SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS (August 28, 2018) – EPIcenter, the City of San Antonio, CPS Energy, San Antonio Water System, the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation, OCI Solar Power, Go Smart Solar and CyberSecurity San Antonio are joining forces to encourage local businesses to establish and test their own resilience plans so that San Antonio will be better prepared to face a disaster – like Hurricane Harvey, which made landfall one year ago in Texas on August 25, 2017. Businesses and organizations of all sizes are asked to participate in the social media conversation about their resilience plans or experience with resilience using #satxresilience during San Antonio Resilience Week, October 8 – 12.
EPIcenter’s Summit in May 2018, called Disaster Disabled | Resilience Reinvented, focused on the technologies that enable a business to stay in operation after a disaster. To extend the conversation past the Summit, San Antonio District 8 Councilman Manny Pelaez and EPIcenter CEO Kimberly Britton announced Resilience Week, inviting local businesses to focus on and prepare their own resilience plans.
“There is no question that as a city we have a lot of work ahead to prepare and build resilience on several levels,” said San Antonio District 8 Councilman Manny Pelaez. “I’m proud to say that we’ve made great progress through the SA Climate Ready initiative, for example, where we are developing plans and policies to better prepare for the anticipated impacts of climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That entire process should wrap up next year and will be a critical guide for much of our resilience planning as a city.”
Videos and take-‐aways from the May Summit, along with a guide to help businesses through the process of developing resilience plans, are available on EPIcenter’s website, EPIcenterUS.org. To participate in Resilience Week, local businesses and organizations are asked to:
• Declare itself a participant in Resilience Week
• Use the provided social media badge and #satxresilience
• Respond to at least one of the disaster scenarios posted by EPIcenter during the week on their own social media channels
• Share a little bit about their own resilience plan or what you they learned by testing it
As of August 28, the following businesses and organizations are participating in Resilience Week. A complete list of participants will be on the EPIcenter website.
• EPIcenter
• CPS Energy
• City of San Antonio
• OCI Solar Power
• CyberSecurity San Antonio
• Accu-‐Print
• Port San Antonio
• Methodist Healthcare System
• San Antonio Water System
• San Antonio River Authority
• San Antonio Chamber of Commerce
• Go Smart Solar
• Pape-‐Dawson Engineers
“We know this issue can seem daunting, particularly for small and medium-‐sized businesses with limited resources,” said EPIcenter CEO Kimberly Britton. “EPIcenter’s goal in Resilience Week is to continue the conversation begun at the EPIcenter Summit last May. We want to raise awareness, provide resources and tools and to bring businesses together to share tips and experiences so that we can all learn from each other.”
