After meeting the basic concerns of employee safety, stopping the cause of the damage, and protecting against further damage, management must address the issues related to operations, customers, and the marketplace. A major manufacturer of school buses had to cease plant operations for a full month and deal with a severely affected plant for one year after an arsonist's fire destroyed the parts warehouse, a portion of the manufacturing line, and numerous subassembly stations.
Some companies are very resourceful in difficult circumstances.
A little creativity goes a long way in post-disaster recovery, as demonstrated in the case of the school bus manufacturer. The part of the plant where the bus windows were made would not be ready for operation until several months after all the other production lines were operational. Rather than hold up the entire assembly process, the company's management identified a supplier that could make the windows and ship them to the plant for installation. Management paid considerably more for the purchased windows, but got the production line rolling and the buses manufactured. Copyrights and legal disclaimers.