It's said that about 4 in 10 small businesses don’t survive a major disaster. That’s often because of all the logistics afterward -- things like cleanup, insurance, labor and shifts in the customer base.
The Houston area's small businesses are a leading concern of consultant Russel Honore, the retired lieutenant general who was the Joint Task Force commander during the Hurricane Katrina response.
Honore says newer, better protocols for business disaster recovery are needed .. and are overdue.
Experts say the challenge is just beginning for small businesses in the wake of harvey ... and the longer the recovery takes, the less likely small businesses will survive the economic damage.
Houston’s current situation has recovery issues that resonate with what Honore saw firsthand in Louisiana 12 years ago – so he looks the Bayou City’s businesses and understands.
He says that small businesses, and everyone else, need to “scale up,” as he put it ... and that local governments should do the same to help them.
Honore also tells Fox News that the country needs newer, better models for disaster recovery, but says those conversations are always put off until after the next disaster.
He says it’s important to get the infrastructure supporting the city’s energy sector up and running.
“You know the old numbers – 40 percent of small businesses don’t survive these events because the grid doesn’t come up, they don’t have the workers and the people that they used to work for are not open,” he told Fox News. “So the quicker they can find a model to get businesses up, the quicker people can get back and get the schools up. But we’ve got to find a different way of doing it.”