Residents in Louisiana spent the weekend cleaning up from yet another hurricane. Hurricane Delta made landfall on Friday bringing flash flooding to parts of the state already battered by an unforgiving hurricane season.
Forecasters called for a storm surge as high as 11 feet in some places, impacting those on the coast and further inland, reports AgDay TV national reporter Betsy Jibben.
A Change in Perspective
Pic Billingsley, director of development and engineering for Sanderson Farms, a poultry producer based out of Laurel, Miss., says Hurricane Katrina taught them many lessons 15 years ago – lessons that have changed the way the company does business today.
After Hurricane Katrina, the company organized a crisis management team. Today, hurricanes are just one of the events this team deals with, he adds. When a storm hits the Gulf, their crisis team immediately mobilizes.
With two plants in North Carolina, a plant in south Georgia and plants in south Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, it’s inevitable when a storm comes to the U.S., that their business will be impacted somehow, he says.
“It just never ends,” Billingsley says. “When Katrina came through, it was not expected to intensify like it did. We knew we would be impacted. But you know, a category one storm is one thing. A category three or four storm is something totally different. And the track of this one brought it right into our operation.”
Tips to Weather the Storm
Billingsley said they learned that when you get into a situation like a hurricane, communication is your most important asset. Today their company has satellite phones to keep communication going during the worst storms.
Another way they’ve changed how they prepare for hurricane season is to have larger supplies of diesel on hand at all times.
“When you’ve got generators running, you’re dependent on those. But you’re only as dependent as the amount of fuel you’ve got,” he says.
When Sanderson Farms created their crisis management team, they decided to put different people in charge of all of the areas impacted by a crisis that they felt they could improve upon, he adds.
From energy and fuel to communication and from mortality management to remediation, it’s important to put your best people together to tackle every possible issue that you could foresee happening.
“We have a good cross reference of our whole company represented on this team and everybody has a role,” Billingsley says. “Every year since 2005, we have implemented this process. The people may change within the system, but the system stays the same and it has served us really well.”
More from Farm Journal:
When the Hurricane Hits: Are You Prepared?
Be Careful Who You Trust: Hurricanes Bring Storm of Misinformation
