Do you have any idea what happens during a local, regional or national disaster event? Chances are you will not be able to communicate as you normally would. Here’s why – cell phone towers, land phone lines, and other typical methods of communication are usually overwhelmed or inundated with hundreds, if not thousands of people trying to reach out to see if there family members are safe during that disaster. Need an example?
On August 1st, 2007 I was finishing my work day in my home office in Minnesota. During the evening rush hour, my cell phone began lighting up with call after call indicating a regional disaster had occurred. The I-35 eight-lane trust arch bridge crossing the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis had collapsed and there were dozens of cars in the river and on the broken highway spans over the river. The phone calls were coming from clients of mine asking me to assist them in locating and responding to the crisis. As a crisis management expert working for a emergency notification company, these clients were asking for assistance. One of those clients was the Metro Hospital Compact for the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. This compact included over twenty hospitals and medical specialty clinics in the area and they were reaching out to me to assist them with this unusual disaster. Ambulances, emergency responders and the public were responding to the event and they needed to know where to bring injured and deceased individuals to the proper location. For the next two hours, I assisted the Compact clients with how they were to respond to this event and take victims to the correct triage area within the Twin Cities.
Meanwhile, during those two hours of assisting clients, my heart and soul was wondering if my daughter (who worked in downtown Minneapolis) was safe. My daughter crossed that collapsed bridge numerous times a day performing her job, so I was really worried that she might have been on that bridge during the collapse and could possibly be a victim. When I had a break during those two hours of helping clients, I kept on trying to call her using my cell phone and our land line. Ever.y time I called I got the message “All phone lines are unavailable and all cell phone towers are unavailable. Please try later”. Finally, two hours after the bridge collapse, I received a text message from my daughter saying she was safe at home and okay. What a relief!
What did I learn from that experience and what should you do for your family to prevent a similar situation like this from happening to you? You need to have a basic family communication plan in place in case a similar event impacts your family. And it doesn’t have to be a bridge collapse event for you to need or use a basic communication plan. It can be a tornado warning with little advance notice, or a wildfire, or a hurricane. A simple, basic communication plan provides your family with easy methods to contact your family and the reassurance that everyone you love is okay. Some family’s may even want to implement an advanced communication plan which provides your family with additional methods to contact your family during a potential disaster. Bottom line, is that any communication plan is better than no communication plan at all.
