Ensuring Community Safety During Hurricane Milton
As an Orlando-based company, Community Tech is keeping everyone in Hurricane Milton's path in our thoughts and prayers and hoping for everyone's safety. Despite being a small business, we are committed to supporting recovery efforts and assisting the community in any way we can once the storm has passed.
With Hurricane Milton rapidly approaching Florida's central region, it's a stark reminder of the importance of preparedness, especially for residential and commercial communities. During hurricanes, resident communication and incident reporting becomes a critical challenge. Community Tech has always built our technology out of the necessity of helping communities, and in a time of a state emergency, we’d like to highlight how visitor management platforms can help.
Real-Time Resident Communication
During a hurricane, communication is key. Ensuring that residents are informed about evacuation orders, road closures, and emergency procedures is crucial. Visitor management platforms provide a centralized hub for sending out real-time notifications via SMS, email, or in-app alerts. This can help community managers quickly disseminate critical information to residents about:
Mandatory evacuations
Community locations for sandbags
Shelter locations
Emergency protocols
Estimated restoration times for power or other utilities
In the case of Hurricane Milton, which is expected to bring a direct hit to the Tampa Bay and Central Florida region that hasn’t been seen since the early 1900s, residents need to be updated frequently to ensure safety.
As a Community, we need to brace for strong winds, unseen storm surge, flooding, and potential power outages. Although technology is the least of everyone’s worries during a time of emergency, platforms like Community Tech enable property managers to keep residents updated, even when physical communication is difficult.
Incident Management & Reporting
In the immediate aftermath of a hurricane, documenting damage and managing incidents is essential for insurance purposes and coordinating repairs. A robust visitor management platform can double as an incident reporting tool. Residents and staff can use the system to submit reports on damages or safety concerns with photos and detailed descriptions.
This centralized incident management capability enables property managers to:
Track repair requests
Monitor the status of recovery efforts
Ensure that all issues are addressed systematically
Additionally, the platform's logs provide a record of when personnel and contractors accessed the community, which can be crucial for coordinating with emergency services and insurance providers.
Assisting with Evacuation and Re-entry
When a hurricane hits, millions may need to evacuate quickly, and re-entry after the storm can be just as complex. A visitor management system can help streamline this process. By maintaining a digital log of resident and visitor movements, property managers can better organize evacuation protocols and control the return of residents in phases, reducing chaos at community gates or guarded entrances.
Platforms like Community Tech also allow for remote monitoring of access logs, giving displaced residents peace of mind as they can track who is entering their property, even if they are not physically there. This ensures that community security is upheld in the storm’s aftermath, which is especially critical during periods of recovery when properties may be more vulnerable.
Safety Above All
At Community Tech, the safety of our community is our top priority, especially during emergencies like Hurricane Milton. We stand with our neighbors, offering our support and resources however we can, both during the storm and throughout the recovery process. We are committed to helping Central Florida stay safe and rebuild.
