Natural disasters are very hindsight things; "We should have done X," and "I wish we'd have Y."
While they catch very few people by surprise, in almost every case you can't adequately prepare for most of them. In the best of cases all you can do is learn from going through one and apply that knowledge to the next one.
When I was a senior in high school, an F5 tornado blew through and around my hometown. We knew it could get bad. The weather forecast was pretty bleak. School dismissed early and the likelihood of tornadoes in Alabama in the spring is always closer to probable than it is to probably not. But a 31-mile-long, three-quarter of a mile wide tornado wasn't at the forefront of any of our minds. It killed 32 people, some of them my classmates. In 2011, another major tornado took a similar path and nearly pushed the entire City of Pleasant Grove off the map.
A tornado forecast in Alabama used to be white noise on television. What I learned from 1998 to 2011 was when the weather person said "tornado," pay attention. Whether it's an F0 or an F5, it's bad news. But other than just knowing what's going on, it's key to have a response plan. Sheltering in place is critical for your personal safety, but what do you do when you emerge from your bunker and you don't have power, running water, or any semblance of a place to live?
Florida is no stranger to hurricanes. More storms hit Florida than any other state in the U.S., yet when Hurricane Ian cut a swath through there was really no way to mitigate it or prepare for it in the physical sense, other than to get out of its way.
At the business level, a business continuity plan is a critical piece of your operations that should spell out protocols for every possible natural disaster.
The Covid pandemic was a Baptism by fire. In December 2019, how many of your co-workers worked from home? How many just four months later? Few businesses had any rules or regulations in place on how to move entire office complexes of people into multiple homes in various cities and still have them work cohesively, and it all had to happen in a matter of days. It was an exercise of building the airplane while you're flying it.
