After Sept. 11, 2001, you would have thought New Orleans would have revisited its emergency operations plan. You would have thought they’d at least make some revisions about terrorist attacks and other insights municipalities learned from those attacks. So many organizations aren’t prepared.

Many problems I saw in the private sector are mirrored in the public sector. After going through several once-in-a-lifetime disasters that seem to hit every year, you would think many organizations would learn from others who were unprepared and lost valuable time trying to recover from a disaster.

Always Prepared?

From the 1988 office fire in Hinsdale, Ill. to the Chicago flood of 1992, there are many catastrophic events that have tested the viability of corporate and municipal disaster recovery programs and emergency operations plans. After those events, you would have thought organizations would have really focused on what to do after a disaster and develop comprehensive contingency plans.

They didn’t. After Sept. 11, 2001, many organizations that saw how unprepared some of the companies caught up in the World Trade Center disaster were started to review their disaster recovery plans. They found them to be sorely lacking.

On the corporate side, legislation like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act required corporations to have disaster recovery plans. While others in other industries also put emergency plans together, many have not revisited them since. Others have revised plans and are probably in a better position to be able to apply them in a disaster.

The newer the date on the plan, the more likely it will be of some use if it gets put into action.

A disaster or emergency operations plan is only as good as the last time it was tested. If you’ve never tested it after you put it together, chances are that it will be of minimal help when you run and dust it off. That was the experience of many companies in the World Trade Center that had a disaster recovery plan but never tested it.

After Sept. 11, 2001, another natural disaster created a wake-up call in both the private sector and the government. If you read what some other states did after Katrina, you would see that they created a well-organized approach for dealing with emergencies and disasters.

After Katrina, the state of New Jersey enacted a bill along these lines. You’ll see this in its “statement” paragraph: “The bill requires counties and municipalities to review and update emergency operations plans at least every year.” If you have a plan that’s five to seven years old, it will be useless in a disaster.

How long have you waited to do a review of your systems? Whether you’re a private organization or a local government, you have to have a plan that’s fairly recent and has been tested at least on a yearly basis.

Top 10 Signs of a Poor Plan

1. You try to look for it but the last person who had it on his or her desk is retired.

2. The plan talks about how to turn off all the gas lights on each block in case of a tornado.

3. The plan has a date that precedes Sept. 11, 2001.

4. The contact list is so old that half the names on it are now names on your city’s street signs.

5. While you could look for it, you are waist deep in water on the first floor and have to figure out how to get to the basement where it is stored.

6. The plan has a date preceding Katrina (Aug. 29, 2005).

7. You open it up and half the pages are missing because someone was using a page every day to start the space heater in the winter.

8. After six years, you decide to finally test it. The equipment that it describes how to operate has all been upgraded twice in six years.

9. The area codes that are defined in the plan have been changed.

10. The plan refers to all the policies and checklists you can get from files on the 5.25-inch disk in the folder jacket pocket.

Plans that haven’t been tested are probably not worth the paper they are printed on especially if they are a couple years old. With all the money that’s spent on various emergency programs, you would think your municipality is relatively safe in the event of an emergency.

Don’t take it for granted. The newer the date on the plan, the more likely it will be of some value if it’s ever put into action. It was hopefully tested in some dry run or simulation exercise.

Carlinism: Emergency operations plans are only good if they are tested and revised annually.