Loss and recovery

Facing the difficult task of business continuity

It’s important to think of the unthinkable – the consequences of a fatal accident involving key personnel – so your company and your individual recovery is made less traumatic.

On an individual level, we have long been advised to ‘keep our affairs in order’ – wills, powers of attorney, lists of banking accounts, superannuation and insurance policies, what to do if life-support decisions are required – even our preferred funeral arrangements. But at a company level, do we have contingency plans that will enable the company to keep trading while it recovers from an emergency? Following identification of a number of issues during implementation of the AAAA integrated management system program – AIMS – the Association developed an emergency response plan for the aerial application industry that covered the full range of issues from first response and first aid to incident control and communication. That manual closed with two pages on recovery that sought to provide a simple framework to answer the question ‘what about after the accident?’ Following recent accidents and examples of the simple yet unforeseeable loss of staff, it is clear that all operators should be considering how they would start to recover from the loss of a key person in their business.