Fresh tremors felt in S'pore

Oct 1, 2009

Fresh tremors felt in S'pore

FRESH tremors were reported in several parts of Singapore for a second day on Thursday morning.

Police and the Singapore Civil Defence Force received more than 60 calls from the public reporting these tremors, shortly after a second earthquake with a 6.8-magnitude hit southern Sumatra, about 480 km southwest from Singapore, at 9.52 am.

Areas that felt the tremors include the Central Business District (CBD), Beach Road, Teban Gardens, Pasir Panjang, Toa Payoh, Ang Mo Kio, Yishun, Sengkang, Punggol, Sims Drive, Marine Parade, Tanjong Rhu, Woodlands, Choa Chu Kang and Jurong West.

No reports of injury nor law and order concerns have been received so far, said police.

On Wednesday, tremors were felt in 234 buildings in Singapore on Wednesday evening soon after a 7.9-magnitude earthquake struck off Sumatra Coast.

They included 187 Housing Board flats, 16 private residential buildings and 31 commercial buildings, said police in an update early on Thursday morning.

Engineers from the HDB and the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) inspected all the affected buildings and found them to be structurally safe and sound.

Thousands of Singaporeans had a fright when they felt tremors in the wake of the strong earthquake on Wednesday at about 6.15pm.

Scores of office workers and residents streamed out of some buildings in areas such as Raffles Place and Changi, and tremors were felt islandwide from Kembangan to Woodlands.

Some 170 calls about the tremors were also made to the authorities.

In a update on the tremors on Thursday, police assured the public that there is no cause for alarm.

'Buildings in Singapore are designed to established building codes and are sufficiently robust to withstand tremors caused by distant earthquakes,' said a police statement.

Should cracks or other structural defects develop, residents or occupants in public housing estates should call the Housing Board's Essential Maintenance Service Unit's 24-Hour Hotline at 6275 5555 or 6354 3333 while those in private buildings should call the Building & Construction Authority at 6325 7191 or 6325 7393.

EMPRR Global Summit (24-25 November 2009, Grande Copthorne Waterfront) will highlight preparedness and response tactics from global responders to ensure safety of property, lives and continuity of your business.

For more info, call 6844 2080 or info@arcmediaglobal.com

Pandemic, emergencies, disasters and their impact on business continuity

I've managed to come across a very compelling business-case why business continuity professionals, facilities managers and emergency reasponders need to know a more encompasssing knowledge of each other's tasks, which also apply to small businesses.

Is your BCM robust enough to have a second back up? Vice versa, is your emergency response effective enough to ensure business continuity?

More of this will be discussed at EMPRR 2009 (24-25 November 2009, Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel, Singapore) in the panel discussion on Day. For more info log on to www.arcmediaglobal.com/emprr09.

An excerpt below

Thursday August 6th, 2009

Pandemic : business continuity

Today, we are used to see colleagues appear at the office, as if they would never be absent more than one day. With this “flou artistique” around the flu we have to take into account that key people may be “out of business” for two weeks. It is no problem, since most of the people can have a backup. What if this backup is also down ?

We do define for ourselves a backup and a second backup. The first person typically knows the business, whereas the second needs to be trained on the tasks to be executed “in case of”. What is crucial or not to insure the continuity of our respective businesses ?

(This is actually interesting, because we now have to tell people the essence of our jobs, which leads to a reconsidering our priorities

Procedures need to be explained and perhaps even made lighter, since there are less people to execute the different steps. What has to be done immediately, what can be postponed until the return of the key people?

For larger companies, things can be solved because the pool of people is large. But for small companies, people are already executing several (different) jobs simultaneously. How can these people become even more multidisciplinary ?

Systems have to be reconsidered. How do you manage them remotely ? How do you restart a crashed server remotely ? And how does a non-IT guy do this ? If you have a disaster recovery site as a backup for your IT, how do you manage a fallback with less and unskilled people ?

We are in any case reconsidering our procedures, backups, business continuity plans and try to consider many different scenarios.

Just in case of.

http://www.onemagazine.be/2009/08/06/pandemic-business-contuity/