At PuroClean Emergency Recovery Services, why are we so concerned in our company with Emergency Response Planning?

When I was a little girl, my father was in the Air Force. We traveled the whole country – crisscrossing it many times for each of his duty stations. He had a great career, but I hated all the moving.

One of his earliest duty stations was at Edwards Air Force Base in California. I was really young then, but it was during my dad’s tour at Edwards that the Bay of Pigs happened. This past week, on April 17th was the 51st anniversary of the Bay of Pigs crisis. The anniversary kinda came and went without much notice for most people. But at the time, the Air Force’s response was to create an Emergency Response Plan – not just for the whole United States, but also for the families living on the military bases. The plan for the families living on Edwards: evacuate to the local borax mines – about 30 miles from the base.

Luckily, we never did have to “bug out”, but I can remember my mother packing for our family. . .

A few years later, my father was involved with the space program. He was stationed at Cape Canaveral and Patrick Air Force Base.

We survived several hurricanes in the couple years we lived in southern Florida. My dad would be out flying the hurricanes, “chasing the eye.” I can still remember my mother taping up the windows, filling the bath tubs with water, and emptying and cooking all the food in the freezer. (Family fun fact: we still call stewed chicken “hurricane chicken” and it’s the best chicken I ever remember eating when I was a kid!)

A few years later, my dad was stationed in Washington, DC. Less than a year after we moved to Northern Virginia, we lived through the 1973 April Fool’s Day tornado – no damage to our home, but the local high school was decimated.

Maybe we were just an “event prone” family – the way some people are “accident prone.” I don’t know . . . The point is, with all the weirdness of my life, I guess I got trained at an early age to think in terms of what the Air Force calls “contingency planning.” It’s normal for me. It’s sort of an “oh, but of course” kind of attitude. Disasters happen – both natural and man-made. We all know this – I just accept it as a matter of course.

What’s really interesting about this attitude is that as a business owner, I’ve found that most people just don’t think that way. Most business owners – if they ever think about disasters – it’s usually with the thought “it will never happen to me.” And hopefully, it never will. But, with all the recent natural disasters happening across the country, why wait to write a plan?

That’s where PuroClean Emergency Recovery Services comes in. We help local businesses create their own Emergency Response Plan - free of charge. We walk business owners step by step through the process, and make sure the key employees at the company have access to both the hard copy and a digital file of the plan.

And, PuroClean Emergency Recovery Services is now a Disaster Responder Partner with the American Red Cross.

Our Mission: Strengthening the communities we serve by helping businesses prepare