Hurricane Florence: What’s the Status of Your Stores?

By Doug Baker, Vice President, Industry Relations, Food Marketing Institute

Hurricane Florence’s impact are still developing factors over the next several hours, but during this time, it’s critical to assess what may hinder your ability to restore capacity to your stores.

We need your support to ensure our supply chain can respond and stabilize. As soon as physically possible, please contact FMI via our crisis resources page to alert us on the status of your stores. With this basic information, we can work together to speed up the government’s response time to get food, water and other commodities to communities in need.

Weights, tolls, driver hours, waivers, access and reentry procedures (e.g., store or warehouse food safety inspections) are all limiting factors during a natural disaster, which is why FMI has organized all the federal, state, local and private sector management to help communicate an effective response and recovery effort. The website has specific information related to:

• Store status form;
• Business-to-business solutions through the National Business Emergency Operations Center dashboard, which has a chat function for you to ask the professional community life-saving and life-sustaining operations questions;
• Private sector liaison map; and
• Curfew and reentry information.

Finally, remember to plan for a scenario where you don’t have power: Print out your private sector liaison map; save a hard copy of contacts at FEMA, state and city emergency; and you should have already established a phone tree within your own organization.

Thank you for providing the information that enables us to be of greater assistance. While our hearts and thoughts are with you during this time of emergency, we also want to send more than just hopeful wishes – we want to send tangible help.

Hurricane Resources and Information

Store Status Form

Photo credit: National Hurricane Center