Critical Natural Disaster Jobs

CNBC comes out with some great stuff from time to time, and a recent article focused on the most important natural disaster jobs is no exception.  Although not directly related to utility outage restoration, I think it’s both interesting and potentially helpful to have an understanding of the types of people you may run into during a widespread outage situation.

List of Top Natural Disaster Jobs

Here is a summary of my ranking of the top-5 natural disaster jobs – for complete details on all of them, you can check out the CNBC article here.

• Emergency responders – these are the folks that rank at the top of my list.  Whether we’re talking about search and rescue teams, firefighters, medical personnel, utility personnel, or anything in between, the performance of first responders is typically the key to minimizing the overall impact of a disaster.
• Disaster relief workers – this typically takes the form of an army of mostly volunteers who want nothing more than to help others through tough times.
• Tree specialists – as you know all too well, trees cause a lot of damage, and are one of the primary causes of power outages.  Tree specialists come to the rescue to remove trees from wires, unblock roadways, and improve overall safety within their areas of operation.
• Hospitality workers – this one is not as intuitive as the top 3, but emergency situations often force people to alter their accommodations, and hospitality workers are key in this regard.
• Airline workers – similar to #4, when flights are cancelled, front line airline personnel must go into overdrive.

The other natural disaster jobs on the list are grocers, hardware store employees, self-storage unit employees, forensic weather experts, and auto mechanics.  Quite a list!