Safety Our #1 Concern
Hurricane Milton has finally passed, thankfully leaving behind much less destruction than was expected. The last few days as we watched the storm headed straight for HQ we had a lot on our minds. Number 1 on the list was the safety of all our employees.
Employees Prepare for Hurricane Milton
Many employees had to take time off to prepare their homes and assist their neighbors in doing the same. We covered for each other as best we could, and business got done as well. Everyone made sure that phones, tablets, laptops, and any portable chargers they had were fully charged and ready to go.
Wednesday afternoon we set up a group chat so we could all stay in touch and update each other as needed. Glad to report everyone weathered Hurricane Milton, unsettled but unscathed!
In addition to our group chat, most of our employees also have both the CrewChief mobile app and the PubSafe app installed on their phones. Both apps can be very helpful in an emergency.
CrewChief Mobile App
CrewChief is designed for communication with your employees and fleet vehicles. Features for lone worker safety include an SOS message, but it is only received by others in your CrewChief group. A free trial of CrewChief is available to our current customers.
PubSafe Mobile App
Alternately, PubSafe is free for citizens to connect people and response resources to improve public safety and disaster response. A citizen in distress can easily broadcast their location and situation, and responders monitoring the system can respond with help.
Technical Preparation
In any case, it pays to have a plan of action to avoid disruption to your business in the event of a potentially catastrophic event such as Hurricane Milton pounding Tampa Bay just weeks after Helene left massive amounts of debris in her wake. Our technical team had a basic plan in place that was executed flawlessly.
1. Position key staff outside the target area so systems can be maintained.
2. Increase the report intervals from the server monitoring system to provide higher resolution monitoring.
3. Increase backup intervals.
As it turned out, power was lost at HQ, but with the servers off-site in secure facilities and monitored by our staff outside the target area there were no service interruptions for our customers.
Thursday Morning After Hurricane Milton Passed
As of Thursday morning, we do not know when full power will be restored, but staff outside the target area have remote access to our systems, and those without internet can connect using cell phone hot spots. We may be a little slower to respond than normal, and some shipping issues may be out of our control, but we are able to assist customers with orders, technical support, and customer service as usual.
Updates on our situation will be posted as needed on the MyFleetistics login page.
Is Your Business Prepared?
Does your company have a solid plan in place to prepare and function in a similar event?
Working with a great managed service provider like IGTech365 makes it easy to ensure offsite backups are completed, server and workstation images are available and any mission critical hardware is available. Having backup server or firewall is important since getting a replacement may take months after a major disaster.
It may also be a good idea to have Starlink in place for internet and communications. The Starlink can be deactivated and only used in an emergency so for around $700 you can have internet when a crisis happens.
Backup power is needed if you plan to get back to work at the office. Install a transfer switch to connect a generator and a soft start unit on each AC to prevent the air compressor from stalling out the generator when it starts up.
We take preparedness seriously at Fleetistics. Here are some links to previous posts, including a video that may be helpful. Just click the images below to view the posts.
