The importance of up to date emergency planning processes within your organisation’s Business Continuity Plan

With the sudden impact of Covid-19 earlier this year, we have talked to many companies who have had a (proverbial) dusting-off of their Business Continuity Plan, or have had to construct a framework for Emergency Management that was not previously in place.

Some organisations, after undertaking a risk assessment, were concerned about the possible reliability of utilities, including power supply, in the event that Covid-19 may impact on the staffing resources, and parts available to support these utilities & extended outages, hence undertook emergency generator installations.

A staple of critical sites and larger organisations, the Business Continuity Plan should always have an Emergency Planning section that addresses how you’ll respond to supporting your your infrastructure, service delivery & continuity.  From a back-up power perspective, we encourage organisations to have a risk framework around each site that addresses their energy related risks, such as:

• Natural disasters
• Extreme weather
• Grid power failures
• Technical interruptions (eg: impacts to data access and cyber security)

We also recommend that all organisations and their individual sites develop – and annually review – an ‘Emergency Plan’ that includes an outline of your back-up power solutions. We suggest an annual update to your plan, to ensure any capital developments or recent service changes over the previous 12 months are supported with your existing back-up power systems.

Part of your preparedness planning, and risk management of the areas noted above should also include assurance that your generator systems have received regular maintenance throughout the year by qualified Mechanical & Electrical technicians. Ensure any sites that have generator installations for fire & life safety services are undertaking the correct compliance maintenance & testing to meet the ministers specifications (form 3), and where needed: component change-out, complete system rebuilds, control system upgrades and enhancements to address any site changes.

If you’re yet to develop an Emergency Management Plan, consider this template from the Australian Government https://www.business.gov.au/Risk-management/Emergency-management/How-to-prepare-an-emergency-management-plan, and feel free to reach out to our team if you have any power back-up questions via email or on 08 8349 7854