How Commercial Buildings Should Prepare for Hurricane Season

At Central Florida Store Services, our mission is to ensure that our clients’ commercial buildings are safe, efficient, and prepared for any eventuality. With Florida always on alert for a rough hurricane season, it’s important to know what to do to prepare your commercial facility for a potentially devastating storm. Here are some important tips and steps to help you in your preparation.

Know the Risks

A hurricane is characterized by strong, high-speed winds, tornadoes, storm surges, and torrential rains. Your building should be strong enough to withstand all of these factors in their strongest intensities.

Hurricanes and other massive storms can negatively impact your business by causing damage to the exterior or interior of your facility. Hurricanes also commonly cause power outages, which could leave your building at risk of having security issues or other vulnerabilities. To avoid this, Central Florida Store Services provides valuable information that lets you know whether your building is susceptible to damage during hurricane season.

The first step is an inspection by our licensed professionals to help assess the threats and come up with ways to handle the vulnerabilities.

Audit Your Disaster Preparedness Plan

Many commercial business owners develop a disaster preparedness plan at the earliest phase of their business.

However, only a few of them put this plan into action to determine whether it actually works. Needless to say, auditing your disaster preparedness plan is the most logical thing to do before hurricane season.

It is important to do the following:

• Remind your staff about policies and guidelines that should be adopted in case of a hurricane. All employees should be aware of their specific responsibilities in an emergency.
• Review your insurance policy to ensure that your business facility as a whole is protected in case of a hurricane or other natural disaster. Always back your insurance claim up with before and after photos of your business premises as this will strengthen your insurance claim.

• Ensure that you prepare an emergency kit and include items like generators, hand tools, and other essential items that will come in handy during a hurricane.

• Back up and secure all your important data.

Create an Inventory of All Property in Your Facility

Creating an inventory of the property in your building will make it easy to reference what condition your assets are in before and after the hurricane.

This will also help you note the important things that you do not have, so you can then acquire them before the storm. Having an inventory is the best way to substantiate losses for income tax.

Preparing As the Hurricane Approaches

Usually, a warning is issued for an oncoming hurricane. During this period, commercial building managers should conduct checks around the interior and exterior parts of the facility.

These are the safety measures that you should take during this time:

• Remove items like outdoor signs and banners that can easily get tossed away by the winds. Ensure that you board up the glass windows to prevent shattering.
• Ensure that all electric cords and devices are disconnected from the main power supply. Double-check the main power supply to ensure that all power connections are off.
• Do not forget to take down items that are loosely hung on the walls as well and remove all small items on work desks.
• Move all furniture and/or equipment away from the windows and secure them in the innermost part of the building.
• Talk to the employees and be sure that they understand the disaster response process. Make it clear that they can only access the building once the hurricane is over.
• Evacuate all employees from the building.

What to Do After the Hurricane Passes

Once the hurricane passes, building owners and employees should only access the building after the authorities give clearance.

Thereafter, an emergency response team should assess the building before people are allowed back to the premises. The purpose of this assessment is to identify any structural damage or hazard that should be addressed before the building can be occupied again.

Bolster Your Hurricane Preparedness with CFLSS

It goes without saying that staying prepared for the hurricane season will help you protect your business and mitigate losses. Be sure to develop your disaster preparedness plan prior to the hurricane threat is imminent.

With the right facility operations team, you will always be protected. Central Florida Store Services will help protect your industrial complex, office building, grocery store, and any other commercial building from an oncoming hurricane.