Nicholas Craig column
Sep 3 2004 By Nicholas Craig, The Journal
What a washout of a summer.
With Hurricane Charley lashing the coast of Florida, causing billions of dollars of damage, and Boscastle in Cornwall looking like a town swept into the sea, the total cost to businesses and people's lives from August's floods is incalculable.
`Extreme weather conditions' have become the norm over the last month.
Insurers, farmers, governments, and the general public will no doubt have to foot the bill for the floods which have left some businesses wrecked and many families in the south homeless.
The people of Boscastle will take years to recover. However, most of us have suffered to some extent.
Appalling August has shown just how easy it is to slow down our working lives after only a few weeks of rain.
It has brought the fragility of business success or failure into sharp relief.
If `extreme weather' strikes your company, do you believe your business would survive?
Whether the company recovers or not, and whether it is still operating 12 months after being hit by disastrous weather, appears to depend on what advance planning has taken place.
Like most crisis planning, however, putting in place a solid disaster recovery plan is somewhere down the list of priorities.
In the recent past we have not been affected by torrential, prolonged rain as much as other areas. I can, however, remember as a youngster the flooding of Corbridge, and York has suffered severely in years gone by.
These are nevertheless isolated incidents in a North-East climate characterised by a lack of dramatic highs or lows.
Even if the effects of global warming were to shake up our region's weather system, we're known for being resolute survivors.
When disaster strikes, we find ways to cope, and make the most of the situation.
It seems to be the same in Edinburgh, where £1 plastic ponchos sold out at the Fringe Festival as floods failed to dampen the fun. I like the attitude - of both seller and wearers!
* Nicholas Craig is a partner at Watson Burton LLP.
