The public health, safety and economic vitality of a community are heavily dependent on the reliability of the services that you supply. Natural and man‐made disasters can disrupt these services, but planning for these events can mitigate their impact.

Steps that your agency can take to plan for disasters, reduce the impact of service disruptions, and provide continuity of services include:

• Obtaining commitment from senior management to the time and resources necessary to develop and maintain the disaster recovery and business continuity plan
• Naming key staff to develop, implement, and maintain a plan
• Identifying the hazards to and vulnerabilities of your systems
• Analyzing and prioritizing the impact of the hazards identified
• Developing strategies to resume any interrupted service
• Identifying resources needed to resume the service
• Developing recovery teams responsible for specific resumption strategies
• Testing the plan and informing senior management of the results
• Revising the plan and adjusting to changes in resources and conditions

This guide provides a discussion of the elements you should consider when developing a disaster recovery and business continuity plan. Along with this are a set of checklists and forms that can help you structure your evaluation. This material is based on numerous sources including FEMA, NFPA, OSHA, and the EPA. Please see the references for a full list of sources.