So, what would you take with you?
Yesterday afternoon, machine gun fire (don't ask!) started a brushfire on the west bench of the Salt Lake Valley roughly 20 mile south of downtown Salt Lake City. Blown by 50 mile an hour winds, it quickly spread, until it covered some 5000 acres and was out of control. It quickly threatened many upscale homes in the city of Herriman, about 20 miles (as the crow flies) from Tooele County forcing the evacuation of some 1600 homes, and over 5000 people. This caused massive traffic issues, and cell phone lines were jammed. I actually read a post on my facebook page from a member of the Utah House of Representatives that lives in the area, to his wife indicating that he couldn't get to her, couldn't reach her on the phone, and that she should grab a couple of things, turn on the sprinklers, and get out. This got my wife and I talking. What would you take if you only had minutes to decide? I'm not talking about the obvious like kids, dogs, goldfish, etc. Tooele County has an excellent emergency management department, due to the 70 year history of munitions disposal here at the Tooele Army Depot. We actually test the alert system every Wednesday at 4pm! So, what would you take? Since our office is a part of our home, we started thinking about important documents, client files, the computers, etc. Naturally, my first thought was the big screen TV! Berna pointed out to me that all of our documents were backed up, both here on an external hard drive that could be grabbed on the fly, as well as at an offsite internet based facility. At that point, we got going on the personal items in the home that we would grab.
The whole point of this post is, that we should be prepared to deal with issues to protect ourselves, and our clients at a moments notice. Is the material related to your clients safe, whether it be from a natural disaster, a fire, a burglary, etc? Are your past client files protected from those that might want to cause a bit of mischief by getting hold of some of the sensitive information that often is part of those files?
Luckily, only 3 homes were destroyed by this fire (one of them belonged to a client, we found out today), when it could have been much worse. While these people have suffered a devastating loss, hopefully preparation kept it from being worse. Preparation can keep you and your clients from devastation as well!