Preparedness is a Leadership Decision

In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri knocked out water service in Taylor, Texas, for ten days. Taylor was the last city in the state to restore service. I was the city’s public information officer, and I spent most of those ten days in the City’s virtual Emergency Operations Center, writing updates in real time for residents who were filling bathtubs with snow and melting it, bucket by bucket, just to flush their toilets.

We had no playbook for a ten-day water outage. We built one as we went: what to say, who approved it, which channels reached which residents, and how often to update them, even when there was nothing new to report. When we posted an explanation of the three-step process the city had to complete before lifting the boil water notice, an MSNBC producer reached out to ask whether a crew could follow our teams and show that process live on air. “I’ve covered a lot of storms and natural disasters,” the producer wrote, “but I don’t think I’ve seen a government explain something as clearly as y’all did.” The producer called it “one of the clearest, transparent explanations I’ve seen a local government give their constituents.” That real-time playbook became the city’s emergency standard.

I’m proud of that work. I also know how much easier those ten days would have been if we had built the playbook beforehand.

Why preparedness keeps getting pushed back

Local governments and nonprofits run lean. Staff wear several hats, budgets are tight, and every week brings something more urgent than planning for an emergency that may not come this year. So crisis preparedness becomes the thing everyone agrees is important and nobody has time for.

When the emergency does come, the cost shows up in predictable ways. Roles are unclear, so people lose hours deciding who does what. Messages conflict or arrive late, and rumors fill the gap. Critical services stop longer than they need to. Afterward, councils, boards, and funders ask what could have been done differently, and the answer is usually “more, ahead of time.”

Deciding not to plan is still a decision. It’s a decision to figure everything out during the worst week of the year.

Four pillars of practical preparedness

You don’t need a binder that sits on a shelf. You need a few things your team actually knows how to use.

1. Know what matters most. Identify the services, people, and partners you have to protect first. For a city, that might be water, public safety, and communication with residents. For a nonprofit, it might be the clients who depend on you every day. Everything else in your plan follows from this list.

2. Plan to keep the essentials running. For each critical function, decide how you’ll keep it going if your building, systems, or key staff are unavailable. Cross-train people. Set up backup locations and vendors. Write procedures for the people who’ll actually carry them out.

3. Decide how you’ll communicate before you need to. Map everyone you’ll need to reach: staff, residents or clients, elected officials or board members, partners, donors, and the media. Draft holding statements in advance, settle who approves messages, and plan backup channels for when your usual ones fail. Include Spanish and other languages your community speaks. During Uri, the questions came faster than we could answer them, and every message we had already drafted saved time. Explaining the process behind a decision is what earned that call from MSNBC. People are far more patient when they understand what’s happening and why.

4. Practice, then improve. Run a tabletop exercise once a year using a realistic scenario, such as a multi-day utility outage, a cyberattack, or a severe storm. After every exercise and every real incident, write down what worked and what didn’t, then update the plan. Preparedness is a habit you keep up.

Start small, but start

You don’t have to do all of this at once. Pick one critical service, one realistic scenario, and one afternoon with your leadership team. Walk through what would happen in the first 24 hours. You’ll find gaps, and that’s the point. It’s far better to find them in a conference room than in an Emergency Operations Center at 2 a.m.

If your organization wants help building a plan or running its first tabletop exercise, let’s talk.

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