Karen Mann (left), Emergency Management Coordinator with The City of Red Deer, and Reg Warkentin, the Red Deer and District Chamber of Commerce's Policy and Advocacy Manager. (rdnewsNOW/Josh Hall)

By Josh Hall (Twitter: @Vancan19)

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A well-prepared business community can make or break a city’s level of resilience in the wake of a disaster or other emergency.

Karen Mann, City of Red Deer Emergency Management Coordinator, said as much Thursday at an emergency preparedness workshop hosted by the Red Deer & District Chamber of Commerce.

Mann says following the 100+ km/h windstorm in June 2017, many businesses started to ask important questions about equipping themselves to handle a disaster.

“We’re starting to see a trend upwards of understanding risks and preparing for them,” she notes. “In 2017, we talked to a lot of businesses afterward, and they said they learned a lot from that experience, and whether their businesses were actually impacted or not, they saw other businesses that were.”

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Mann explains how important it is to assess risk.

“The big thing is to look at each business and see what vulnerabilities there are. Then start to look at how to mitigate your risks, both internally and externally. How would that impact your ability to provide services to your customers, and what would the impact be on your employees,” says Mann, referring to what she calls ‘business continuity.’

“If something happened to your building and you couldn’t access it, or if you had your computer systems go down, how would you run your business? We tell every business to understand and assess the risks specific to their type of business and physical location.”

At the end of the day, Mann says, communities that are more prepared will respond and recover quicker, which is better from economic and economic development points of view, as well as from life-saving and tourism perspectives.

“When you think of a community as a system of systems, when the community gets hit, their ability to recover to a pre-disaster state as quickly as possible is important.”

Reg Warkentin, the Chamber’s Policy and Advocacy Manager, admits the workshop is something they’ve been meaning to put on for some time.

“It’s one of those things where it might not be on the top of everyone’s radar, but there is a really strong need to have a plan in place in case something happens. A lot of it is reactive, and how to deal with certain occurrences, but a lot of it is preventative,” he says.

“One of the things we find, especially in a tough economy, margins are already so tight, so if you have just one or two or a handful of days where you’re not able to operate, it can be absolutely disastrous to your organization. When you’re able to implement safeguards or steps for a quick recovery, it’s crucial.”

To learn more about emergency preparedness, visit RedDeer.ca.