Severe weather events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, or storms pose a significant risk to senior living and healthcare operators. Having a preparedness plan in place enables the community to respond effectively during severe events. The most impactful storm of 2023, Atlantic hurricane season, for the continental US was Hurricane Idalia, which made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida at a Category 3 intensity, causing five fatalities, and $2.5 billion in damage, according to the National Center for Environmental Information.
It's important to keep in mind that the effects of hurricanes and natural disaster events can be felt hundreds of miles across state borders and have a resounding impact to residents, employees, and your organizations. Emergency response plans can aid in assuring that senior's medical needs are met and appropriate care can be delivered during the storm. Proactive planning will help with having a significant impact during severe weather events. The podcast episodes are intended to give you firsthand tips on staying ahead of the storm through preparations to mitigate unnecessary loss, destruction, and devastation.
Three-part episodes will be presented by a panel of risk control consultants and national response experts. The three-part episode will focus on essential preparations and emergency planning that address before the storm, during the storm and after the storm. The podcast will provide significant tips on staying vigilant to your community's emergency planning, prioritize safety plans for your residents, and your organization.
Today's episode will address the importance of conducting a thorough risk assessment to understand a community's vulnerabilities, the necessity of an effective communications plan, facility preparation, staff, resident, and family preparations, and evacuation plans. So with all of that said, I would like to introduce to you our panelists and our guest today. I have David Gluckman, who is the WTW Risk Control Consultant. Welcome, David.
DAVID GLUCKMAN: Thank you, Rhonda. Hello, everyone.
RHONDA DEMENO: I'd also like to introduce you to Cal McCarty, who's the Vice President and National Commercial Sales and Response for ServiceMaster Brands. Welcome, Cal.
CAL MCARTY: Thank you, Rhonda. It's good to be here. Hello, everybody.
RHONDA DEMENO: Nice to have you. I also have Wade Miller, President of OneRallyPoint. Welcome, Wade.
WADE MILLER: Thank you, Rhonda. It's great to be here with everybody. And thanks for the opportunity to help share a little bit about what we think could be helpful.
RHONDA DEMENO: We're really happy to have you. We're really honored to have all of you join us in our discussion today. And it's a very timely discussion. We're getting ready to get into, unfortunately, hurricane season here in Florida where I live. I know we've had several planning calls for our discussion. I've heard you all talking about how standard operating procedures really have an impact to the recovery process. So my first question goes to Wade. Wade, can you really clarify why it's so important to have standard operating procedures?
WADE MILLER: Yeah, sure, Rhonda. It's interesting that, after the fact, people have-- sometimes the complaints are how it costs so much. It took so long. It was really stressful on everybody. And you look at their planning, and they haven't really done a lot. They may have an evacuation plan, or a data backup plan, or a generator plan and have some random things.
But what we found extremely helpful is if you really spend time, and it does take time as you walk through and create a standard operating procedure for the contractor like Cal's company. If you have any other specialty vendors, let's say an industrial hygienist or an engineer for your insurance adjuster team, for your local staff, what do each of these groups need to do when this disaster hits, whether it's a hurricane like you mentioned, or any other type of just, you know, standard water damage problem that could be pretty pervasive in a building is how do you want each of these groups to act for you, and how do you want them to interact with each other.
So there's a plan in place. So when they come on board, that they know they're working for you. So you're the client, it's your building, it's your insurance policy, it's affected. All these things are in play. And then review that with them and probably at least have an annual review and make sure that whatever lessons learned you get later that you incorporate into the future SOPs.
RHONDA DEMENO: Very good information. Cal, do you want to elaborate?
CAL MCARTY: I think Wade covered it really well. Just to piggyback on it a little bit, as he said, to, to have a good SOP for your entire team, when it comes to recovery, it really sets expectations on what everybody expects when we're working together to recover from, say, a loss, or storm, or a natural disaster that really allows us not only on site and while we're working, but a good SOP and a good pre-loss plan, we're going to know that SOP up front, so we can study it, we can rehearse it, we can talk or ask any questions with the client or somebody like Wade on the SOP and really know before we go in what the expectations are, and then obviously carry those out while we're on site and have something to go off of. So I think everything Wade said was spot on and just want to piggyback how important that is.
RHONDA DEMENO: So it really helps to communicate accountability and really who's doing what. And, David, do you have anything to add about the standard operating procedure?
DAVID GLUCKMAN: Sure. One of the most tried and true standard operating procedures, which is used all the time when they're especially during the response and recovery efforts, is the use of an incident management system or an incident command system. And I can't stress how important that is to be implemented. And it's very easy for the type of program that's always used in the public sector, first responders, fire departments, EMTs, law enforcement to modify it and tailor it to the private sector.
And incident management really focuses on a bunch of principles. But most important being you need to have a unified command. There always has to be somebody in charge when an event is going on, or a loss, or disaster, or crisis, or emergency, whatever, because we need to know who's running the ship, who's the one who's going to be in charge, who's going to be making the decisions. And along the same lines, incident management system takes into consideration a terminology called span of control.
No plan can be written where very few people are involved. It really needs to be an organization-wide approach. And by that, I mean you can't have one or two people doing eight, ten, 12, 15 different tasks. So you take into consideration the term called span of control, where you break it down into small little manageable pieces. So that everybody knows what their role and responsibility is ahead of time. When you're using an incident management system, like I said, somebody is always in charge. But at other command staff positions include planning, and operations, and logistics, and finance, and administration.
And the nice thing about it is it's scalable. You don't always need to have all those boxes filled. But it's something that would be making sense that no matter whether it's a small event or some kind of catastrophic enterprise wide situation, you have a plan in place that's going to work and that everybody knows what their role and responsibility is. And the framework is there and the structure is there.
RHONDA DEMENO: Yes, I can definitely relate to that. I know as a clinical operator working for a large retirement CCRC communities in Florida. And that incident command, you cannot underestimate the power of having a leader that's really driving that. And it is interdisciplinary for sure. And as you said, you don't have to have everyone available all the time, but someone really has to be driving the bus, so to speak.
So I'm going to go to Cal for this next question that we have. And this question talks about a pre-loss agreement. What are some of the key components of a pre-loss agreement?
CAL MCARTY: Well, the pre-loss agreements are so crucial because what we've already talked about, a standard operating procedure and incident command, how crucial those are for a successful recovery. When you have a pre-loss plan in place, you can adapt the SOP, you can adapt an incident command, get to know everybody while that's in place. It's also the three components of that. When you're understanding your emergency response plan are, who your partners are. So, so know who you're calling and who you're working with when something is to go bad, where do they come from, how long can we expect them to respond. And most importantly, how do I use them when we're in trouble.
How do I say help, how do I get them to come support us and be here when they're needed. So the who, where, and how are the three big pillars of it. But you have a good pre-loss plan, you can adapt an SOP with the company and learn it and know it up front. And you can also know your incident command system, know who we're going to be talking to. The biggest breakdown that you see in recovery, from the contractor side, is we need a permission to act on a property or we need direction on, say, where to park or respond. If we do not know or there's a different contact every day and no incident command set up, that communication takes time, which time costs money. And that's one of the crucial parts of it as well.
RHONDA DEMENO: Yeah, and this episode is really, you know, talking about those preparation, so before the storm. So all this can really be done ahead of time. Wade, do you have any comments on pre-loss agreements? Anything else that you may want to add?
WADE MILLER: Yeah, sure. A couple of things that, you know, what Cal said about it being crucial, definitely crucial. You don't want to be waiting till after an event happens and trying to make a phone call to whoever has a capability or capacity in your area is having that somebody guarantee. But in that pre-loss agreement, a couple of things to consider are make sure the contractor is essentially in there when you get these agreements signed up, that they will make themselves familiar with your SOPs and follow them.
And then within that, you're saying who's going to take responsibility for what. So let's say power is out, who is responsible for getting the generator and the generator fuel and things like that. Is it going to be or are you going to put that burden on your contractor? Know those things up front so you're also not scrambling at the last minute. And then if you have a dedicated adjuster, let that adjuster and your team all review the rate sheet, the documentation protocols, make sure everybody's on the same page so that you don't have issues later come times for settlement. You try and prevent future problems from even coming up because you've set things up on the front end with your agreements and your SOPs.
RHONDA DEMENO: Really good information. Now I'm going to jump to David, and as a broker, what are some of the ways that you can help a client prepare to respond to a disaster situation so they're just not reacting and making decision during the crisis?
DAVID GLUCKMAN: Thanks, Rhonda. That's a great question. And I look at it from a two pronged approach. The first being pre-emergency planning and do you have plans in place to address certain events that you know, based on the probability and their frequency, that would have a direct impact on your operations. For example, obviously, if you're in a hurricane prone area, do you have a hurricane preparation document? If you're in a flood zone, how about a flood emergency response plan, based on some of the natural and other hazards that you're associated with?
And then not only from the written documentation, a great old riddle that I always like to talk about is how do you get to Carnegie Hall. And the answer is practice, practice, practice. And the same thing applies with all your plans and your written documentation. You want it to get to the point where you've had tabletop exercises, and you've had drills, and you've had post-incident critiques and you've gotten everybody who's involved in the planning and preparation effort to know what they need to do and to be comfortable so that when the event does happen, it's almost like second nature.
When you go out in the morning to start your car, you don't tell yourself to put your foot on the brake, and turn the key, and shift into reverse. You just do those things automatically, like muscle memory. And a mature program for handling certain events takes that into consideration and it gets to that level, hopefully, which obviously unfortunately takes time. But nonetheless, that's really where you want to be. And then as a risk control engineer, we want to try to see what we can do to engineer the structure or design things so that we can hopefully mitigate an event from happening as much as possible.
And by that, if you know that, again, hurricane season is coming. So my roof, I know that it ponds a lot and I need to get up there and make sure the roof drains are clear. And I'm having problem with water intrusion into the building through windows. I want to make sure that my generator has fuel. I want to make sure that I can adequately get a backup supply if the power goes out. All those things to take into consideration and try to be as proactive as possible.
RHONDA DEMENO: Wade and Cal, do either of you have anything that you think would be really helpful for our senior living audience as far as preparation? Can we start with Cal?
CAL MCARTY: Sure. And just to back up on what David said, he said something very key to everything we've talked about from a pre-loss plan in place to a standard operating procedure to incident command. And that is testing that plan up front. Everything looks great on paper, sounds good in your mind. But until you test it, and get all the players involved, and put yourself through the exercise, you don't know how it's going to perform. You don't know if everybody truly understands all the working parts of that plan or standard operating procedure.
So having things in place, David said it best, like a tabletop exercise, is one of my absolute favorite ways to test our plans and standard operating procedures with clients. You know, you got to be able to test it out and really feel how it's going to run, know how it's going to run when it's in place. So that's a key point I wanted to touch on as well.
RHONDA DEMENO: Yeah, those tabletop exercises really do help and really including people. It's a great time to really learn where there are some gaps in your preparation plans. Wade, is there anything else you wanted to talk to our audience about today?
WADE MILLER: Yeah, definitely echo what David said and what Cal endorsed too, practice so you can develop a muscle memory makes a big difference in how you lower your stress level. Knowing you have a plan in place and the right people in the right places to work on it is a big difference. One thing that to consider, too, because companies like mine or Cal and whoever else like get some collective experience shares on these SOPs when you're creating them and you're creating your plans because people have experienced a lot of things in a lot of ways that can sometimes bring some knowledge to help prevent things in the future.
And then just to also give an example, like when David said, if you know you have a flat roof that pools, how do you keep things clear? As we've seen, I'm sure Cal can attest to this, too, where a little bit of maintenance could have made a what became a several hundred thousand dollars loss, could have really just been a, you know, $10,000 or $20,000 loss. But underground pipes weren't clear, gutters weren't clear, and things backed up and flooded a building. There are preventative things that can be done. So keep that in your plans and just have those things put together on some kind of rhythm where you know you're prepared as best you can. You can't prevent the weather event from hitting you, but you can prepare and plan for how you respond to them.
RHONDA DEMENO: So some of those preparation strategies and some of those vulnerabilities can actually be addressed in your annual hazard vulnerability assessment. I know we didn't talk about that, but that can actually help drive your decisions for your incident command and what type of emergencies you are preparing to respond to based on your geography. Really good input there, guys. How about, Cal, can you give some insight into the importance of defined roles and responsibilities, a lot of times when these things happen, well, that wasn't my-- that wasn't my job. But what is some of the importance of defining the roles and responsibility and the importance of the incident command system?
CAL MCARTY: Overall, learning a good incident command and knowing it as a partner to a client who is giving you that incident command system, the first thing is always going to be with an incident command is communication. So who's the command chief when we need permission or we make a discovery that needs to be reported, where does that information go, who is the chief command officer in that situation, where will they be, do I need to communicate with them via text, via email, or will there be a site on the property or asset. Oftentimes, in a disaster, you see a tent, probably a temporary office, where they'll be. So knowing where people are going to be at.
In an incident command, there should always be a public communicator or a media representative from the company or client that you're working with because we're going to be everywhere in the building. We're going to be working actively to set up and get that asset back online. During Hurricane Katrina and also during Irma, we were working in a senior living facility and it was later, so post hours, and we noticed media vans being outside and them looking for anybody to talk to. Well, my team understands to never talk to media when we're on an asset for a client. But notice them talking to some janitorial, some maintenance folks and needed to communicate to the media person on the incident command who's in charge here, you have somebody speaking to the media that probably is not assigned to do that in the incident command.
And we're able to-- what I would consider-- don't know what that person was going to say, don't the questions that were asked, but able to block that effort from the media, from talking to a nighttime maintenance person or facility person. And those questions that they ask could be how long till you're back online and the folks in the senior living facility have a place to stay. They could say things like it's going to be a while, it could be three or four months. And if that gets back to loved ones or even investors, partners, that's crucial information that can't get out. So define roles from a chief who makes all the decisions to assign media person.
That's one that will always stick with me is seeing that maintenance person talking to the media and being able to stop that from happening, and that whatever information is going to come, getting out in the public eye, public sector and really tarnishing our client's reputation as well as ours because we're on site working for that asset, working for that client. So that's why it's really important to have defined roles and know those roles like we talked about.
RHONDA DEMENO: Speaking on experience, I know that has happened where media is there and it's really important for us to educate our associates too on, we do have one person controlling all media and the communication is being controlled that way. David, you were mentioning something?
DAVID GLUCKMAN: Yeah, I was just going to add that it's also as part of a crisis communication plan or a crisis communication strategy, it's a good idea to have pre-scripted statements already developed and maybe even vetted by legal department so that, when the event does happen, there's somebody who's familiar, and has rehearsed, and already has something available to be able to present to the media as well so that the message is presented the way the organization wants it to be. And as Cal mentioned, hopefully won't be misunderstood or misinterpreted in any way possible. And not only that, but internally as well. You want to make sure that the employees and all your other stakeholders are aware of what's going on. But again, the message is clear, and concise, and everybody's almost literally sometimes on the same page.
RHONDA DEMENO: That's a really, really good point. So now I'm going to switch the conversation to downstream liabilities that could ensue from improper response or inadequate documentation of work. So, Wade, can you walk us through what are the ways to protect about these various downstream liabilities.
WADE MILLER: Yeah, sure, because it's very important that while you're in the midst of taking care of getting the building back up and running, making sure staff and residents are all healthy and safe, is there are certain documentations that need to be taken care along the way because you still have a responsibility to staff and residents, to the public, and other people. And one of the things was mentioned by Cal is having that media relations person because I've seen some kind of going the other way from Cal's example is we'll have this back up and running in 48 hours.
We haven't having any clue what it's really going to take to put that building back together. And just either way, you don't want to get bad PR out there that you have a separate battle to have to wage-- or not wage but just defend against that you didn't need to get yourself into. But things that are of concern for sure with residents always because of the acuity level of these buildings and the people in them are, are there environmental concerns later and the one that comes up the most is usually mold.
So what have you done to protect against that, make sure things have been cleaned properly so that you can say, at least at this point in time, after the event, we can show you that we did all we could to make sure that this building was safe, and clean, and put back in the condition it should be the one that you as a customer expect. So anything like that, where you're doing from a health and safety reason plus looking forward to, if it's an insurance claim, your insurance settlement, or if you have a lender on the building, you have a requirements there or the documentation items being put together to help with your own financial recovery as well as the building recovery.
So there's several things that you're-- this also goes back to your SOPs, put these things in there. So you're saying, along the way, we're taking care of these items so that when we get down to the end, we can easily answer these questions. And if someone is curious or wants to know, there's a concern, you have answers for them. You're not fumbling around or wondering what to say. It's already there. You put this as part of your SOP in the incident command thing that you're tracking along the way.
RHONDA DEMENO: Yeah, all those preparations. So, Cal, I'm going to ask a question off the cuff. Everyone's talking, no matter what industry you're in, none of us are immune to disasters. I mean, unfortunately, with these severe weather events and climate change issues, there are weather events and natural disasters from occurring. But are there any artificial intelligence tools or prediction tools that are being used or coming on the market to really help with preparations for these natural disasters that you're aware of?
CAL MCARTY: I think it's pretty early for AI prediction. We still largely depend on some of the predictors that work within-- I still believe NOAA is a great prediction system. Breaking down some of the AI that predicts how strong like an El Nino or a La Nina situation will be is huge in a hurricane. And then also something that's been said to be very predictable as to the magnitude of storms is something like the Saharan Dust Model that comes off of Africa, that slows the current in the Atlantic Basin. That is another AI prediction of where that's going to be more like.
It's almost a weather forecast, but those two factors, an El Nino situation or season La Nina and the Saharan Dust Model are going along with the Atlantic Basin charts of how deep and how warm the water is, those AI predictions have been very accurate. Other than that, I think when it comes to a prediction model, it's still pretty early for AI to be-- to predict named storms, or tornadic activity, or earthquakes, or wildfires. It's a natural disaster and an unknown disaster for a reason. I still think it's a little early for that. But they are very accurate in the ways of predicting La Nina or Saharan dust or even with wildfires, winds, and then also the dryness of the climate. They can be very accurate when it comes to that.
RHONDA DEMENO: David, did you want to make any comments to that?
DAVID GLUCKMAN: Yeah. Well, I think in the realm of risk management, we're always looking to try to identify what the frequency and severity of particular events are. And there's no doubt that, as Cal mentioned, just looking at weather models and hurricane predictions and some of the other tools that are available, things have improved so much over the last, let's say, 10, 20 years, whatever time period you want to choose that it's safe to say tornadoes, you used to have very little warning. Now sometimes you can get 15, 20 minutes of warning that a tornado is going to happen, which is a tremendous life saver.
Same thing with tools to predict hurricanes and certainly the path of hurricanes. Maybe intensity always sometimes can be a challenge. But I think, very rarely now is there a surprise about a hurricane's path where now you may know two or three days earlier that, yeah, there's a high probability and a high likelihood that we're going to be impacted by this particular event where years ago, that just didn't even exist. So yeah, like Cal said, as things get better as far as modeling and technology, I think it's just only something that's going to help identify what the frequency and severity of events are going to be.
RHONDA DEMENO: Fair enough. So a question to the group, is there anything that we haven't discussed that could help senior living operators in their pre-storm mitigation plans? Is there anything that we haven't mentioned?
WADE MILLER: Yeah. I think we hit the points well, I think the thing I would say, though, is hopefully, you don't just say, hey, that's a great idea, we'll get to that at some point. Put something down on your calendar now to say we're going to start putting together if you don't have a vendor team, if you don't have an SOP, if you don't have any of these things that we've talked about already in place, start planning for that immediately and get advice from the people that you know can give you good advice and start working on those plans and get them in place because, like we just talked about in these predictions, they're helpful with probabilities, they're helpful in certain cases. But in any case, whether it happens or not to whatever frequency, being prepared is your best position because, at some point, you're going to need to respond. And so be ready for that.
RHONDA DEMENO: Your best defense is preparation, I'm hearing. Cal, did you want to add something?
CAL MCARTY: It really comes down to I call it being on the agenda. The one thing we hear all the time is we've never been hit by hurricane, we've never had any big floods, we've never had a fire. Well, that type of thinking keeps people away from the SOPs, the pre-loss plans, the incident command setups. And I see a lot of companies, a lot of clients that are sort of maybe embarrassed of where they're at with it. I said the best plan is just to have a start to one, and I call it being on the agenda, which we all have, right? We all start meetings or start our day at home with some type of agenda for the day. If it starts being two minutes of your agenda, hey, you got it started.
And then that will snowball into being a major part of the agenda to testing. It's putting it in place and having a pre-loss plan or an SOP, whatever it might be. So don't think it won't happen to you. And a little start is better than no start.
RHONDA DEMENO: Great insight. David, any final thoughts?
DAVID GLUCKMAN: Sure. I mean, no plan is going to be perfect. And I think there's a tendency to start out thinking, OK, we really don't have anything in place or we want to build upon what we already have. So we need to come up with this very massive document that takes everything into consideration and covers all the contingencies. And that's just not going to be practical because no matter how hard you try, there's going to be something that happens that you didn't expect. And that's fine. The key is then learning from those lessons and not getting bogged down to your paralysis from analysis to the point where you feel overwhelmed to the point that this is just something that we're not going to be able to do because breaking it down to small, little manageable pieces and having it evolve over a long period of time is probably the best approach.
RHONDA DEMENO: We've covered a lot of territory. I really want to thank you all for attending today's discussion. I would like to thank you, David, very much for giving us some time and insight into how to best prepare for a storm. So thank you, David, for attending today.
DAVID GLUCKMAN: My pleasure.
RHONDA DEMENO: And, Wade, thank you very much for attending. Your insights are very valuable. And I look forward to talking to you on our next episode. But thanks for attending our call today.
WADE MILLER: Sure. Thank you, Rhonda.
RHONDA DEMENO: And same to you, Cal, Thank you very much for attending our podcast today. Your input was very valuable. And again, I think that those preparation strategies, you guys did a great job in really communicating how best to go about preparing for any disaster event. So thank you very much. This concludes our podcast for today.
We look forward to having our second episode to our Emergency Preparedness series. Thank you very much for attending.
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