Professional security group conducts emergency preparedness training

All across the globe, the population of every country must be prepared for any crisis or emergency. To keep your business running, and to stay in business, corporate managers, building owners and operators must anticipate emergencies or disasters of any proportions, natural or man made. The first step owners, managers and occupants must take is to conduct a risk/vulnerability assessment. The assessment should identify the probability of all potential emergencies and their impact on life safety, property and the business. To assist the commercial, industrial and institutional communities at large, the Crisis Management and Business Continuity Council of ASIS International conducted a four-day seminar and workshop in Boston from May 23-26. The seminar was titled, "Crisis Management: Introduction to Plan Development with Guided Exercises." The mission of the council is to promote crisis management, business continuity and organizational resilience concepts worldwide. The council holds their crisis management seminars in a different city every year. Twelve experienced professional members of the council conducted educational sessions and group exercises on the flowing topics: the planning stage, performing a risk analysis, a business impact analysis and creating response procedures. Additional sessions and exercises included crisis leadership, crisis communications, developing the written plan and recovery exercises. We had 31 domestic and foreign attendee/students from various security and emergency management positions of responsibility. After each presentation session, the seminar attendees were broken out into smaller workshop exercise groups to independently come up with their solutions to various emergency situations. Each team leader presented his team's solutions which were then critiqued by the students and the instructors. Performing a formal risk and vulnerability analysis is critical. You can prepare a listing of all possible or potential contingencies ranging from fires, floods, explosions, blackouts, telephone outages, power outages and weather related emergencies, such as wind and storm damage, to violence and crime in the workplace, terrorist activities and medical emergencies. You can further list the contingencies related to computer downtime or the total loss of a computer or data facility. A comprehensive crisis management plan, to include policies and procedures for an "Incident Response" must be written, validated through scenario-based exercises and then issued to employees. The plan is a critical component of an organization's preparedness strategy. Property owners and managers need to be aware that power outages are the leading cause of organization downtime. They account for 31% of all of the causes of organization downtime. As a property owner or manager, you are undoubtedly aware of the long-term serious impact of a business interruption, and the related high costs associated with "down time". Downtime in excess of two hours is unacceptable for 24% of organizations. An additional 48% of organizations cannot tolerate more than 48 hours of downtime. And, for many organizations, such as financial trading groups, downtime is not an option at all. According to the 31 attendees from around the world, the seminar was a huge success. As part of the workshop training, which included lectures and tabletop exercises, the Council provided a "behind-the-scenes" field trip, a security tour of the TD (Boston) Garden (home of the 2011 Stanley Cup winning Boston Bruins and NBA Eastern Division winning Celtics). The field trip took the "learning experience" to another level. The seminar attendees learned about the issues of crowd control, evacuation and shelter-in-place procedures, incidents of crime in large public venues and terrorist threats. This value-added bonus to the annual seminars has proven to be a valuable feature as it takes classroom experiences into the "real world" for pragmatic conversation as well as Q&A with security professionals who are in the trenches virtually every day of the year. As each annual seminar and workshop is held in a different city each year, the security tour is unique to that city. The crisis management and continuity council is pleased to announce that the seminar and workshop for May 2012 will be held in Chicago. Allan Schwartz, CPP, CHS-III is president and CEO of Safeguards International, Inc., Yonkers, N.Y.