“Imagine a really expensive microscope you’re not currently using — hey, maybe get a plastic cover on that and move it off the floor,” says risk expert Robert Emery aka ‘Safety Bob’. “Focusing on miniature losses improves resilience for the big ones.”
In 2017, Hurricane Maria’s heavy rains and high-speed winds caused widespread devastation in Puerto Rico.Hurricanes are common visitors of Puerto Rico. So when Hurricane Maria developed in the Caribbean in mid-September 2017, atmospheric chemist Olga Mayol-Bracero, then at the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras in San Juan, knew how to prepare.
Natural disasters often serve as wake-up calls regarding preparedness. For Houston, which is home to several universities and medical centres — and indeed, for other storm-prone areas in the United States — that event was Tropical Storm Allison, which in 2001 dropped more than 1 metre of rain on some areas, causing massive flooding.
“Think of this as an at-home will kit,” says Emery. “You are not required to have a will, but it’s probably a good idea.” Emery also encourages researchers to read their universities’ insurance policies for disaster coverage, noting that, after Allison, some were surprised to learn that their losses either were not covered or had failed to meet their deductibles — and that they were on the hook for replacing them.
These days, institutional safety officers routinely check on researchers’ compliance with preparedness protocols, and Tomita notes that when a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck the Kumamoto prefecture in southwestern Japan, in 2016, researchers and the community were better prepared. Scientists who work with animals should draw up plans for an alternative facility — say, a colleague’s laboratory — in which they can house animals in the case of an extreme event, says Robert Taft, senior services programme manager at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. And cryopreserve especially important strains’ sperm or embryos in case animal facilities are damaged, he adds.
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