack on a Metro Train in St. Petersburg. It notes, however, that “Past performance in security terms of Russia at large events has been very strong, the Sochi Olympics was well controlled with no terrorist incidents affecting fans.

Based on our assessment we continue to recommend that any attendance at large events, or corporate travel in Russia is supported by additional risk management measures.”

The article also recommends that attendees remain vigilant in public places, adding that to address this risk, security has been increased at airports and transportation hubs. It warns of street crime, including pickpocketing, that targets tourists. “Bogus police officers have harassed and robbed tourists.

If you are stopped always insist on seeing identification. Avoid openly carrying expensive items, or anything that might easily identify you as a tourist. Avoid walking about late at night alone,” Circuit warned.

Not to be overlooked are health concerns.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (EU/EEA) recommends in a recent report that anyone traveling to Russia for the games make sure their vaccinations are up-to-date, particularly for diphtheria, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, measles, meningococcal infection, mumps, pertussis, poliomyelitis rubella and tetanus. According to the EU/EEA:

“As is often the case with mass gathering events, during the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia visitors may be most at risk of gastrointestinal illness and vaccine-preventable infections. The risk of being affected by gastrointestinal illness can be reduced by employing standard hygiene measures including regular hand washing with soap, drinking safe water (bottled, chlorinated or boiled before consumption); eating thoroughly cooked food and carefully washing fruit and vegetables with safe drinking water before consumption.”

It added that while outbreaks and spread of vaccine-preventable diseases are of particular concern during such mass gatherings. “there are no indications that the risk is higher than usual.”

Beazley notes that many of the 2018 World Cup’s risks impacting various industries will be covered by the London insurance market. The insurer outlines some of the key risks and their likely insured values:

Expect the Unexpected: Mitigating the Risks of Natural Disasters

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As we’ve seen with the recent Kilauea volcanic eruption and last year’s catastrophic hurricane season, natural disasters are becoming more frequent and dramatically more powerful. In fact, NOAA recently reported that weather and climate disasters reached an all-time high in damage costs within the United States, exceeding $300 billion in 2017.

In the face of these increases, companies have a social responsibility to maintain a strong disaster recovery strategy. How can your company prepare to combat the risks from these seemingly unpredictable events? Implementing a proactive risk management approach can help companies better prepare themselves, their employees and their communities to minimize damage and loss in the face of these destructive events. But these strategies cannot simply be created when a natural disaster strikes. As with anything, careful planning before a catastrophe happens is vital to the continued health and success of a business.

When developing these strategies, it is imperative that both pre- and post-disaster planning is  included in the mix, as each plays a critical role in ensuring your ongoing operations.

Maintain a pre-event strategy
It’s important to remember that when natural disaster strikes, there are both direct and indirect costs to a company. How you plan and address these costs can either save or destroy your business.

With today’s technology, we have the ability to monitor most natural disasters and maintain a better idea of when and how hard they will hit. This isn’t always the case, however. While hurricanes can take time to form before making landfall, oftentimes tornadoes and wildfires happen overnight, making it critical to have disaster plans in place before a disaster strikes.

There are three main areas companies should consider when creating a preemptive disaster strategy: 1) supply chain, 2) employees and 3) business infrastructure.

Maintaining a timely and accurate risk strategy for your company and your employees is incredibly important to protect all of these assets. First, it can help protect your supply chain by providing time to divert your supply chain operations from problem areas.

Additionally, it is imperative to be mindful of conditions affecting your various suppliers and how their potential risks can affect your operations.

Armed with this knowledge, you can proactively develop supply chain diversion strategies to maintain efficiency and production. While you may not have the threat of a natural disaster, one of your largest suppliers might. So think ahead, make a back-up plan and monitor both your own operations and those of your supply chain.

As we all know, employees are central to each and every business. An established risk mitigation strategy will include notifying employees so they have time to protect themselves and their family. It can also help management decide if and when to send employees home to help keep them safe.

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Finally, a preemptive strategy needs to consider the effects of disaster on business infrastructure. How will you prepare your building and operations for the threat of a flood or tornado? Do you have access to the proper reinforcements and equipment to accomplish these preparations? A well-established pre-event risk management strategy can help with these issues and also minimize damage so that you are not left picking up the pieces of what could have been a protected building or warehouse.

Implement a proactive post-event strategy
When developing a post-event disaster plan, the best strategy is to think long-term, as short fixes are just that—short fixes.

Consider the upstream impact of the disaster. Damage to raw materials and supplier areas can amount to huge indirect costs. So how can you avoid this? One way is by ensuring your pre-event plan is efficiently put into effect and is able to redirect any necessary supplies. It is also imperative to have a successful remediation strategy in place to recover from the effects of a disaster for both your operations and those of your supply chain. Be prepared to re-establish your supply chain and be sure it is completely intact post-disaster.

Many disasters also have long-lasting impacts that cause companies to have a lengthy rebuilding process. Have a plan for secondary supply chain options to ensure ongoing operations in case a supplier is out of service for a longer period of time. The problems don’t end when the disaster ends, so be sure to build out contingency plans for your operations through the potential recovery months.

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Your post-event remediation strategies must also consider your physical office environment. Ensure there is a plan to check that equipment is operational and know how to repair or find replacement equipment to get operations up and running as soon as possible. Focus on rebuilding the business ecosystem from supply chain, to operations, to your employees.

Finally, consider how you will get your employees back to work, and not just for the immediate future. Invest in your employees, and they will invest in you. After natural disasters, your employees could be facing damaged or destroyed homes, the loss of loved ones and even personal injuries.

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Look at what the company can do to help ensure their well-being so that they are willing and able to return to work.

Inevitability doesn’t have to mean susceptibility
Regardless of location, natural disasters are going to occur that affect you and your business to some extent. That is a fact of life. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that your company is susceptible to the significant damages and costs associated with these disasters.

Maintaining open lines of communication with your leadership and employees will help you develop and implement a strategic plan before and after nature takes its course. As we face the upcoming hurricane season and other inevitable disasters, it is better to mitigate the risks and susceptibility so that your “in case” plan doesn’t become “we should have.”

Secure Messaging in Incident Response and Business Continuity

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Today’s businesses face unprecedented risks. As mass interconnectivity replaces operational silos, every aspect of business, from transportation and the supply chain to email, data storage, facilities management and financial transactions, are all vulnerable to compromise, disruption and human error. In addition to the people, processes and technology that are at risk in a crisis, so too are the communications mediums most commonly used for incident notification and response.

At the forefront of defining their organization’s risk management strategies, risk managers, board members, chief security officers and chief information security officers all have a responsibility to initiate both incident response plans and business continuity strategies that transcend the digital and physical worlds. After all, a digital threat can quickly evolve into physical damages and destruction while a physical event can negatively impact digitally-driven business operations. However, if the communications mediums through which companies collaborate and disperse important news and information are also compromised, challenging situations increasingly become more complex.

Secure Messaging’s Role in Incident Response & Business Continuity
All organizations must prepare for out-of-course events. Situations like acts of nature, data breaches or other compromises require planned responses under the assumption that one day they will occur. Yes, different situations will require a different chain of events to take place, but there is one thing that all incident response and business continuity plans have in common: the need for ongoing communication during and after the event.

Whether you represent a power company that needs to notify first responders and emergency managers of an unexpected power outage/grid loss, an IT department discussing a plan of action during and after a ransomware attack, a healthcare team in different parts of a university communicating information during an active shooter event, or an enterprise sending messages to employees during a blizzard, fast, efficient and secure communications are essential.

How risk managers keep their businesses safe, how stakeholders communicate with colleagues and clients during a crisis and how an organization continues operations as quickly as possible is of the utmost importance. In some settings such as healthcare, energy or even on a campus, business can’t stop. So how do we ensure that caring for patients can continue and that we are prepared for any type of incident, emergency or crisis?

The first step is certifying that your company’s communication plans are solid. No one should want to depend on a phone tree in which you never know if someone receives a voicemail, wonder if information sent via fax is shared after receipt, or worry if a text has been compromised.

That means instantaneous response is required. For example, an organization’s proactive incident response personnel can use their secure messaging platform to preemptively set up templates and pre-schedule a series of texts to notify first responders and emergency management offices as well as all field employees during a declared emergency. Replies to these automated communications can be routed to a specific mailbox or group for monitoring and response, or disallowed based on the type of communication and need, providing a central communication hub.

Many communications, even during an emergency, are confidential to the business. They must be retained for compliance and reporting purposes and need to be protected from leaks. Simply put, communications that require confidentiality and secure discussions do not belong on non-secure channels. In these situations, secure messaging platforms allow for rapid, secure notifications and response communications to meet corporate operating procedures and compliance mandates, without worry of third-party surveillance or leaks.

Every organization must proactively prepare to respond in a secure and efficient manner to minimize the impact to employees, clients and its bottom line. With email and SMS texts plagued with inherent risk, secure messaging platforms are emerging as the trusted option to ensure rapid, efficient and secure communications when they matter most.

National Safety Month Targets Preventable Deaths

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Hazardous work zones, insufficient planning, prescription and illegal drugs and distracted driving continue to affect the careers and companies of employees in the United States. According to the National Safety Council’s (NSC) Injury Facts, the lifetime odds for the top three accidental causes of death are motor vehicle crashes (1 in 102), opioid and painkiller use (1 in 109) and falls (1 in 119).

To demonstrate that “knowing the odds is the first step in beating them,” the NSC launched its No 1 Gets Hurt campaign as part of National Safety Month, which begins June 1.
“Preventable injuries are the third leading cause of death for the first time in United States history,” NSC president and CEO Debbie Hersman told Risk Management Monitor. “Sadly, our national opioid epidemic and the sudden recent increase in motor vehicle deaths have propelled preventable injuries past chronic lower respiratory disease and stroke in terms of how many lives are lost each year. Every single unintentional injury could have been prevented.”

The numbers tell the story. In 2015 there were 214,008 injury-related deaths in the U.S., 69% of which were unintentional.

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Slightly more than half of those unintentional deaths occurred at home, while the remainder were classified as motor vehicle nonwork (24%), public (22%) and work-related (3%). Although the latter had the smallest number – 4,190 – that still equates to nearly 11.5 preventable work-related deaths per day.

NSC data also indicates that, on average, an additional 12,100 at-work injuries occur each day.

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The cost of these injuries was estimated at nearly $142.5 billion in 2015, equivalent to 15 cents of every dollar of corporate dividends to stockholders, 7 cents of every dollar of pretax corporate profits and exceeds the combined profits reported by the nine largest Fortune 500 companies.

NSC statistics indicate that since 1900, death rates in the U.

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S. have decreased by 71.1%. Preventable causes of death are also down by nearly 45% in the same time period but have been steadily increasing since 1992, which marked its lowest point (60.5%).

No 1 Gets Hurt aims to identify safety risks and prevent the leading causes of injuries and deaths at work and at home. Each week in June will focus on a different overarching cause of injuries and fatalities in the U.S.:

  • Emergency Preparedness
  • Wellness
  • Falls
  • Driving

“This year’s theme, No One Gets Hurt, encourages everyone to make at least one change for safety during June,” Hersman said. “Small actions—creating an emergency escape plan, avoiding using your phone while walking, or wearing your seat belt, for example—can make all the difference.”

To help accomplish thus, tip sheets and articles are available in English and Spanish. NSC members will also have access to other materials, including checklists, 5-Minute Safety Talks, games and best practices. As with other safety-themed campaigns, NSC encourages employers to use these resources during the designated weeks, or create a schedule that works best for their organization.

The NSC made these suggestions to keep workers, families, and communities thinking about safety in June and beyond.

  • Distribute the downloadable National Safety Month materials
  • Create bulletin boards, newsletters or blog posts
  • Encourage others to take the SafeAtWork pledge at nsc.org/workpledge
  • Share posts on your social media channels using #No1GetsHurt
  • Provide safety training
  • Host a safety fair, lunch ‘n learn, trivia contest or celebratory luncheon

“Employers look to NSC for resources to help employees understand safety risks, and we are committed to helping them provide that education—not just in June, but year-round,” Hersman said.