Research Paper 1

How safe are the government facilities?

Rebecca Leon
Empire State University
Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery
Diane Delucia
April 01, 2015

Research Paper 2 On March 9th 2015 an email was sent out to every Army recruiting station across the nation. The email was telling all military personnel to be vigilant of their surroundings as ISIS had put out word to target all “soft military targets” meaning facilities that do not have weapons and would not pose a threat back to the person targeting the facility. March 11th, just two days later, a man wearing a robe and turban was spotted at the recruiting station in Oxnard, California sitting in a car with a camera. When he noticed people were looking at him, the man drove off.
After the commander of the station was called, the man showed back up. This time the man was taking pictures of all the government vehicles in the parking lot. When the commander of the facility arrived to assess the situation, he saw the man in the car and started walking toward the man, and the man sped off. The commander tried to get a license plate number only to find that the car the man was driving had no license plate. Not even fifteen minutes after this incident, the secret service showed up not allowing anyone to go into the office for hours until they cleared the building. For the next two days, the recruiters at the office were instructed to wear civilian clothes. Did this recruiting station have a disaster plan ready in case something was to happen? On February 5, 2015 a patient at the VA clinic in Oxnard California called the clinic

Research Paper 3 demanding that they fill a narcotic prescription. The clinic declined to do that and an hour later that patient made a threat to the V.A. clinic stating that an armed person was going to show up at the facility and “shoot everyone”. Was this clinic ready if a disaster like that happened? Many facilities plan for all types of disasters such as floods, snow storms, power outages, hurricanes, earthquakes, personnel or IT but what about disasters that you don’t expect to happen such as a shooting, or a bomb. Although we do not wish for things like that to happen, the fact is that they do happen. The most we can do is to be prepared. Every work place and home setting should have a disaster plan in place for any circumstance. Each disaster has actions that should be taken before, during and after the event. Not every area has the same disasters, although it can happen, facilities in NY do not usually plan for earthquakes and in California, facilities don’t usually plan for snow storms but each can happen. Let’s look at the recruiting station in Oxnard California. This recruiting station is home to five offices, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard. Each office employs 4-10 people. The office is located at the end of a strip mall that is made of brick. I personally interviewed some Army and Marine personnel to find out what they had in place for disaster plans and the following questions were asked:

Research Paper 4
Do you have disaster plans for all types of disasters? I don’t know we have a plan that hangs on the wall.
What does that plan say? It just shows us where to evacuate in case of an emergency
What would you do in case of IT disasters or personnel issues? I don’t know we are not prepared for that I guess. We have never been told what to do.
Do you hold any kind of