When “Attention, shoppers” comes over the public address system at a big-box store, most customers expect to learn about a special sale.

On February 8 at the Wal-Mart supercenter in Prattville, Ala., that message preceded a tornado warning and instructions to move to the center (safest) part of the store.

Fifty-five people died and hundreds were injured in the communities where tornados struck that day, but all the shoppers and associates in that Wal-Mart – which was in the middle of one tornado’s path – were protected by store managers’ quick response to an advance weather warning system that Wal-Mart has in place throughout its global enterprise.

In fact, entire communities have been helped by Wal-Mart’s emergency response system in advance of hurricanes in Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi, tornadoes in Missouri, Texas and Virginia and wildfires in California.

That system is housed in the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) at the company’s Bentonville, Ark., headquarters. The EOC, which has its own staff meteorologist, is being expanded from 5,600 sq. ft. to approximately 10,000 sq. ft. and operates 24/7 year-round. It consists of four divisions: planning, preparedness, operations and recovery/mitigation.

Everything the planning department does ultimately transfers to the emergency management preparedness division, which is responsible for training, testing exercises and awareness programs. Wal-Mart’s training focuses not only on preparing its two million global employees to cope with crises that occur in the workplace, but also with the crises that occur at home as the result of catastrophic events.

Operations comes into play as Wal-Mart begins to respond to an emergency. There are alarm and watch operations that are on guard “for emerging business-interruption issues constantly around the globe,” says Jason Jackson, Wal-Mart’s director of emergency management. The alerts triggered by watch operations give Wal-Mart “the ability to get out in front of issues immediately.”

Wal-Mart uses a third-party emergency alert/emergency communications tool from New York-based SWN (Send Word Now) Communications to automate alerts so that all stores that might be affected by a fast-developing event like a tornado can be alerted virtually simultaneously.

“Trying to alert 100 stores in an area that may be in the path of tornadoes takes too long if you rely on phone calls,” Jackson says.

Wal-Mart relies heavily on technology to run its EOC, with systems ranging from global positioning software to mapping, modeling and geological applications. And, during emergencies, hundreds of people can be working at once from all of Wal-Mart’s different divisions to support a response that can include thousands of people in the field.

As part of a broader partnership, Wal-Mart, through its preparedness and operations sections, also works closely with a wide variety of local, state and federal government agencies, volunteer organizations and non-profit entities like the Red Cross and Salvation Army.

In March, Wal-Mart partnered with Colorado’s Department of Health to develop a statewide preparedness program, engaging the head of the company’s preparedness section and members of the operations, marketing, government relations and public relations teams.

The end result, Jackson says, was a “huge statewide preparedness program that manifested in our stores in the form of emergency kits and information that described what Colorado’s citizens needed to do to be prepared for emergencies. Government officials were also on hand as part of in-store events to talk about the program.”

Wal-Mart also has worked with federal partners on national campaigns like Ready.gov and with local governments in Louisiana, Oregon, Texas and Utah to create emergency preparedness programs for families with themes like “Ready or Not” or “What If?”

Jackson says working with state-level planners is a wonderful way to plan for emergencies on a large scale because “you’re high enough to be strategic and low enough to be actionable.”

In the aftermath of the 2004 hurricane season that devastated parts of Florida, Wal-Mart set out on a mission to increase its public/private partnership in emergency management. Those efforts have been publicly recognized as not only being at the forefront of developing public/private emergency preparedness programs, but as examples of how effective such partnerships can be at the local, state and federal levels.

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