Disaster Prevention or Disaster Recovery?

Disaster Prevention or Disaster Recovery?

• Disaster prevention refers to specific and direct planning for certain disasters, as well as training. It also means the purchase and installation of building features or equipment that can help to stop flooding, fires, and more. Just having a pre-disaster plan in place will dramatically ease the recovery and reduce the damage.
• Disaster recovery can mean many different actions you must take after a disaster, whether natural or manmade. Who to contact, what has to be repaired, what you will need to replace, how you keep your business operating, and insurance involvement are all part of the recovery process.

Since we know you are interested in protecting your property, both strategies are worth your time and your financial investment. Often, the challenge is to decide which actions and processes should be priority, and why.

Equally Valuable in Measure

It is difficult to break down exactly which steps and actions are preferred to maximize your protection from financial and health risks, but if one needs to be prioritized, it is usually prevention for these reasons:

• Appropriate prevention can happen on an extended timetable. You can carry out prevention throughout the year and scale your costs accordingly to include: training, installation of safety features, such as water drainage and fire alarms, reinforcing doors and more. When you treat it as an investment, prevention is much easier to budget for, with years of preparation actually all coming into action when a catastrophe happens.
• Prevention can also involve recovery, as there will need to be constant interaction with emergency services. For the best chance at recovery, you need to have a trusted repair and damage mitigation contractor already on record so that you can contact them as soon as possible. Plans involving disconnecting or protecting equipment and appliances also drastically reduce your recovery costs.
• Prevention can save lives. Depending on the nature of the emergency and the threats that are faced, appropriate disaster prevention can actually prevent the loss of human life, especially in situations where you will need emergency medication, supplies, and more.

While prevention is always going to be imperative, proper response will be just as important in many ways, not the least of which is your financial consideration. Depending on the speed and thoroughness of your recovery period, you could be looking at tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in variance, particularly if you’re dealing with a commercial property. Ideally, you will engage a PREP Certified contractor long before you need them.

As we mentioned, having a trusted contractor with skilled repair technicians ready to go, is vital in your recovery. The less time that you need to spend contacting and vetting contractors after a disaster has taken place, the sooner you will be able to prevent some of the more extensive, cascading damage that can occur after a disaster, such as mold growth, further damage to a building’s foundation, and more. Remember: nobody should be exchanging business cards with someone they have never met at 3am during a disaster! That is just not a responsible approach to quickly getting your property back in operation again.