In many organizations, “emergency preparedness” still looks like a binder, a floor plan, and a drill last held 18 months ago. Facilities managers know better. Hurricanes, wildfires, cyber incidents, equipment failures, and utility outages aren’t abstract risks—they’re recurring operational events that determine whether a building protects people or becomes another headline about downtime and loss.
Across leading organizations, a shift is underway: moving from recovery to resilience. The question is no longer “How fast can we get back online?” but “How well can we continue operating, adapting, and protecting people when conditions are uncertain?” At the center of that shift is facilities management.
From Recovery to Resilience: A New Operating Standard
Traditional emergency planning assumes a simple sequence: event, failure, response, recovery. Facilities managers see a much messier reality—overlapping events, cascading failures, partial outages, and disruptions lasting days or weeks.
“Resilience means critical functions continue even in degraded mode. It also means decisions are based on reliable, instantly accessible information—not memory or scattered documents,” said Jonathan Fader, a consultant at Integrated Facilities Management. “Whether dealing with a hurricane, wildfire smoke, a cyberattack that shuts down building automation access, or an unexpected equipment failure, resilience is built long before the incident.”
Organizations that weather disruption best treat emergency readiness as part of daily operations. Facilities management is where that integration either succeeds or breaks down.
“For me, real resilience starts before anything goes wrong. You have to know your building inside and out—your shutoffs, your weak points, and your backup plans. When you’ve already walked the site, tested systems, and talked through what-ifs with your team, you’re not scrambling when something hits,” said Gebrin Alvarez, a building engineer at OliveMill Holdings. “Recovery is just fixing things after the fact. Resilience is being ready so the damage stays small.”
Barriers That Slow Response When Minutes Matter
Facilities managers seldom lose time because they lack technical skill. Time is lost because acting in real buildings is difficult. Common obstacles appear across nearly every portfolio include:
Inaccessible or unknown shutoff points. Critical isolation points for water, gas, power, and IT are often hidden above ceilings, behind locked rooms, or known only to long-tenured staff. If those people are off-site, response slows instantly.
Siloed and outdated emergency data. Evacuation routes, fire system layouts, valve maps, and risers may exist only in binders, PDFs, or local drives. During an incident, teams waste precious minutes digging through files instead of responding.
Knowledge trapped in memory. Facility teams accumulate real-world knowledge—where drawings are wrong, what fails first, how systems behave under strain. When a senior tech retires or is unavailable, that knowledge disappears exactly when it’s needed most.
Fragmented vendor and contractor coordination. Emergencies often involve fire/life safety teams, mechanical and electrical contractors, IT, security, and sometimes public agencies. Without a shared, current view of building systems, each group solves its own piece of the problem and downtime stretches.
These gaps rarely appear in formal plans—but they surface in the first critical 15 minutes of a real emergency.
Making Critical Information Instantly Accessible
Resilience is impossible if critical building information is scattered across binders, desktops, legacy systems, and individual memory. More organizations are replacing that model with instant, mobile, visual access to actionable data.
Mobile access lets technicians pull up valve locations, panel schedules, or isolation diagrams in the field. Navigation by facility, floor, room, and asset means they can find what they need in seconds. Role-based access lets trusted vendors and emergency responders see the same information, eliminating back-and-forth during a chaotic moment.
Instead of calling multiple people to locate a shutoff, a technician can navigate directly to it. Instead of relying on a paper life-safety plan, a fire response team can view exits and risers on a tablet. The result is not only faster response—it’s fewer errors under pressure.
Improving Coordination and Response Speed
Emergencies rarely involve a single team. Resilient facilities design coordination into their operations.
Shared situational awareness. Operations, IT, security, and leadership often need the same information. When they share a real-time, accurate view of facilities data, conversations shift from “What’s happening?” to “What’s our best next move?”
Realistic training. Tabletops and drills work best when they reflect current building conditions—not drawings that are several renovations behind.
Better vendor alignment. When vendors have structured access to updated drawings and system data before an event, troubleshooting and repairs accelerate significantly.
The payoff: minutes or hours saved, less secondary damage, and faster restoration of normal operations.
Maintenance With Emergency Planning
Maintenance and emergency preparedness often run separately, but resilient facilities connect them.
“A lot of emergencies start as small maintenance issues,” said Alvarez. “When maintenance and emergency planning are connected, you catch problems earlier. Plus, your equipment is actually ready when you need it—generators start, pumps run, sensors work. Good maintenance makes emergencies a lot less chaotic.”
Prioritizing critical assets. Not all systems matter equally during an emergency. Facility teams are reclassifying assets based on life safety, continuity impact, and recovery dependencies—and adjusting maintenance and redundancy plans accordingly.
Testing under realistic conditions. Generators, transfer switches, fire pumps, smoke control systems, and communication systems are increasingly tested in ways that simulate real-world conditions rather than just meeting compliance checklists.
Turning after-action reviews into improvements. Drills and events expose gaps—mislabeled valves, missing panel schedules, confusing instructions. When these become maintenance tasks linked to specific assets or documents, every incident strengthens future readiness.
Integrating workflows. When a critical system is offline, teams can see which emergency procedures are affected and adapt coverage. Maintenance becomes a resilience engine.
From Invisible Burden to Recognized Resilience
“Most of the work that keeps buildings safe happens quietly—when a facilities manager documents shutoff points, updates drawings after a renovation, briefs a vendor, or fixes a gap uncovered in a drill,” said Fader.
Operational resilience isn’t a project. It’s the long-term result of disciplined decisions made by facility teams. As climate events intensify, technology grows more complex, and infrastructure becomes more interdependent, facilities management is shifting from “keeping the lights on” to protecting people, assets, and continuity when uncertainty is the norm.
Buildings stay operational during disruptions because facilities managers prepare them to. That is the journey from risk to resilience.
Jack Rubinger is the marketing content writer for facility solutions provider ARC Facilities. He can be reached at jack.rubinger@arcfacilities.com.