Winter Weather Response

All over the country, we are dealing with the harsh effects of the winter season – even areas that don’t normally see inclement weather have been caught unprepared. In the Everbridge Insights severe weather communication webinar on Tuesday featuring Dr. Robert Chandler, we took a poll to see how many attendees have had instances where people have come in to work because they did not get the message to stay home. Surprisingly, approximately 40% have had this happen. Communication is vital in situations like these where life and limb are being risked to get to work. Many are hungry for resources to help them create severe weather messages. Everbridge is helping the effort by offering a complimentary winter weather response kit. This kit includes winter weather sample messages, a white paper detailing how to define communication needs during the six stages of a crisis and create messages that work, and a case study about how Kentucky Farm Bureau Insurance navigated a major ice storm.

In the webinar, Dr. Chandler also reviewed the case of Kentucky’s ice storm in 2009 and their Kentucky Outreach and Information Network (KOIN) communication group. Residents of Kentucky were unprepared for this type of natural disaster, unusual for their state.

Jay Blanton, a spokesman for Gov. Beshear’s [Governor of Kentucky] office said late Saturday night [January 31, 2009] that Kentucky was in the grip of “the biggest natural disaster in the state’s history,’ and that it was a crisis of not only electricity but of communication. (From the article “Kentucky’s Ice Storm Worse in Aftermath“, S. James Snyder, Time.com, Feb 2, 2009)

Reading about their response to the winter weather is extremely valuable, particularly the survey sent out to KOIN members after the response. Read more. You can also view the webinar slides and recording in the Everbridge Insights Webinar Materials section of our blog.