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Be Prepared: Don’t Take Facility Security For Granted
With the war in Iraq more than three years old, it
may be a good time to consider the role we all play in the defense
of this country. No matter your political persuasion, we all have a
lot at stake in its resolution. As facility manager or safety
professionals, perhaps you should ask yourself what you’re doing to
ensure the safety and security of the people who use your facility.
In this month’s feature titled “Disaster Preparedness: Responding to
Facility or Area-wide Damage,” John Stagl, a business continuity
planner for Belfor USA, warns that we should not take the facilities
in which we work and live for granted. He says they are the most
frequently overlooked assets in our communities.
He discusses the importance of developing an effective disaster plan
for your facility, and says the time to develop such a plan is now,
while there is ample opportunity to explore alternatives and seek
out the best support companies to utilize when a disaster strikes.
The purpose of developing a disaster plan is to set priorities for
recovery in order to reduce the inconvenience to tenants, ensure
quick recovery of the facility, reduce the financial impact of a
disaster and make sure that you have the needed support of
professional disaster response companies. By taking this important
step now, facility managers can get the support they need and not
have to settle only for what is available at the time of a disaster.
Hurricane Katrina showed us what can happen in an area-wide
disaster, underscoring the need to have a plan and the wherewithal
to act on it in a timely manner. In today’s uncertain social,
political and economic environment, the only certainty is that we
have to prepare for the worst.
New Orleans, like 9/11, also showed us what happens when threats
aren’t taken seriously enough.
After the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, we should
have been better prepared for Sept. 11. Today there’s no excuse, but
until 9/11 there was no state sponsored terrorism in the United
States. That, like many other things, changed when terrorists
hijacked and flew jets into the towers in lower Manhattan and The
Pentagon.
The War on Terrorism may be a result of 9/11, but international
terrorism has been a problem for the West for more than 20 years,
according to John McCartney, formerly corporate safety director for
Texaco and president of Business Security Advisors Group, which
develops policies and programs to secure buildings.
He told attendees of the National Facilities Maintenance &
Technology conference that we are now in a worldwide struggle with
“homicidal Islamofascist attackers” (the term almost makes
“terrorists” sound benign) who are willing to kill innocents,
including the elderly, children, the infirmed, business executives
and average workers, in order to impose their eighth century Islamic
view of the world on the rest of us.
Though their views are obsolete and abhorrent, they are not dumb and
couldn’t have been more successful on Sept. 11, 2001.
Displaying an image of smoke billowing from the WTC Towers with the
Statue of Liberty in the foreground, McCartney said the terrorists
managed to destroy the most visible symbols of the world economy in
the shadow of political liberty. They can’t do any better, he said.
This can be seen in Iraq, where Al Queda has changed its strategy
from attacking high-profile targets to quick suicide attacks against
lightly defended targets. “This style may spread,” said McCartney,
adding the softer the target, the greater the likelihood of being
attacked. And as we saw in the attacks on Madrid and London, all
public places are targets, including malls, movie theaters, sporting
events and other public gathering places.
It’s not just an issue for the government, either, since 85 percent
of the country’s infrastructure is controlled by private industry,
according to McCartney.
Whether you think we should withdraw immediately from Iraq, or that
it’s just the beginning of World War III, what is clear is that each
facility is a potential target, and that we all need to be ready to
respond to the next disaster, whether it comes from man or Mother
Nature.
Thanks and good luck.
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