Disaster Safety Blog

Climate change affects tornado activity

A new U.S. study suggests climate changes during the autumn and winter may affect the number of tornadoes during the spring.

According to University of Georgia researches, global warming will likely mean more unpredictable weather conditions.

According to Associate Professor Marshall Shepherd, a meteorologist and lead author of the study, “Results suggest that there is a statistically significant reduction in tornado activity during a tornado season following a drought the proceeding fall and winter. On the other hand, wet autumns and winters examined in the study had nearly twice as many spring tornado days as drought years.”

While their study was specific to Georgia and the Southeastern United States, further research could reveal patterns that might make findings more general.

Fargo flood vote approved

An estimated $200 million over the next 20 years will be generated as a result of a half-cent sales tax increase for flood protection which won overwhelming approval yesterday in Fargo, North Dakota.

As many may remember, the Red River stayed above flood stage in Fargo for a record 61 days in March and April and crested twice. The damage topped $1 million.

New technology could help save lives and property

This fall, scientists are hoping the same drone technology that helps monitor the border will help spy on hurricanes.

The unmanned Global Hawk, an upgrade of the flawed drone that was launched in 2005, will go into testing in September. Designed to drop small devices that can report sea temperature, and salinity, the information can help describe how energy is transferred between the ocean and the atmosphere to make a storm grow so quickly.

According to Scott Spratt, a forecaster for the National Weather Service, significant improvements in hurricane intensity forecasting will be made in the next decades. This technology could help save lives and property during storms.

Protect your unoccupied assets

Millions of homes are left unattended during an extended period of time each year. Whether you travel for business or pleasure, have rental property that is unoccupied, or share time between two homes, it is important to take the necessary steps to keep your home safe and protected before leaving for any significant length of time.

An eighth-inch crack can spew up to 250 gallons of water a day, wrecking floors, furniture and keepsakes.

No one knows when disaster might strike. Whether it is caused by the natural elements or a pipe decides to spring a leak unexpectedly, not taking the proper steps to safeguard your home could cost thousands of dollars in repairs.

The Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) has developed several tips you can take to help properly protect your unoccupied home.

• Adjust the thermostat – in colder climates adjust the temperature to 55 degrees. This will keep pipes
  from freezing. In warmer climates adjust the air conditioning to 85 degrees to protect against humidity.

• Protect Plumbing – if leaving for an extended period of time, the best protection is to have the water
  shut off and the water lines drained. Shut off the gas to the water heater, or turn the
  temperature control to a “vacation” setting. If a house has a water softener, shut off its supply line.
  Remember, if the house has a fire protection sprinkler system, it will be deactivated if the water is shut
  off.

• Protect Active Water – insulate the pipes, turn off the water supply to individual fixtures, don’t leave
  appliances running and make sure the sump pump is working properly.

• Plan for Hail and High Winds – trim dead vegetation around the house, close and lock all doors, 
  windows and skylights, install hurricane shutters, and bring in patio furniture.

It is important to stay on top of both internal and external routine home maintenance. Inspecting the roof, cleaning the gutters and downspouts, flushing the water heater and sealing cracks around all pipes will help protect your home year-round.

No need to worry quite yet

While the development of a system bringing showers and thunderstorms extending from the northeastern Yucatan Peninsula into the southern Gulf of Mexico brought worry about the first Atlantic hurricane system forming, officials advise that the system is expected to slow as it drifts northwestward.

According to officials, there is a less than 30 percent chance the tropical wave will become a hurricane during the next 48 hours.

Heavy rains and winds will continue to affect portions of the Yucatan Peninsula and western Cuba throughout today while the system slowly moves northwestward above the southern Gulf of Mexico.

The IBHS Friday Question

 
Every Friday, the Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) will pose a multiple choice question to its Twitter followers. The question will be related to information that was tweeted earlier in the week. Follow IBHS daily to be able to answer the question correctly, and you could be chosen to win the “mystery prize.”

If chosen, the winner will be notified through a direct message on Twitter! Good luck to all and don’t forget to share IBHS tweets with your fellow tweeters! Also, check IBHS out on the web!

The IBHS Friday Question:

Which IBHS program can you utilize in order to build a safer home in hurricane prone areas?

A) Open for Business®

B) Fortified…for safer living®

C) Community Land Use Planning

Protect farms from lightning

As we all know, lightning is very dangerous and can cause a great deal of damage in any environment, however, lightning is particularly dangerous in a farm environment. Lightning strikes can start fires in buildings, damage electrical equipment, and electrocute humans and livestock causing disrupting farm operations and incurring considerable expenses.

In order to prevent these losses, installing lightning protection is highly recommended by the U.S. Department of Agriculture .

To ensure that lightning protection systems are safe and effective they should be designed and installed only by trained professionals because certain codes and standards must be followed.

LPI-175: The lightning protection code, published by the Lightning Protection Institute.

NFPA 78: National Fire Protection Association Lightning Protection Code.

ASAE EP381: American Society of Agricultural Engineers, Engineering Practice.

96AUL: Requirements for Master Label for Lightning Protection, developed by Underwriters' Laboratories.

Components of the system:

The main components of a building’s lightning protection system are air terminals, conductors, and ground electrodes.

Lightning arrestors should be installed outside, where the electric service enters a building, or at the inside service entrance. The arrestor supplies a ground so that a power surge will not enter the building. If a farm has several buildings with separate electric service entrances, a grounded lightning arrestor should be installed in each building.

Wire fences supported by wooden or steel posts set in concrete are not grounded. The best way to ground these fences is to drive 1/2- or 3/4- inch steel rods or pipes next to the fence posts at least 5 feet into the ground, at intervals of no more than 150 feet along the fence. The grounding rod should be securely fastened so that all the fence wires are in contact with the rod.

Maintenance of the system is vital to make sure the system will work when it is needed. Weather conditions, such as high winds, along with building additions and re-roofing can affect a system’s performance.

Plan now so you are prepared later

The Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) recognizes the importance of business continuity planning. As part of Business Continuity Awareness Week, June 21-27, IBHS would like to offer business owners an easy way to get started with a plan.

Before you start, you need to identify your risks—whether tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, freezing weather, earthquakes, or the “smaller” problems such as loss of basic utilities—and what you can do to protect yourself, your business, and your property. Then, you need to think about what you must do to assure your business’ survival and ongoing viability, i.e. what is most critical and time-sensitive.

Now, you are ready to focus on the construction of your business continuity plan. Here are the main steps:

First, record basic information:
1. Employees, including owners
2. Suppliers and vendors
3. Key contacts

Next, identify:
4. Critical business functions (What is most important to do to maintain an income stream; to keep your
    competitive advantage and reputation; and to meet your legal, regulatory, financial or contractual
    obligations?)
5. Possible alternate locations (Where could your business resume operations if you could not work
    from your existing location?)

Then list what you would need to fulfill your critical business functions at that alternate location:
6. Vital records
7. Critical telephone numbers
8. Critical supplies
9. Equipment, machinery, and vehicles

Identify the items your workers will need:
10. Computer equipment and software
11. Voice and data communications
12. Miscellaneous resources such as office supplies

Once your plan is complete, store it in paper and online copies. Some people keep an extra encrypted backup copy on a computer flash drive on a key chain. Experts recommend updating the plan at least once a year, perhaps on an anniversary date or before storm season.

As a result of your planning process, you may decide to take some immediate steps to reduce the potential for damage from the risks you have identified, i.e. your vulnerability. You may want to install storm shutters, buy flood insurance, stock up on water, purchase a generator, or regularly back up critical information and data, for examples.

IBHS offers several tools to help you understand the ins and outs of planning ahead for a disaster, as well as identify other areas where you may benefit from planning on a day-to-day basis. The Open for Business® program is available in multiple formats and includes resources such as worksheets, checklists and even reminder emails to help you stay on track with your planning. And if planning still seems too daunting of a task, take a look at the Open for Business® Trainers to walk you through the process one step at a time.

Resolve to start planning now, because later may be too late.

Increased technology offers better predictions

ScienceDaily (June 25, 2009) — Louisiana State University's WAVCIS, or Wave-Current-Surge Information System for Coastal Louisiana, has a few new tricks up its sleeve in preparation for the 2009 hurricane season.

Drawing from a pool of scientific talent at the university, across the nation and Europe, WAVCIS now offers graphic, easy-to-understand model outputs projecting wave height, current depths and tracks, salinity ratios and water temperature measurements that not only provide state-of-the-art guidance to emergency management officials, but also give federal and state agencies such as the United States Navy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Weather Service, National Hurricane Center and Louisiana Department of National Resources new and improved ways to test their own modeling accuracy.

"I believe WAVCIS is likely the most comprehensive program in the entire nation," said Gregory Stone, director of both the WAVCIS program and the Coastal Studies Institute and also the James P. Morgan Distinguished Professor at LSU. "We now have 60 to 84 hour advance forecasting capabilities due to our satellite link-ups with NOAA and our supercomputing capabilities. Because of these advancements, we are in much better shape for the 2009 hurricane season to provide valuable information than we were in the past."

WAVCIS operates by deploying equipment in the depths of the Gulf of Mexico. Currently, they have sensors attached to numerous oil platforms. Instruments are attached to towers on the platforms and allow meteorological measurements – air temperature, wind speed and direction, visibility – to be made; state-of-the-art oceanographic sensors are placed underwater and on the sea floor.

Advanced technology, including the Acoustic Doppler Profiler, an instrument that Stone's group has helped perfect in real time with the private sector, provides a very comprehensive overview of current velocities from the sea bed to the surface in addition to wave conditions on the sea surface.

"In a normal weather situation, WAVCIS links with the satellites and retrieves up-to-date information every hour. This information is then immediately supplied to computer models at LSU's WAVCIS lab and the data are posted on the WAVCIS Web site," said Stone. "However, during a hurricane or other extreme weather events, we have the capacity to increase the frequency of these link-ups. We won't have the luxury of waiting an hour during the approach of a hurricane – it's critical that we can see what's going on out there in 15 to 30 minute intervals in order to accurately assess the situation."

The WAVCIS group, a component of LSU's world famous Coastal Studies Institute, has sensors all throughout the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, most of the equipment used by WAVCIS is developed and maintained in-house at the Coastal Studies Institute's fabrication shop. Through a close and reciprocal relationship with NOAA's National Data Buoy Center, WAVCIS can also access that group's sensors, giving the system a gulf-wide look at emerging trends in waves and currents, which can be very important during the approach of a tropical cyclone.

"Things such as the maximum wave height, wind speeds and storm surge, will play an integral role in issues concerning public safety," said Stone. "For example, the development of certain currents, such as the Loop current in the Gulf of Mexico, allows for almost immediate intensification of storms. That's why having an easy-to-understand and comprehensive end product was so important to my team and the Coastal Studies Institute, for example the Earth Scan Lab and the Southern Regional Climate Center, during the development stages. When it's crunch time and people are nervous, we want the facts to be clear."

In addition to being a very active research group and providing graduate and undergraduate students with hands-on opportunities in an internationally-acclaimed lab, WAVCIS also provides other entities with the opportunity to test their own modeling accuracy. "By looking at the models they developed and then comparing them to ours and our measurements offshore, they can determine how accurate their models currently are and go about fine-tuning if necessary. This strengthens our knowledge of the oceanographic and coastal environment. Given the vulnerability of, for example coastal Louisiana and the oil and gas infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico to erosion and hurricane impacts, it is important that the Federal Government, State of Louisiana and the oil and gas industry continue to support this effort," Stone said.

WAVCIS models are available on http://wavcis.csi.lsu.edu/index.asp.

Louisiana State University (2009, June 25). Hurricanes: Increased Technology Offers Better Ways For Officials And Public To See The Storm Ahead. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 25, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com¬ /releases/2009/06/090612163535.htm

The importance of updating

While many companies may have a business continuity plans already in place, when was the last time it was updated?

Many organizations go through the pain of putting a plan together. They may bring in a consultant and spend countless hours filling out questionnaires and risk matrices and sit in meetings that seem to go on for hours. Each department pours over the flowcharts and explanations detailing their processes, checking off their controls or researching alternate site facilities for recovery. In the end it may all look impressive but if the business continuity plan hasn’t been updated to include any new business processes or equipment – or even supply vendor contact info, then it might as well be framed for display.

The Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) realizes that this is one of the challenges associated with business continuity management (BCM) and  as part of Business Continuity Awareness Week, June 21-27, strongly encourages business owners to take the time to update their current plans.

The most effective business continuity plans are those which are maintained, updated and tested on an ongoing and regular basis. To assist in this updating process, IBHS has developed a few questions that can help get you started:

1. Do you have one person in charge of BCM? If not, who is responsible for maintaining the plan?
2. How does your organization incorporate new processes, systems (software and hardware) and people
    into the business continuity plan?
3. Does your organization perform self-assessments or audits of the plan?
4. If so, who performs the self-assessment or audit?
5. How often does your organization perform the self-assessment or audit?
6. Has your organization ever conducted a BCM test or exercise?
7. If so, what kind of test or exercise was conducted?
8. When did the test or exercise take place?
9. What was the outcome of the test or exercise?
10. Have you analyzed your supply chain dependency?

IBHS offers Open for Business^®, a collection of business protection planning and educational tools that were designed for small and medium businesses to reduce the potential for loss in the event of a disaster, and to help reopen quickly afterwards. The variety of easy-to-use tools include tips to identify hazards, worksheets to help develop a property protection and recovery plan, and education to organize your business to become more resilient. Click here for additional information regarding Open for Business^®.