Friday, May 27, 2011

LESSONS FROM CHRISTCHURCH

Earlier this week Malcolm Timms of Rider Levett Bucknall and Jeremy Hay of RCP gave an excellent presentation in Sydney, Australia about the Christchurch earthquake. You can get a sense of the damage caused by that earthquake on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WoKu5VxKgs.

Malcolm and Jeremy’s presentations dealt with the quake itself, what is meant by liquefaction, how the residents coped during and after the quake, the technical side of the after-quake clean-up work (including massive deconstruction of the Christchurch downtown) and, most importantly, lessons learned for disaster preparation. The two salient lessons for me were (1) make absolutely sure that you have ways of connecting with your staff after the event and (2) in developing your disaster recovery plan (you do have one, don’t you?) assume that you will never be able to get back into your office so keep copies of everything off site.

Natural disasters are scary!  Through our own North American post-disaster consulting work, we at Rider Levett Bucknall know how devastating hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and fires can be. If you don’t already have a disaster recovery plan for your home or business it would be a good idea to develop one right away.

posted by The QS


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