Prepare for the Worst, Plan for the Best: Disaster Preparedness and Recovery for Small Businesses

Chapter 5. Basic Safety Practices

This and the following chapters are organized around several "key theme topics," including information that is important for you to have but does not easily fit within the more strategic framework of this book. The first deals with basic safety practices. The first edition of this book included summary information on basic safety practices in the Appendix to refresh the reader's memory of information that we learned as children, either in school, from our families, or both. Safety information was almost a non sequitur to a strategic handbook for small businesses, because it is common to everyone, but I thought we would be remiss for leaving it out. Since the publishing of the first edition of this book five years ago, I have taught seminars to small businesses across the United States, Canada, and Asia and I discovered not everyone has learned basic safety information! I recently spoke at an event for the San Antonio Small Business Development Center (SBDC) and was discussing this observation with one of the SBDC counselors. She told me that her father was in the military and before she could apply for a learner's permit for her driver's license, she had to demonstrate, to his satisfaction, that she knew what belonged in an emergency "Go kit"—and how to change a flat tire. My grandfather was a firefighter, so I had similar training. It was just unthinkable back then that you would not have a battery-operated radio with spare batteries in the home, ...