Is Your Workplace Prepared for a Sharknado?

Federal rules require employers to ensure that employees know what to do in an emergency such as fires, hazardous spills, power outages, and other workplace threats, including severe weather. However, your workers may be buzzing about something you may never have considered—a sharknado!

Remember, decisions on emergency procedures should be made in advance and clearly communicated to employees, not left to chance or to the conditions of the moment. So review your emergency action plan if your facility is near an ocean, gulf, or other potentially shark-infested body of water.

In the case of a sharknado, travel is a major problem, what with the high winds and falling predators, so employees may want to have a shelter in place because going outside is extremely dangerous. It’s not like workers can run from the danger like they can from Godzilla or other nonairborne menaces.

Luckily, a new book is available to help you prepare for this event. In “How to Survive a Sharknado and Other Unnatural Disasters” (that cover looks so familiar), Andrew Shaffer addresses this new threat and offers “easy-to-understand survival tips” and useful resources for that and other dire possibilities such as a Stonehenge apocalypse, redneck gators, a beeclipse, and a bataclysm. The book is a companion to Shaffer’s Zombie Survival Guide.

In a blurb for this book, Random House, the publisher, says “catastrophes like the sharknadoes have taught us that we need to be ready for anything.”

Survival expert Bear Grylls told PopWatch that protecting workers from flying sharks would be problematic—it’s much easier to protect them from sharks in the water than sharks in the air. In the water, a swimmer would go for the gills, eyes, or nose or shout at it, says Grylls. “But the truth is, [if] you got great whites flying through the air, and they’re all coming towards you, you’re a little bit scr@!*$. You’ve got to take cover.”

So just use your current policy on tornadoes and inclement weather for sharknadoes—no special policy needed!