The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, like many organizations and businesses, big or small, has a pandemic plan. Mary Lasky is in charge of that plan. She says her job means “being sure that business can continue” in any emergency — whether it’s a fire or an earthquake, or, at the moment, H1N1.
The Lab’s full pandemic plan is roughly 100 pages long, but the cleverest part is its one-page summary, which presents the most important elements for, Lasky explained, “different phases of a pandemic — e.g., verifying the critical work that cannot be disrupted, when to institute social distancing and work-at-home, actions to be taken if elements of the infrastructure are not available.” The one-page pandemic plan, Lasky told me, “is what seemed to get everyone’s attention” when she presented the idea at an international swine-flu summit in August.
In addition to her work at the Applied Physics Lab, Lasky helps businesses and organizations in Howard County, Maryland, prepare for pandemic (and other) emergencies. (Click here to see examples of one-page pandemic plans she developed for the county.) This kind of local planning is happening across the country — in your neighborhood, too.
If you’re interested in reporting on it and would like to research the topic, try the relevant CDC page, Flu.gov page, Flu.gov FAQ, or Occupational Safety and Health Administration page. (Many of these resources might be directly useful to your station’s audience, too.) Harvard’s Nieman Foundation offers additional resources and specific story ideas here.
You might also be curious to learn more about SAFER — an NPR-NFCB project to help stations stay on the air during emergencies.
Leave a comment to suggest other places to find continuity planning information.
[Update 11 November 2009: Here are two interesting relevant articles -- one on the possibility of sick workers clogging up the web by working from home; and the other on pending legislation to mandate emergency paid sick leave.]
