Our email newsletter offers timely insight into preparedness topics of interest.
Risk Assessment
A thorough risk assessment is the foundation of all loss prevention, risk management, and emergency management programs. A sound understanding of threats, hazards, and perils that can injure people, damage property, interrupt operations, contaminate the environment, or damage your image or reputation is essential to developing prevention, mitigation and risk financing strategies. Risk assessment is also critical to defining scenarios for emergency response and recovery time objectives for business continuity plans.
Have you thoroughly evaluated all threats and hazards?
- Fire and explosion
- Accidents
- Hazardous materials spill or release
- Natural hazards (flooding, hurricane, tornado, and earthquake)
- Utility outages
- Entrapment
- Water leakage
- Workplace violence
- Cyber threats to information technology
- Loss of vital records and data
- Terrorism
- Transportation accidents
- Threats to your image and reputation
A thorough risk assessment is the foundation of all loss prevention, risk management, emergency management, and business continuity programs. Understanding the threats, hazards, and perils that can injure people, damage property, interrupt operations, contaminate the environment, or damage your image or reputation is essential to developing mitigation or risk financing strategies. The risk assessment is also critical to defining scenarios for emergency response and business continuity plans.
A risk assessment should be done for the organization as a whole, and then individually for all facilities. The risk assessment should answer questions including:
- What are the threats and hazards?
- What is the probability of occurrence?
- What is at risk?
- How vulnerable are people, property, operations, and your reputation?
- What are the potential consequences?
- How would emergency response, business continuity, and crisis management plans respond to the threat?
- What insurance or financing is in place to mitigate the financial impact of any losses?
Risk assessment should follow a defined process that begins with determining the scope of the assessment—do you want to assess the organization as a whole, individual facilities, or a part of a facility? Preparedness, LLC considers dozens of potential threats that could harm people, damage property, interrupt operations, contaminate the environment, or damage the image or reputation of the organization. We also attempt to quantify the potential frequency of each threat using multiple databases and research.
We assess the potential impact of each threat based on the potential
magnitude of the threat and the vulnerability of the facility and the
people and operations within.
Our vulnerability assessment and the prioritized recommendations presented to our clients present many opportunities for loss prevention and risk mitigation.
Security & Vulnerability Assessments
The security of your people, facilities, equipment, stock, vital records and data, information technology, and overall operations are threatened from outside and within. How secure is your facility? How vulnerable are the people as they enter, exit, and work inside the facility? Are occupants susceptible to violence in the workplace? Is the facility an attractive target for terrorist attack? If so, is the facility vulnerable to vehicle born explosives or interior or exterior attacks involving chemical weapons or biological agents?
A detailed security and vulnerability assessment can assess the potential threats to people, the facility, and valuable assets and operations within the facility. Using national standards for security and Preparedness, LLC’s own research as published in Business At Risk: How to Assess, Mitigate and Respond to Terrorist Threats, [2002, The National Underwriter Company] we can assess your vulnerability to security threats and provide detailed recommendations for mitigating the exposure. We can also help develop security policies, procedures, and strategies for mitigating the exposure.