Severe weather

Is your organization ready for the rainy season? A pre-season continuity checklist

· 8 min read · PlanProof

Short answer

Ready means five things are settled before the first orange alert: who decides to send people home and by when; what you will do when water reaches the basement, where many buildings keep their power, lifts and pumps; how you reach staff who cannot reach you; what your insurance actually covers and who photographs what; and one rehearsal of the whole thing with the people who would really decide. The forecasters say this winter could be wetter than usual. Nobody is promising a storm, but the checklist costs an afternoon and the alternative costs a week.

Most organizations in the UAE have an April 2024 story. It might be the office that stayed dry while the car park filled, the night shift that could not get home to Sharjah, or the finance team that found out afterwards which of the company vans were insured for third-party damage only. The stories differ; the lesson underneath them is the same. Rain in this country is not really a weather problem. It is a decisions problem, a basement problem, a people problem and a paperwork problem, and all four can be sorted out in the dry months.

This checklist is for the person who has been asked “are we ready for the rains?” and wants to answer with something better than “we have a plan”. It assumes a UAE calendar: the season runs roughly November to April, and the forecasters’ outlook this year deserves a sentence of its own before we start.

About this winter

The National Center of Meteorology’s seasonal outlook, reported in October 2026, gives a high probability of El Niño conditions from November to March and expects above-average rainfall and temperatures over that period, if the regional conditions line up. NCM itself added that this does not make heavy rain or flooding certain. Separately, the World Meteorological Organization has described the El Niño event in the Pacific as potentially one of the strongest since at least 1950, which is a statement about the ocean, not a forecast for Abu Dhabi.

So the honest version is: this winter could be wetter than usual, and nobody can tell you when or how much. That is exactly the kind of forecast a continuity plan is for. You prepare for the possibility, and you do not wait for the certainty, because the certainty arrives the evening before the water does.

1. The decisions, written down before anyone needs them

In April 2024 the public sector decided the evening before: remote work for government staff, distance learning for schools. The directives did not cover private employers. When the next orange alert came, on 2 May, the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation advised flexible or remote work; it did not order it. An employer waiting for an instruction was waiting for something that was not coming.

  • Name the person who can send people home, and the deputy, and write down what triggers it. An NCM orange alert for your area is a sensible trigger; so is a police alert to every phone in the area, which before the 2 May 2024 storm arrived the evening before.
  • Decide what “closed” means for you. Remote for office staff; a delayed start for a plant; a skeleton crew for a hotel or hospital that cannot close at all. Say it in one page, not in a policy.
  • Decide who reopens, and on what evidence. Reopening is harder than closing. Access roads, the car park, the lifts, the sewage, the cooling plant: each needs a yes before people come back.
  • Decide the stand-down. For the orange alert on 2 May 2024, schools went remote, beaches and parks shut and intercity buses stopped; the airport was back to normal by evening. Your plan needs a proportionate ladder and a way to stand down without losing face or a day’s production.

2. The basement, which is where the building keeps everything that matters

Walk down to the lowest floor with the facilities manager and look. In many mid-rise buildings the transformer room, the low-voltage switchroom, the lift pits and the water pumps sit at the lowest level, and the generator, if there is one, is often next to them. In April 2024 flooded basements and wet transformers left Dubai blocks without power or water for almost a week. Without power the internet went too, one mother carried her toddler down six floors, and one building’s management put residents in hotels until the electricity came back.

  • Know where the water comes in — the ramp, the lift shafts, the ground-floor plant room — and what sits lowest.
  • If the generator is in the same basement as the switchroom, you do not have a generator plan. You have two things that fail together. Decide now whether you can hire one, where it would stand, and who authorises the spend.
  • Barriers buy days, not weeks. In Sharjah in March 2026, one shop’s foam and sandbags kept the street out for three days of standing water before it began to seep in; another shop, which had taken precautions after a near-Dh1 million loss in 2024, still had water at knee height. Stock barriers, train two people to place them, and still plan for the water getting in.
  • Do not assume the municipality will pump you out. In March 2026 Sharjah cleared main roads and vital areas first, and a private basement comes after those. Assume your own tanker contractor may be committed to the municipal effort too.
  • Photograph everything before it floods: the plant room, the stock, the vehicles in the car park. You will want the “before” when the adjuster asks for it.

3. The people, who are the first thing you lose

The first failure in a flood is access, not the building. Staff cannot reach the site, deliveries stop, and the building may be perfectly dry. The organization that knew where its people lived had a very different week from the one that did not.

  • Know, by department, who lives in Sharjah, Ajman and the Northern Emirates, and who commutes through the airport-side tunnels or the Al Nahda crossings. Five days after 16 April 2024, Dubai’s last listed road tunnels were only just reopening, and parts of Sharjah stood in water that had mixed with sewage.
  • Have a way to reach everyone that does not depend on the office: a staff group, a text list, a number people can call. Test it before the first alert.
  • Tell drivers what to do, in writing, before the season. Do not drive into water. Do not drive through a flooded underpass. Do not restart a vehicle that has been in water. Photograph where the vehicle was parked. Each of those protects the person first and the insurance claim second (see the companion article on flood insurance claims).
  • Plan for a shift that cannot go home. Food, somewhere to rest, phone charging, and the authority to pay for a hotel without a committee.

4. The paperwork, which arrives weeks later and divides people into insured, under-insured and declined

After April 2024 the central bank said within six days that comprehensive motor and property policies respond to storm damage, and told people to take disputes to its new ombudsman. It also became clear, over the following months, what that did and did not mean in practice: third-party cover never paid for the policyholder’s own vehicle; claims were declined where cars had been driven into flooded roads; shop owners asked about cover for their stock and few bought it; and the cost came round a second time at renewal.

  • Read your own policies before the season, or ask your broker to. Which vehicles are comprehensive and which are third-party only. Whether flood is covered or sits in a natural-perils add-on. Whether stock, fixtures and equipment are declared on the property policy. Whether business interruption needs physical damage to your own premises to trigger, which it usually does.
  • If you are a tenant in a tower, know three documents: your lease, the building’s insurance, and whether the owners’ association has a reserve fund. Who pays for a flooded basement depends on all three at once.
  • Keep the policies, and the photographs, somewhere that does not flood. It sounds obvious until the filing cabinet is in the ground-floor plant room.

5. The rehearsal, which is the only item that tells you whether the other four are real

A checklist on paper is a hope. An exercise is evidence. Before the season, put the people who would really decide in a room for ninety minutes with a rain scenario that follows the real shape: an alert the day before, a decision on remote work that evening, water on the basement ramp the next morning, a shift stuck in Sharjah, a tunnel closed for five days, and then the letter from the insurer. Watch who decides what, how long it takes, and what the plan did not cover.

Both continuity standards used in the UAE expect plans to be exercised. ISO 22301 (clause 8.5) asks for an exercise programme that validates the plans; NCEMA 7000:2021 (clause 8.6) asks for exercises with defined objectives and a report of the results, and says they must not disrupt normal operations, which is one more reason to run one before the season rather than discover the gaps in the middle of it. Neither standard names a hazard or a season. That is your call, and this season the call is not difficult.

If the exercise finds that nobody knows who can send staff home, that the generator shares the basement with the switchroom, that the driver instruction was never written, or that half the fleet is third-party only, you have found it in a dry room with coffee. That is what the exercise is for.

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