Prepare Your Business and Employees for Potential Fires

4/28/2021 (Permalink)

Commercial location suffered from fire damage

As a business owner in Bangor, PA, you know the unexpected can happen. Although you may not know what kind of emergency may affect your operations, planning ahead by establishing a contingency plan can help calm a chaotic situation and ensure the safety of everyone in the building. It also makes it easier to keep the business afloat while repairs are being made by a certified fire damage and restoration company.

Business Plan

Planning ahead to protect employees, processes, and vital business components is important for any business. They should be developed with key personnel to ensure all the bases are covered. Although every business is different, key ingredients of a contingency plan should include:

Assess Risks: Identify vulnerabilities unique to your business and the risks associated with the location. Knowing these are essential to formulating the rest of the plan to ensure limited business interruptions.
Understand the Hazards: After the assessment, you can better categorize the likelier hazards that you may be faced with this. Grouping them into categories, such as natural incidents or civil disruptions, allows you to create a general plan for each kind.
Identify Critical Process: The processes essential to operations should be ranked. This allows for the most important operations to resume first after the incident.
Establish a Crisis Management Team: Ensuring you have a team in place ready to handle anything is vital to managing a crisis. All responsibilities should be clearly spelled out and discussed with all involved.

Emergency Plan
One of the most important components of any planning needs to be an evacuation plan. This should account for any potential people on-site, including visitors, emergency responders, and employees. The plans should also involve:

• Establishing an emergency team to direct the evacuation.
  
• Ensuring there are primary and secondary exit routes. Discuss the routes and have them clearly posted.
  
• Communicating the plan with employees and conducting regular drills.
  
  

Although there are always unknowns, having a contingency plan enables a business to navigate them safer and easier.