Thursday, December 06, 2012
Major Overhaul
In the coming weeks, Forever Resilient will go through a major overhaul and facelift. Shortly thereafter, I anticipate a minimum of bi-weekly articles to be published. Suggestions or comments on content or structure are encouraged!
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
FEMA's Take on Business Continuity
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Preparedness Month
September has been dubbed "Preparedness Month." What have you done to prepare your family and your workplace for a disaster? Have you started your plans? Have you conducted a Business Impact Analysis? This week's article will review previous preparedness articles and consolidate several key links to help you instill resiliency into everyday life.
Lessons Learned from India's Power Crisis -
India suffered a huge power outage affecting over 670 million people. What would happen if the power went out, on a massive scale, right now? If you are at work or in transit, how would you get home? How do you conduct business? How do you care for your family? When reviewing this article think about how would you take care of your family for a week without power (remember the entire area is out of power too).
Sheltering in Place -
What is sheltering in place? How do you shelter in place? This term is also used to describe actions taken during an active shooter situation. Residents or employees are to barricade themselves in their offices/homes to prevent the suspect from entering the space and continuing crime. In either circumstance, have you prepared your business and home for sheltering in place?
Managing Your Emergency Supplies -
Food expires, first aid supplies lose their sterility, and water containers breakdown. Buying emergency supplies means maintaining them as well. Check your expiration dates, review your stockpiles and supplies. Ensure you are ready for tomorrow, even if you prepared for it last year.
Family Evacuation Plans -
Hurricanes, wild fires, gas leaks, flooding, and civil unrest all drive people away from their homes. Sometimes families are given warning of the impending incident, sometimes they are not. Even if your family is not in a danger area, a neighborhood fire or gas leak may drive you away from your home temporarily. This article discusses key points and lessons learned for evacuating your family safely.
Exercising Your Plans -
Whether you are an Emergency Management Officer or a family leader, plans/courses of action are worthless without exercise. Testing your plans ensure they work correctly, familiarize others with their responsibility, and builds confidence in the plan. Exercises and testing are critical portions of effective planning. They are all too often neglected.
Lessons Learned for Family Preparedness -
Take other's lessons and use them to shape your plans. Each incident discussed was unique, but carried pertinent lessons for us to ponder as we create family plans.
Where to Begin -
Wrapping up the preparation review is an article focusing on where to begin preparing. A fantastic way to finish out this review.
Key Sites to Help Your Preparedness -
http://www.ready.gov/
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/hq/emergency/personalPreparedness/index.html
http://www.calema.ca.gov/Pages/default.aspx
http://www.floridadisaster.org/index.asp
http://www.fema.gov/
Food Insurance
Emergency Reserve
http://www.emergencymgmt.com/
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/prepare/ready.php
http://www.bt.cdc.gov/preparedness/plan/
http://www.weather.gov/
http://72hours.org/
Feel free to ask for help, guidance, or just a general question. Prepare your family. Prepare your workplace.
Lessons Learned from India's Power Crisis -
India suffered a huge power outage affecting over 670 million people. What would happen if the power went out, on a massive scale, right now? If you are at work or in transit, how would you get home? How do you conduct business? How do you care for your family? When reviewing this article think about how would you take care of your family for a week without power (remember the entire area is out of power too).
Sheltering in Place -
What is sheltering in place? How do you shelter in place? This term is also used to describe actions taken during an active shooter situation. Residents or employees are to barricade themselves in their offices/homes to prevent the suspect from entering the space and continuing crime. In either circumstance, have you prepared your business and home for sheltering in place?
Managing Your Emergency Supplies -
Food expires, first aid supplies lose their sterility, and water containers breakdown. Buying emergency supplies means maintaining them as well. Check your expiration dates, review your stockpiles and supplies. Ensure you are ready for tomorrow, even if you prepared for it last year.
Family Evacuation Plans -
Hurricanes, wild fires, gas leaks, flooding, and civil unrest all drive people away from their homes. Sometimes families are given warning of the impending incident, sometimes they are not. Even if your family is not in a danger area, a neighborhood fire or gas leak may drive you away from your home temporarily. This article discusses key points and lessons learned for evacuating your family safely.
Exercising Your Plans -
Whether you are an Emergency Management Officer or a family leader, plans/courses of action are worthless without exercise. Testing your plans ensure they work correctly, familiarize others with their responsibility, and builds confidence in the plan. Exercises and testing are critical portions of effective planning. They are all too often neglected.
Lessons Learned for Family Preparedness -
Take other's lessons and use them to shape your plans. Each incident discussed was unique, but carried pertinent lessons for us to ponder as we create family plans.
Where to Begin -
Wrapping up the preparation review is an article focusing on where to begin preparing. A fantastic way to finish out this review.
Key Sites to Help Your Preparedness -
http://www.ready.gov/
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/hq/emergency/personalPreparedness/index.html
http://www.calema.ca.gov/Pages/default.aspx
http://www.floridadisaster.org/index.asp
http://www.fema.gov/
Food Insurance
Emergency Reserve
http://www.emergencymgmt.com/
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/prepare/ready.php
http://www.bt.cdc.gov/preparedness/plan/
http://www.weather.gov/
http://72hours.org/
Feel free to ask for help, guidance, or just a general question. Prepare your family. Prepare your workplace.
Monday, September 03, 2012
Physical Security = Business Risk
The general concept used for many assessments is taken from the military's concept of defense in depth, or layers of overlapping security. Essentially, starting at one point, and look for the different methods of protection or risk going outward or inward from the location. Start at your business and go out, then return to the business going inside.
Start with reviewing your business itself. What type of business do you have? A plant nursery has different security requirements than a jewelery store. Are you a 'sole source' provider of a service or product or are there plant nurseries all over the geographical area? You should use a different approach if your service or product was widely available than if you were a sole source provider.
Where is your business located? Naturally, if you are in a high crime area, the risk changes than if you were not. The protection of your facility needs to be altered to meet the threat. Are your business neighbors a higher threat? For example, is there a jewelry store next to your offices? Perhaps the way into the jewelry store is through your front windows and through the attic? Is there a repossession car lot across from your manufacturing plant? Your neighbors bring a lot of risk that is difficult to control outside of relocating to another place. However, there are things that can be addressed to mitigate against their threat. Review the types of crime occurring in your area. If there is a pocket of violent crime and burglaries around your business, you should review safety for your employees in addition to the securing the physical building. If there are only white collar crimes being reported, then adjust your employee backgrounds policy to mitigate against the insider threat, as applicable.
Returning to the business location and looking inward, start at the parking lot/garage for your facility. Can you control the traffic in and around your building? If you are able to seal off a parking garage, essentially making that a 'sterile' area requiring key cards to enter, you may have mitigated against a certain risk. Also, by creating this choke point where all cars must enter and exit from, you can lower the amount of cameras needed to capture vehicle traffic. How many cameras do you have? Who is monitoring them or are they recorded? When I was a deputy sheriff, I responded to a burglary at a business. The business owner had a recorded camera system. However, it recorded over itself every 24 hours. Unfortunately, the crime occurred (we believe) on a Friday night and was not discovered until Monday morning. Any footage of the incident was long gone. Is there an alarm system? Who monitors it and what is their reputation? Have you researched their ability to assist you in an emergency?
Reviewing access to your facility, does your facility use key cards to access the buildings or the non-customer areas? Do your employees 'tailgate' each other. At a client site housing over 200 employees, I observed many of them key card each other in, even though it was the first or second time seeing that person. I understand keying in a person who is known as an employee. However allowing access into a restricted area completely defeats the security practices in place.
Do you have security officers/guards? Are they armed? Are they capable? Are they alert? While taking my family to a museum inside Washington, DC, I observed a security guard who was extremely obese to the point her 'love handles' rested on the grip of her pistol. If she was forced to draw her weapon and defend herself or another person, she would have to move her body away from the weapon before drawing it clear of the holster. At another location, the security guard was a very senior citizen with a police baton. His hands shook while he wrote our information down in the guest log. I saw a cane in the corner next to his desk. This image clearly does not inspire confidence or deter criminal behavior. It may even invite it. Allow me to explain, while in the State of Nevada Police Academy, we were told a story that was taken from an interview with a convicted cop killer and murderer. When he was discussing the events leading up to killing the Police Officer, he indicated he knew he could kill the officer with ease. He said that the cop's boots were not polished. The criminal said if the cop didn't care about something as simple as keeping your boots shined, his combat skills were probably lacking too. Conversely, if a cop has sharp creases and polished boots, he takes pride and care in what he does. He is most likely proficient in combat and should be taken seriously. So, the question remains, are your security guards competent and project an image of professionalism, or do you look at them with dismay hoping you won't need them?
Are your employees back grounded? Who does the background check? What are you looking for? How deep do you check? Do you have pilferage of office or manufacturing supplies? Internal risks are difficult to reduce since they are your employees. They know the processes and procedures as well as the ways around them. It takes time to narrow down the root cause and creative methods to combat them.
In summary, physical security risks are abundant and many of them transparent. Generally speaking, most employers do not consider many of the risks because they are viewing them from their perspective vice an adversary's perspective. A criminal sees your building and routines much different than you do. For a true risk analysis and security assessment, you should consult a security professional, independent of your existing infrastructure for a neutral evaluation. Harden your facility, reduce the risk, cause the threat to target another location, instill resiliency through strength.
This was a general overview of physical security with many critical details and tasks omitted. For a complete security and risk assessment of your home or business, feel free to contact me at forever.resiliency@gmail.com References and CV available upon request.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
10 Commandments of Emergency Management
This week's article was taken from HERE, as published by Eric Holdeman. I located this tongue in cheek delight while researching another article to write for you. This is a great snapshot of crisis management and crisis leadership from an Emergency Management Director/Officer/Manager, etc. My comments are in BLUE next to Holdeman's thoughts.
It was Sunday morning and my wife and I had skipped church. I was in the backyard pruning a burning bush when a voice came into my head and suggested that I could do penance by writing about the ten commandments of emergency management. The woman’s voice said she would show me the way. The conversation went something like this:
“Thou must establish relationships with others,” she said. I asked a clarifying question — not the best thing to do. “With whom?” The answer was simple, “With everyone — public sector, private sector, industries, nonprofits and anyone else who can help build your program.” “Sounds pretty inclusive.” “It is,” she replied. I attended an ICS lessons learned from the 9/11 Pentagon Response. The leading FBI Agent said, "9/12 is NOT the time to exchange business cards." He's exactly right. We should make our contacts, build relationships, and establish mutual trust prior to the disaster or crisis, otherwise, we are playing catchup in a dynamic situation.
“Thou shall not construct any programmatic idols.” Dummy me, I asked, “Like what?” She said, “Don’t think you have any magic-bullet solutions. Yes, you have the Incident Command System, but that’s not the solution to every problem. Think outside the box and be creative.” Emergency Management is out of the box thinking. We have to be quick and be resourceful. The answer today is not the answer tomorrow.
“Thou shall not complain about not having enough funding. For if you do, what has been given to you might be taken away in an instant.”
“Thou shall take some time off — all work and no play makes Jack and Jill dullards.” This is one that made sense to me. I kept my mouth shut and thought this would be the first commandment I’d pass along to my boss at work the next day. Should I ask for two weeks off? Maybe a month?
“Thou shall honor the DHS and FEMA so that they will be well with thee.” Now I’m thinking that she maybe was getting mixed up with her instructions, since this made no sense to me. So I asked, “Why is that?” Somewhat annoyed, she replied, “You want grants, don’t you? Fill out the paperwork, do the reports and always ask for more money than you need since you know you’re going to be cut.”
“Thou shall not make enemies of others.” She went on to point out that, “Friends come and go — enemies you keep forever. Remember you can’t make people and agencies cooperate with you.” One thing I have learned while working in and around pubic service, is that politics play a huge role. Unfortunately, making enemies is sometimes unavoidable. However, if professional respect is given, regardless of disagreements, enemies can be avoided. The point the author is trying to make, is that in a time of crisis, you want to be able to call on neighboring agencies and jurisdictions for assistance. If you make enemies of people you rely upon, your call for assistance may not be carried out as quickly or efficiently as it could be.
“Thou shall keep your promises and promise less and deliver more.” This commandment immediately struck home. I was always trying to do more than what my staff and resources would allow. Self explanatory - if you make a promise, you must keep it. Once you lose this trust, it most often is lost forever. That being said, make less promises. Sometimes, we must give the answer, "No," to a request or question. With this thought, if you are a supervisor, you should check with your staff before promising to deliver on a request. After all, they are the ones delivering your promise.
“Thou shall steal all the ideas you can.” This one seemed negative to me, based on my memories of the original Ten Commandments, so I suggested that maybe this would be inappropriate. “Nay lad,” she said, “you are to use all good ideas, no matter where they come from. Someone else has plowed that field for you.”After all, why re-invent the wheel. If you steal other's ideas in Emergency Management, it's not theft, it's using your resources. Also, it allows you to use their lessons learned.
“Thou shall not talk bad about other jurisdictions or persons.” Since this had become a national sport, I was thinking it might be a tough one to give up anytime soon. With a booming voice, she pointed out how this commandment and No. 6 are related.
“Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s grant funding.” This one made me think of all the money that New York City gets and how smaller jurisdictions always complain and think about what they could do with a fraction of the funding that the city receives every year. I can state, with absolution, that finger pointing and "coveting" directly impact emergency/crisis planning. A project I was involved was calling for dramatic Federal policy and program changes. While the end result was justifiable and noble, the reasoning the agency was using was simply, "Other jurisdictions are receiving similar treatment, we want it too." Focus on your capabilities and what you have received and push forward. It may be completely unfair that another jurisdiction or division receives something you genuinely need. However, spending time focusing on that is wasting time and energy.
Keep these thoughts in mind as we interact with our emergency management and business continuity partners. Establish relationships, meet counterparts and expand your knowledge base.
It was Sunday morning and my wife and I had skipped church. I was in the backyard pruning a burning bush when a voice came into my head and suggested that I could do penance by writing about the ten commandments of emergency management. The woman’s voice said she would show me the way. The conversation went something like this:
“Thou must establish relationships with others,” she said. I asked a clarifying question — not the best thing to do. “With whom?” The answer was simple, “With everyone — public sector, private sector, industries, nonprofits and anyone else who can help build your program.” “Sounds pretty inclusive.” “It is,” she replied. I attended an ICS lessons learned from the 9/11 Pentagon Response. The leading FBI Agent said, "9/12 is NOT the time to exchange business cards." He's exactly right. We should make our contacts, build relationships, and establish mutual trust prior to the disaster or crisis, otherwise, we are playing catchup in a dynamic situation.
“Thou shall not construct any programmatic idols.” Dummy me, I asked, “Like what?” She said, “Don’t think you have any magic-bullet solutions. Yes, you have the Incident Command System, but that’s not the solution to every problem. Think outside the box and be creative.” Emergency Management is out of the box thinking. We have to be quick and be resourceful. The answer today is not the answer tomorrow.
“Thou shall not complain about not having enough funding. For if you do, what has been given to you might be taken away in an instant.”
“Thou shall take some time off — all work and no play makes Jack and Jill dullards.” This is one that made sense to me. I kept my mouth shut and thought this would be the first commandment I’d pass along to my boss at work the next day. Should I ask for two weeks off? Maybe a month?
“Thou shall honor the DHS and FEMA so that they will be well with thee.” Now I’m thinking that she maybe was getting mixed up with her instructions, since this made no sense to me. So I asked, “Why is that?” Somewhat annoyed, she replied, “You want grants, don’t you? Fill out the paperwork, do the reports and always ask for more money than you need since you know you’re going to be cut.”
“Thou shall not make enemies of others.” She went on to point out that, “Friends come and go — enemies you keep forever. Remember you can’t make people and agencies cooperate with you.” One thing I have learned while working in and around pubic service, is that politics play a huge role. Unfortunately, making enemies is sometimes unavoidable. However, if professional respect is given, regardless of disagreements, enemies can be avoided. The point the author is trying to make, is that in a time of crisis, you want to be able to call on neighboring agencies and jurisdictions for assistance. If you make enemies of people you rely upon, your call for assistance may not be carried out as quickly or efficiently as it could be.
“Thou shall keep your promises and promise less and deliver more.” This commandment immediately struck home. I was always trying to do more than what my staff and resources would allow. Self explanatory - if you make a promise, you must keep it. Once you lose this trust, it most often is lost forever. That being said, make less promises. Sometimes, we must give the answer, "No," to a request or question. With this thought, if you are a supervisor, you should check with your staff before promising to deliver on a request. After all, they are the ones delivering your promise.
“Thou shall steal all the ideas you can.” This one seemed negative to me, based on my memories of the original Ten Commandments, so I suggested that maybe this would be inappropriate. “Nay lad,” she said, “you are to use all good ideas, no matter where they come from. Someone else has plowed that field for you.”After all, why re-invent the wheel. If you steal other's ideas in Emergency Management, it's not theft, it's using your resources. Also, it allows you to use their lessons learned.
“Thou shall not talk bad about other jurisdictions or persons.” Since this had become a national sport, I was thinking it might be a tough one to give up anytime soon. With a booming voice, she pointed out how this commandment and No. 6 are related.
“Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s grant funding.” This one made me think of all the money that New York City gets and how smaller jurisdictions always complain and think about what they could do with a fraction of the funding that the city receives every year. I can state, with absolution, that finger pointing and "coveting" directly impact emergency/crisis planning. A project I was involved was calling for dramatic Federal policy and program changes. While the end result was justifiable and noble, the reasoning the agency was using was simply, "Other jurisdictions are receiving similar treatment, we want it too." Focus on your capabilities and what you have received and push forward. It may be completely unfair that another jurisdiction or division receives something you genuinely need. However, spending time focusing on that is wasting time and energy.
Keep these thoughts in mind as we interact with our emergency management and business continuity partners. Establish relationships, meet counterparts and expand your knowledge base.
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