Disaster planning

Nobody seems to be good at it, least of all our utility companies. Where we live, not far from Gloucester, the water company seems to be without a clue.

I don’t know the details but Severn Trent Water run the water plant that supplies what would seem to be most of Gloucester and surrounding areas. A single plant, that is under water and hence shut down. Redundancy anyone?

They are now saying that people are unlikely to have the water back for 7-14 days. That’s an impossibly long time for an area that is quite densely populated at least in the cities of Gloucester and Cheltenham.

What do they do about it? Send out trucks (bowsers) with water. You can get the list of them from their website which is just a plain text dump of abbreviated and sometimes split locations. They kindly tell you to use Google Maps to find these places. I mean COME ON. Look them up once at your HQ and put LINKS in or a map like this one I started doing in a couple of minutes having never used Google Maps to make a custom dataset before.

Large companies seem to have no clue how to communicate with the public in emergency situations. We’re only going to have more and more emergencies as the climate becomes more unpredictable.