29 Jun
Severe Weather & Floods

Friday Roundup – Flooding, water bottles and more than insurance

Greetings from Victoria BC where I have been busy checking out this weeks articles, blog posts and product reviews to pass on to our readers. One provincial department that I follow on Twitter is @EmergencyInfoBC.  They are fantastic on keeping us up to date on breaking emergency news, events that are promoting safety and awareness and are full of  great tips.

From Emergency Info BC we have the following tips during flooding season.  It’s Flooding-Now What?  Be Flood Smart!  The information includes safety on the roads, with electricity and gas, boating and how to prevent illness.  They have a guide called the Guide to Disaster Recovery to help get people started which can be downloaded.

Finally an article regarding emergency preparedness and small businesses. Don’t stop at insurance to protect business in disaster speaks to the other measures every business should implement above and beyond insurance.  Insurance will only help so much.  Tips like creating redundancies, establishing alternative sourcing for supplies and negotiating reciprocal contingency plans and cooperative agreements with local competitors.  If every business identifies the scenarios they may potentially fall victim to based on geography, they may be able to survive.  It finishes with an interview with a family business that learned the hard way through experience.

Bye for now!

16 Jun
News

Friday Roundup – Insurance, tax holiday and Apps

It was one of those weeks that culminated in a Friday Roundup being posted on a Saturday morning!  Not to worry though, the wait is worth it with three great posts for your emergency preparedness interest.

We start with another Insurance Industry news item.  A proactive stance is required by the Canada’s property and casualty insurers to discuss earthquake preparedness with consumers.  Rather shocking statistics state that only 60% of BC consumers have earthquake insurance and only 2% of the rest of Canada.

I really like this next story and would hope more cities, counties, states and provinces can join suit.  A TAX holiday!!  The weekend of July 6-8 see’s the state of Alabama rolling out a tax holiday for severe weather preparedness products.  The program follows the states successful back-to-school sales tax holiday.  Sweet Home Alabama!

 

Until next week…

08 Jun
Zombies

Friday Roundup – Communication, zombies and insurance

Moving into the month of June, activity seems to be increasing with emergency preparedness around North America.  Is it due to economic unrest in Europe or the continued wild weather?  This weeks roundup includes an article on mobile communications and earthquakes, the CDC denying the existence of Zombies and the Insurance industries take on disaster preparation.

First up is the headline, Mobile communications and earthquakes: a very “disturbing” marriage.  My first thought is: what??  Mobile communications would be the ideal marriage from first glance.   The author,  Armand Vervaeck from Earthquake-Report.com a website that follows and has reported on every major earthquake over the last 12 months, has concluded that communication problems are one of the recurring problems that exist.   Armand explains the major problem is mobile connectivity after a quake and lists the 3 main results from this.  He goes on to layout an effective way that the authorities and Networks can manage behaviour after an earthquake.  Very interesting reading and solutions that CAN work. (This article is no longer hosted online, however a similar study may be found here.)

We move on to the Zombie news item that left me a little perplexed.  The article is called “CDC Denies Existence of Zombies Despite Cannibal Incidents”.  I was really unsure if this was tongue in cheek or not.  If it was, it was more than a little “zombie” off colour.   These were actual events that happened with very disturbed people.  Regardless, the CDC has continued the theme with their Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse.  Have fun ya’ll.

Finishing the week we have a look at how the Insurance industry is weighing in on emergency preparedness.  The good folks over at InsuranceNews.net bring us the following headline:  “Insurance is Key to Disaster Preparation”.   This was issued by the Texas Department of Insurance at the beginning of the official Hurricane season.  They make some great tips and observations from creating a home inventory to checking your policy.  They have even created an app called the myHOME Scr.APP.book.  It can be downloaded via iTunes.  Just search “NAIC”.

 

 

 

http://insurancenewsnet.com/article.aspx?id=344681&type=newswires