Businesses to prep for power outages resulting from heat wave: Marsh

A massive heat wave is pressuring utilities in Northeastern United States and Central Canada, potentially leading to power outages, rolling blackouts or brownouts, said Marsh.Businesses should review steps to protect their supply chain during a power outage, Marsh notes. It’s also important to review loss control and security guidelines to ensure protection against damage to property and equipment in the event of operational disruptions.Marsh suggested the following tips:•determine how critical a facility is to ongoing operations and whether or not alternative production or service sites are available;•assign responsibility to a plant manager or other operations executives for maintaining and disseminating information about planned reductions in service or power outages;•review security measures at the facility, especially human-to-electronic monitoring ratios to determine if additional human presence may be required to protect the facility during any reductions in service or power outages; and•identify critical electronic data processing functions that might affect operations if power to data centres is lost.