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Emergency Preparedness
While disaster planning must cover many potential events, including tornados, earthquakes, and floods, the threat of hurricanes remain a major potential natural disaster for residents along much of coastal United States. Residents along the U.S. Gulf Coast learned first-hand in 2005 that advance planning is a hurricane season imperative. As banks prepare for future hurricane seasons, businesses should ensure that they have taken necessary steps to protect their employees and their operations.
Through this web page, ABA will bring you information about our member banks and businesses in areas that may be affected by a natural disaster. This page will be updated as necessary to provide information for member banks in the affected region, to help them prepare, recover, and to aide their efforts in restoring essential financial services to both their individual and business customers.
Advance planning can help businesses secure property, commerce and enable them to release or evacuate employees sooner in the event of an emergency.
Current Issues
UK Releases Results of Pandemic Test
The United Kingdom has released its final report regarding the six-week pandemic planning exercise that the financial services industry ran last year. The exercise modeled the first wave of an influenza pandemic. Seventy organizations from across the financial sector took part, including some that extended the exercise to include their overseas offices; in total around 3500 people were involved.
The scenario set the distribution of cash across the country as an early challenge for the industry. Although no overall cash shortage emerged during the exercise, there were bottlenecks. In addition, growing staff shortages forced banks to close an increasing number of branches, which reduced the availability of retail banking services to the public, including ATMs. A clear lesson learned from the exercise is that there would be much to be gained from developing a coordinated strategy for responding to these challenges. Read the Executive Summary. Read the Report.
Interagency Advisory on Influenza Pandemic Preparedness
This advisory is intended to raise awareness regarding the threat of a pandemic influenza outbreak and its potential impact on the delivery of critical financial services. It further advises financial institutions and their service providers to consider this and similar threats in their event response and resourceful. Read the Advisory.
Publications
FEMA
Important Links:
Disaster Declarations:
Emergency Aid Authorized:
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Additional Resources
Last Updated: 10/01/09
Questions? Please contact Doug Johnson, (202) 663-5059 for more information.
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