Have we learned the lessons from Christchurch?
If you don't have a disaster readiness plan, now is the time to start.
Monday, September 12 2011 || Comment || BY Julian Smith
Almost no one in the city and wider region is unaffected by the calamity - from the families that lost loved ones and homes to the workers who have lost their jobs and residents who have left Canterbury.
While Cantabrians have rightly won international praise for their resilience over the last 12 months, it’s clear they have a long way to go to return their city to something approaching normal.
After the major quakes, authorities in many centres - particularly Dunedin and Wellington - have begun to make stark assessments about their ability to handle a similar disaster, and review whether infrastructure and buildings in their regions would cope with the immense forces generated by similar earthquakes.
Around the country, up to 50% of businesses felt the impact of the Canterbury earthquakes, according to our recent MYOB Business Monitor. But with so much else to focus on in the past year, it’s unlikely that as many as half of all Kiwi businesses have also looked to the lessons of the Canterbury earthquakes, and made a similar assessment of their own ability to withstand a similar shock.
In Christchurch, with the near total loss of the CBD, many thousands of businesses have had to cope with a sudden and total loss of everything within they depend on to run from day to day. If the same were to happen in your town or city today, would your business cope?
A disaster plan is something many businesses have put in place in recent years. But the lessons of the Christchurch earthquake, including our Christchurch office's experience, have taught us that unless planning is reviewed and updated regularly, and teams familiar with how to react in a crisis, even the best plans can be difficult to put into action.
Our last edition of the MYOB InFocus we included a business preparedness checklist, including a wide range of topics to focus on, from identifying risks to making contingencies for locating staff (who would have believed before February that Facebook would become such an important staff contact tool?).
If you don’t already have a disaster plan, this is a good place to start. And if nothing else, the trials Christchurch has faced over the last 12 months can teach the rest of the country to be prepared for any eventuality, in the hope that we can face a similar situation as bravely and dynamically as the residents of our second largest city have.
Julian Smith (@JulianTSmith) is the general manager for MYOB in New Zealand. A frequent keynote speaker and business commentator, he blogs on key issues and trends, providing advice on how to make business life easier.
