In certain areas, hurricanes are a certainty. As a facilities manager, it’s your responsibility to have a plan that speeds recovery and helps keep students and staff safe. K-12 Hurricane Preparation is essential in these situations. Extreme weather events are happening more frequently these days. In 2023, they cost schools $165 billion in damages and caused 82% of Florida school districts to close for at least one day, according to a federal report1. Those closures kept approximately 2.5 million students out of school, disrupting their learning progress, possibly impacting performance on standardized tests, and perhaps even affecting student mental health.
When it comes to preparing for hurricanes, the best tool is a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). If you use it strategically before an emergency, you’ll be able to track all maintenance tasks, prioritize preventative maintenance, and document asset conditions to ensure you have the records and information needed in the aftermath.
Work Prioritization
Once you get news that a hurricane is headed your way, it’s time to prepare your facilities as best you can – and time is of the essence. Using a CMMS to create high priority work orders that your team receives on their mobile devices, you can deploy technicians to quickly begin preparations. They can start removing or securing items outside, covering windows, preparing for flooding, and moving furniture and electronics to safe places–all the things that can fortify buildings against potential damage. With a CMMS, you spend less time coordinating who is doing what work and which tasks are the highest priority, so the team can get as much done as possible in the shortest amount of time.
Preventative Maintenance
Preventative maintenance is the best way to ensure your equipment and assets are in proper working order should you experience a weather emergency. With a robust preventative maintenance program, you can be confident that fire extinguishers are fully operational, drainage systems can handle excess water, and generators are ready to perform when needed. Tracking PM schedules in a CMMS ensures you can rely on emergency systems to function properly when needed.
Asset Management
In the aftermath of a severe weather event, the process of recovery starts with assessing the state of damage. A CMMS provides a full understanding of the condition of assets prior, and allows your team to document the current state of equipment and assets. This helps with repair versus replacement decisions, as well as submitting documentation to insurance or government agencies. A critical function of a CMMS is the ability to locate assets in a map view on a mobile device. Asset maps allow technicians to quickly identify missing or damaged items and update the asset inventory as they move through the facility.
Digital Documentation
Maintenance records, equipment warranties, asset histories, and clean up efforts will be needed in the aftermath of a disaster. To avoid scrambling to pull together information or trying to reproduce paper records that were destroyed, a cloud-based CMMS is the safest place to keep all of this information. A picture is worth a thousand words, so having photos and videos that show equipment in good working order is critical. Maintenance records that prove the team consistently cleaned the gutters and tested the fire system will be important to illustrate that proper upkeep was performed on buildings. Digital documents are best because government agencies and insurance companies may ask multiple times for documentation.
Are you prepared if disaster strikes your school district? Contact us today
