By Jason Dean
In the hours leading up to Hurricane Irene’s anticipated meeting with his city in late August, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was a model of stoic leadership. Deftly addressing contingency plans while underscoring the severity of the situation as it stood at that moment (residents who had not heeded evacuation orders were now told to stay put and hunker down until the storm passed), he assured citizens that the city had taken all possible measures to prepare for what Mother Nature was about to unleash.
Grace under pressure is a valuable commodity–in life as well as in business–but you don’t always have the benefit of a slow-moving weather system to anticipate the need to take action. Sometimes you need to think on your feet.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Bloomberg’s predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, was thrust front and center into an orchestrated airplane hijacking and attack that marked the homecoming of international terrorism. He gained wide praise for his strong leadership at the time, but subsequent criticism has focused on the city’s lack of preparedness in the period between the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 and the events of 9/11.
How you respond in an emergency depends a great deal on how prepared you are to respond. A disaster can be the difference between an emergency that is dealt with successfully and one that isn’t. The onset of disaster can be sudden – a violent tremor that builds to a tsunami, which then mushrooms into nuclear catastrophe, as happened on March 11 in Japan.
The American Red Cross is an indispensable emergency support agency that over the past 130 years has become a trusted partner with the government in providing the public with accurate, reliable information related to being prepared for and responding to emergencies as they occur. In an age when rumor and panic can spread with lightning speed, the Red Cross stands as one of the most trusted brands in the world; it has evolved its online presence to utilize social networking and provides a rich menu of online resources, including a Safe and Well registry for locating friends and family during emergency situations.
With close to 700 local chapters worldwide (28 in California), the Red Cross is the world’s nerve center of humanitarian goodwill. Local chapters mobilize trained volunteers to deploy where needed, regardless of location. Last year, the Red Cross budget was $3.5 billion, and each year volunteers provide assistance to 70,000 emergencies around the world.
There are plenty of opportunities for companies to take a leadership role in disaster preparedness, to the benefit of employees, their families, the community, and the health of the business itself. “Preparedness requires an investment of resources, time, and money, something many people forget,” says James McGee, CEO of the Ventura County Red Cross. The Red Cross Ready Rating Program, says McGee, is a great tool for assessing business preparedness. “After you find out where you’re at, assess your needs and develop a plan,” he advises. “The big part that people miss out on is that a plan is only as good as people’s understanding of that plan.” The key is to make preparedness part of the culture. 
McGee points to Amgen, Inc., as a shining example. “Chris Wright [Senior Manager of Worldwide Crisis Management for Amgen], has an emergency response plan that goes much further and much deeper than what the Red Cross consults businesses on,” says McGee. “The most important thing is to raise awareness, [but] there’s a need to go beyond that for bigger, more complicated organizations.” Leading companies, he adds, are making first aid and CPR training part of the employee benefit package.
“Business leaders have access to the budget, yes, but more importantly, they have influence to drive this necessary change,” points out McGee. “That’s where the Red Cross gets excited about partnering with business leaders, because they have the ability to affect this change.”
Ten years ago, the collective consciousness of the nation was rudely awakened to the reality of global terrorism on domestic soil. The Los Angeles region, with its plethora of natural disaster vulnerabilities, now has to contend with the possibility of terrorism as well. In the past four years, the Los Angeles Region Red Cross has made significant progress in the state of preparedness for a multi-source crisis, according to Paul Schulz, CEO of the Los Angeles chapter.
PrepareLA, a three-year Red Cross campaign to address disaster response, aims to strengthen the city’s capacity to meet the federal mandate for feeding, sheltering, and caring for citizens of Los Angeles following a catastrophic event. Another reason businesses should take the lead in disaster preparedness is that, if left to their own devices, individuals do not make it a priority: A scant 20 percent of Americans feel prepared for a catastrophic event, according to a 2006 Red Cross Preparedness Survey.
The Red Cross offers engagement opportunities for businesses that have employees who want to volunteer and get trained with other Red Cross volunteers. “Any time something [catastrophic] happens, it raises awareness,” says McGee. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there. We have the responsibility to ensure people have access to the right information.”
