What's your emergency communications plan?

When disaster strikes, it's essential to be able to connect with your residents in a timely fashion. Not only could it spell the difference between an emergency and a tragedy -- having a good emergency communications plan in place means that you're better prepared to deal with all the things that follow the actual emergency. This is especially important if any of your residents cannot immediately return to their units.

I'm interested to hear different methods you've used (or plan to use) to connect residents with staff, insurance, and rescue crews during and following a disaster. Collecting cell phone numbers? Email? Setting up a blog? Text messaging? Using the community's Facebook page?

If you have first-hand experience with this, I would love to hear from you.

I would like to input here, I'm not in property management, but seeing the aftermath first hand in Houston, TX after hurricane Ike. I would like to stress to property owners and management how IMPORTANT this can be. We worked on several properties after the storm and there was a total lack of communication from management to tenant as well tenant to management. (It’s a two way street) As a result there was additional damage to the property that could have been adverted if they had better lines of communication. Thankfully there were no human casualties at any of the properties we worked on (did loose some ducks), but an ounce of preparation and forethought could have saved some money.

Also with the amount of power loss that happen in Houston there was no way for communication to happen through the internet, e-mail and facebook was not an option. Just a reminder to always have a back up plan.

Thanks for the insight, Nathan. That certainly highlights the difference between having just a basic disaster communications plan and having nothing.

Can anyone else add in their thoughts/experiences with disaster communications and planning?

While we have websites, collect cell phone numbers and use email addresses, we rely almost entirely upon Manager presence and good old paper. In the event of a natural disaster that disconnect residents, it is likely that phones and other communication devices would fail as well. I know this seems elementary, but quickly printing or handwriting notes and placing them on doors followed by having staff on hand in the office is usually best.

This past year Client was able to witness 2 major disasters at other apartment complexes. Both were large structural fires that destroyed buildings. In one case, over 40+ apartments were burned. When client showed up to help it was chaotic. The thing tenants needed most was physical help moving people’s belongings (stuff not destroyed by water, smoke or fire) out of the buildings. The #1 communication form was face to face conversations with the Management – it is critical that management is on site and calm. The #2 communication was cell-phone communication to insurance companies.

I agree with my client that we could spend hundreds of hours planning for a disaster only to find that the complex systems are no longer operable. Therefore they have chosen to work through the basics.

An additional note, tenant socio economic level and ethnic background must be taken into account. Not all tenants have cell phone, computers or other means to communicate. Ethnic background comes into play when you consider tenants past experience dealing with police and other emergency personnel or ability to communicate in Eglish.

Your end note is a good point. We have worked on several lower income properties and you end up dealing with people that may not even have basic communication capability, such as a home phone or any kind of electronic comm. Also the likely hood of even being able to use electronic communication is really over rated. Such as we saw in Houston with Ike, in Louisiana with Katrina, and Mississippi with Rita, massive power outages caused a major communication nightmare. Anyone that had family in those areas knows what I am talking about. There was no use of home phones, computers, or even cell phones because the towers were down.

Human presence is always the best for direct communication, and the point that Paul made about being calm is extremely important. There is a thin line between chaos and order. When you also throw in a hurricane or major disaster it makes that line a lot thinner.

If a disaster plan were to be put into place I would make it as rudimentary as possible, and focus more on training my people to handle a chaotic situation, and bring order to were there is none.

Thanks for the advice, Paul.