Category Archives: Tornadoes

How to Plan for a Rare Threat or Weather Event

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Whether it’s a crime, a meteor shower, a dam breach or a major hack attack, how can
security directors, managers (and even individuals) plan for the extremely rare threat event?

Even with the challenges of global warmings and changing patterns in society, and, apparently, in space, it’s still possible to anticipate and prepare for the outlier events.

You start with the known elements, for example, lately, some residential developers have been building in established flood plains, because, hey , there hasn’t been a flood in over 50 years.  But there are 100-year flood plains, 50-year flood plains and 200-year flood plains.  If your home, or facility, is located in a 50-year flood plain, and it’s been 48 years since the last flood, you can correctly infer that the next five years, you have an increased flood risk!

How to find out about flood risk?  If you live in the USA, you can go to www.floodsmart.gov, put in your zip code, and find out whether or not you are located in a flood plain, or flood prone area.  If you find out that you are, then you can add some additional preparation to make sure this threat is not going to materialize, or if it does, you’re ready!

Another example,  if your house/facility is in a high risk flood area, that means that there is a 1 in 4 chance (25% chance) that the property will experience a flood during the next 30 years.

If we look at chance of being hit by a meteor shower, we might find that a meteor hits the earth, with an impact, once every hundred years.   And so we take that 1 in 100 number and factor in the global surface, say divide it into 50 regions.  So that reduces that 1 in 100 number down to a much lesser number, maybe one in 100,000.

While the rare events are shocking when they occur, you can plan for them, by analyzing your risk, and putting in the proper controls so that if or when it happens, you’re ready and can continue to operate with the minimal of disruption!

We’re analyzing and examining  over 65 threats in the next 12 months, so subscribe to the blog and collect all the latest threat information.

Get Ready for Severe Weather!

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Whether it is Spring tornados or spring-summer thunderstorms and hurricanes.  We officially enter the season of severe weather across the U.S.

A major focus at the beginning of each severe weather season, take a few minute to get ready and make sure you are prepared, and your kids are prepared, and your pets are prepared.

You can download a complete list of preparation details at www.ready.gov but here is a
short list to review:

1.  Keep enough food and water for at least two weeks.

2.  Have a family evacuation plan and practice it often, including a meeting place.

3.  Keep a ‘ready-kit’ in your car with extra food, water, change of clothes and don’t forget to include pet food, plastic bags, diapers and other essentials that could carry you for a few days.

4.  Make sure and keep large trees trimmed to decrease the chance they could fall on your house.

5.  Use the internet, like Twitter or National Weather Service, to get breaking alerts, and invest in a battery powered radio.

6.  Keep extra batteries available to keep the radio alerts going.

7.   Keep your car gassed up, instead of running out during an emergency and finding
it’s out of gas, and remember, if the power goes out, the gas pumps don’t work.

8.  Stay alert and try to keep a day ahead of the weather!

Severe Tornados and Why We Need to Stay Prepared

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The damage and destruction from the path of a tornado is incredible – and only matched by the sad stories of the survivors, if they are lucky enough to survive.

If there’s one thing that social media has improved – it is the ability of an individual in an affected area to get detailed updated by the minute on a smartphone or over the internet.

The old early warning systems were set up for radio, that was in the days when everyone listened to radios.   I do listen to the radio for maybe 5 minutes a day, in the car, just long enough to put in the CD or connect my ipod.   So the Twitter accounts and iphone-smartphone apps from CNN, the National Weather Service, Weatherbug and dozens more really help to keep people informed.

I often hear news anchors lament the over-availability of information these days, but I think the more access we get to this kind of information and other kinds of info is absolutely a wonderful thing for society and for most people!

If you do live in a tornado-, hurricane- or other disaster-likely area, the Weatherbug app is one of the best because you can set it to actually chirp if severe weather threatens.

As far as risk reduction – being able to protect yourself against major weather events is one of the threats you can more easily eliminate or at least manage.

Are there mor

“Although the average number of April tornadoes steadily increased from 74 a year in the 1950s to 163 a year in the 2000s, nearly all of the increase is of the least powerful tornadoes that may touch down briefly without causing much damage. That suggests better reporting is largely responsible for the increase.

There are, on average, 1,300 tornadoes each year in the United States, which have caused an average of 65 deaths annually in recent years.

The number of tornadoes rated from EF1 to EF5 on the enhanced Fujita scale, used to measure tornado strength, has stayed relatively constant for the past half century at about 500 annually. But in that time the number of confirmed EF0 tornadoes has steadily increased to more than 800 a year from less than 100 a year, said Harold Brooks, a research meteorologist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory. ”