In this episode, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser and Senior Consultant Jen Otremba talk about a recent storm in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul – and what happens after the storm hits for individuals and businesses.

What does a business do after the storm hits?

Topics discussed include building plans for natural disasters and severe weather, weather monitoring, crisis management processes and frameworks, and working through the consequences of a disruption.

Episode Transcript

Bryan Strawser:                   About two weeks ago you were running around flying helicopters.

Jen Otremba:                        Yeah, I was in California.

Bryan Strawser:                   Flying helicopters.

Jen Otremba:                        Flying helicopters.

Bryan Strawser:                   Two weeks ago while you were deployed to training, there was a pretty major storm came through the twin cities. We knew it was coming, you kind of see severe weather most of the time coming. It looked pretty bad as it came in.

Jen Otremba:                        Did it, did it like-

Bryan Strawser:                   It did. It was the darkest and greenest outside that I’d seen in a long time. It felt like night.

Jen Otremba:                        Oh wow.

Bryan Strawser:                   But it was nine o’clock in the morning. We knew what we were in for because we’d seen the forecasts and of course, we’re watching Twitter and we’re seeing reports come in from the west side of town. We live due north of Minneapolis.

Jen Otremba:                        It was during the week right? It was a weekday?

Bryan Strawser:                   No, it was a weekend.

Jen Otremba:                        Oh, it was a weekend.

Bryan Strawser:                   It comes in and it’s, fortunately the storm kind of split and went both north and south of us, but we got pretty high winds. There were 60 mile an hour straight line winds recorded not far from where I live. We got a significant amount of hail. I’m talking here, maybe like small rock size of hail. It wasn’t as windy where we were at, and so we just got a little bit of, we had a little bit of damage on the deck, not anything to write home about. I had friends who had trees come down, who had gardens destroyed, glass furniture, glass table tops on their outdoor furniture broken, landscaping shredded.

Jen Otremba:                        I saw on social media the snow trucks were out removing the hail and stuff from north Minneapolis, or it looked like they were plowing away.

Bryan Strawser:                   Coon Rapids is the one that stands out, where they brought out the snow plows to move the hail out of the street, there was so much of it.

Jen Otremba:                        Yeah, I know, I just saw social media, so I wasn’t here, but yeah.

Bryan Strawser:                   That’s only 10 or 12 miles north.

Jen Otremba:                        Yep.

Bryan Strawser:                   Then beyond the trees that caused the damage, I saw where hail came in and would catch this straight line winds and then get blown in [inaudible 00:02:28] just shredded it. [crosstalk 00:02:31]

Jen Otremba:                        Yeah, that’s what I saw.

Bryan Strawser:                   Fortunately we didn’t have that happen where I lived, but people to the south of us 20 miles and to the north of us 10 miles really got a significant amount of damage, without there being a tornado.

Jen Otremba:                        Yeah.

Bryan Strawser:                   Was just hail and straight line winds.

Jen Otremba:                        Yeah,