In a time of crisis

As we all may know by now, Valley City, North Dakota, was recently dealing with major flood threats. There is still a threat since the river is over the flood level, but it was dealt with very well. Just recently, Friday the 17, the sewer system gave, leaving many businesses within a four-block radius with water in their basements. Shortly after that, Mayor Mary Lee Nielson came onto the radio and announced what happened. And what was going to change for the next month. Life as Valley City knew it was thrown back in time, but with electricity.
All non-essential businesses were asked to shut down. The only thing open were the clinics, hardware stores, gas stations and grocery stores. From Friday until Wednesday, the whole town was basically dead. Not being able to use water, well you can use it - you just cannot drain it. Everyone was suddenly coming up with creative ways to rid of their wastewater. And let me tell you, working at a gas station/farm store, we saw a lot of how people were planning to rig up their washer, sump pump the water out of the tub, and so on. Luckily, for Valley City, and after a business owner made a big deal about what is essential and what is not, all businesses were allowed to open back up on Wednesday the 22. However, they too still had some water restrictions, and the residential people were still on their no draining orders. If you were to enter Valley City now, you would see porta potties on every block. I do believe it was about 500 of them that they brought into town.
The reason I'm writing about the Flood of Valley City and all that came with it is because this is a violent natural crisis. So I started looking for things that deal with crisis communication, and I came upon an article about crisis communication kits and what you need in them. The article/web site is entitled "7 Must-have Elements in Every Crisis Communications Kit". It discusses how all businesses should have a kit and a plan ready to go. The seven items that should be included are as follows: 1) A list of the members of the crisis management team; 2) contact information for key officers, spokespeople, and crisis management team members; 3) fact sheets on the company, each division, each physical location, and each product offered; 4) profiles and biographies for each key manager in your company; 5) copies of your company, division and product logos, your press release format and the scanned in signature of your CEO on disk; 6) pre-written scripts answering key questions that you have generated through your crisis scenario analysis; and 7) contact information for each of your key media contacts both locally, nationally, and if appropriate, key financial press and analysts.
As I assume, Valley City's leaders probably had it all figured out - and dubbed the mayor to be the spokesperson. Overall, they seemed to handle this natural crisis pretty well. Handling things quickly, getting info out to the public as soon as new news arrives.