Hurricane Season BCP: Every Caribbean Board Needs a Fresh One This Month

Claude Lorrain (Claude Gellée), The Trojan Women Setting Fire to Their Fleet, ca. 1643. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.

The climatological peak of the Atlantic hurricane season falls around 10 September. That is two days away, so any board reading this is reviewing its continuity plan during the exposure rather than ahead of it. Everything below can be done in a week.

NOAA's outlook for 2026 puts the probability of a below-normal season at 55 percent and an above-normal season at just 10 percent, with eight to 14 named storms and one to three major hurricanes expected. Acrisure Re projects around 13 named storms and roughly four landfalls. Caribbean landfall probability this year sits at 35 percent, below the 47 percent historical average. A warm Atlantic and an expected El Niño during the peak months pull in opposite directions.

A below-normal outlook makes boards relax, and the relaxation rests on a misreading. A seasonal count tells you how many storms will form across an entire basin. It does not tell you where any of them go or how strong they are when they arrive.

Melissa formed near the end of October 2025, late in the season, and made landfall on Jamaica's southern coast near peak Category 5 strength. It killed 93 people across the region, 45 of them in Jamaica. Physical damage in Jamaica was first estimated at US$8.8 billion, and the government's full assessment in March 2026 put damage and losses at US$12.2 billion, 56.7 percent of 2024 GDP. No firm on that coast was helped by the seasonal count.

Why the plans in the drawer do not work

Most business continuity plans (BCPs) I have reviewed for Caribbean firms fail in the same three ways.

The first is age. A plan last updated in 2019 or earlier was built around a Category 3 scenario, because that was the reasonable planning case then. Melissa and the seasons around it have moved the baseline. A Category 5 direct hit is now the case a plan has to survive.

The second is language. Too many of these documents read as though they were downloaded and lightly edited. A phrase like "ensure business continuity through robust protocols" tells nobody anything at 6am when the roads are flooded and the mobile network is down. The test for every sentence in a continuity plan is whether a person who has not read the rest of it could act on that sentence alone, in the dark, without internet. Most sentences in most plans fail that test.

The third gap is missing operational detail, and it is the expensive one. Who are the first three people the chief executive calls, by name? What are the payment terms for pre-positioning fuel, and with whom were they agreed in advance? Who can authorise spending without a board resolution, and up to what limit? These questions are tedious to answer, which is why they get deferred to the moment when there is no time left to answer them.

Three things worth doing before the next storm

Run the scenario, per business unit, as a Category 5 direct hit in the peak week. Every lesser case is contained inside it, so a plan that survives it survives the others. Model three things specifically: the disruption window, the point at which cash gets tight, and the decisions that have to be made in the first 48 hours. Most plans say nothing about the third.

Rank your critical dependencies by how fast each has to come back, not by how important each feels. For most Caribbean firms the top three are power, telecommunications and access to cash, and those three decide whether you can operate at all. Everything else can wait, and the plan should say so. A ranked list of three that people argued over is more use than an unranked list of thirty that nobody has read.

Then write the first three calls down. Names, mobile numbers, backup contacts, and the script for each: what you are asking that person for, and who you call instead when the number does not connect. Keep it to one page and laminate it. A 40-page PDF on a server behind a login will not be opened when the power is off.

All three steps are in the Hurricane BCP Scenario Tool, which models the two scenarios for one business unit, ranks the dependencies, works out where cash becomes the binding constraint, and prints the call sheet. It also scores your existing plan out of 100 against ten questions and shows which fixes are worth the most points, so you can take a number to the board. It is free, runs entirely in your browser, and nothing you type into it goes anywhere. Run it for your largest unit before your next executive meeting.

Two things that have changed since 2019, in opposite directions

Insurance has moved against Caribbean firms. Hurricane cover is more expensive and narrower than it was, and catastrophe pricing is built on multi-year models rather than on this season's forecast, so a quiet outlook will not reduce your premium. That changes the case for self-insurance and captive structures, and makes physical hardening pay for itself sooner.

Telecoms have moved in your favour. Fibre and mobile network hardening across the region have made remote operation during the recovery window possible in a way it was not seven years ago. That changes the geography of the plan: where key staff need to be before the storm, and which functions can be run from outside the affected area. Several firms I work with have restructured their continuity staffing on this alone.

Where I would push back on my own advice

The Category 5 rule is the right default, and it has a cost. Planning every unit against the worst case produces plans that are expensive to maintain and that some managers stop believing in, and a plan nobody believes gets ignored under stress. If your firm has limited capacity, plan two business units properly against the severe case rather than eight superficially.

The one-page call sheet has no such trade-off. It costs an afternoon, it works when everything else has failed, and I have never seen a firm regret having it. If you only do one thing this week, do that.

What to do before your next executive meeting

1. Company secretary: find the current BCP and report the date of its last substantive update to the chair this week. If it is before 2024, put a rebuild on the next board agenda.
2. Chief executive: name one owner for the rebuild and set a deadline inside this month, starting with the Category 5 direct-hit scenario for the largest business unit.
3. Chief operating officer: rank power, telecoms, cash and every other dependency by how many hours each can be down before operations stop, and agree fuel and generator terms with suppliers in writing now.
4. CFO: set out who can authorise emergency spending without a board resolution, up to what limit, and how staff are paid if banks and card networks are down for a week.
5. Every senior manager: keep a laminated copy of the one-page call sheet at home and in the car, and test each number on it before the end of the month.

The plans that get used are the ones rebuilt for the storms the region is getting now. Rebuild before the next storm rather than during it.