Plan? Get to an ATM Fast

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In the last week or so, as multiple catastrophes unfolded in Sendai, Japan, you may have gotten e-mails soliciting you to plan now to protect your business in case you’re hit with some similar disaster.

Or you may have seen articles or heard from colleagues who reminded you that you need to prepare your personal life for some future calamity.

If you ask me, I wouldn’t spend a nickel or waste a minute on such things. That’s because immense, overwhelming tragedies are just that: overwhelming.

Oh, sure, it’s great to have a plan for your ordinary three-alarm emergency. You can prepare for that. But that’s quite different from an earthquake followed by a tsunami followed by nuclear radiation. Don’t bother preparing for Armageddon. There’s no way to Sendai-proof your life.

Luckily, few of us have experienced anything approaching what’s occurred in Japan. I had a sense of it, however, when I lived in New Orleans.

I was out of town on a scheduled trip when Hurricane Katrina came ashore in August 2005. As I was driving back into the city, I pulled off the highway maybe 80 or so miles north of town to get gasoline. The first shock was the hour-long line of cars. The second shock was a hand-scrawled sign: “Cash only. No checks.”

The gas station had no electricity. (Why the gas pumps worked, I can’t tell you.) All phone lines were down. That meant credit cards were useless. The clerks were making change literally from a cigar box.

In the days that followed, that sign was common on the few – and I mean few – shops and restaurants that were open. Cash only. No checks.

Banks weren’t open. ATMs didn’t work. You had to live on whatever cash you happened to have in your pocket when the hurricane hit.

So let me ask, how do you prepare for a primitive, cash-only economy? Are we to carry thousands of dollars of cash in our pocket at all times, just in case a 9.0 earthquake occurs?

You can come up with an intricate emergency plan for your business and tell Mary that she’s responsible for this and Joe that he’s responsible for that. And that’s fine in a normal emergency. But in the case of Katrina, Mary and Joe had fled town for their lives. They couldn’t reach you and you couldn’t reach them because cell phones and land lines didn’t work. Neither did the Internet. Didn’t matter. There was no electricity.

Early in post-Katrina New Orleans, a few workers gamely decided to live at home and be true urban pioneers. But civil order hadn’t been restored. If the pioneers felt unsafe, they couldn’t call police because, remember, the phones didn’t work. Didn’t matter that they couldn’t call police. There weren’t many policemen to speak of.

I remember one co-worker told me that her pioneer experiment lasted a night or two.

I mean, you can try to fortify your life against Sendai-like events by carefully building your own Maginot Line. But overwhelming catastrophes, like the Germans in World War II, will just go around it.

That’s why I wouldn’t bother. You can’t outsmart an extraordinary disaster. You just have to react to the events of the moment and try to survive.

Actually, I do have one plan: At the first hint that a catastrophe may be looming, even if I can get a one-minute jump, I will run to the ATM and get cash.

Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].

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