Small and medium-sized businesses are being urged to develop disaster and emergency plans in the wake of last week?s Island-wide power outages.

Police spokesman Dwayne Caines said the emergency broadcast system and other emergency services were deluged with calls from business owners trying to use the system to notify staff and clients that they would be closed.

Among the worst offenders, he said, were nursery school owners who did not have lists of parents and could not contact them to tell them not to send their children to school.

?Many places had contact lists of employees but the lists were at the places of employment,? he said.

He said the Police are advising company managers to have contact lists for their employees at their residences because it is no good in having it at an office during a time of crisis.

?Individuals should also be responsible to have traditional phone that plug into the wall because phones that require a lot of electricity don?t work in crisis,? he said.

?Nursery schools had no way of contacting parents and parents were calling all around to see if schools were open,? he added. He said that if the administrators of the nursery schools had parental contact information at home the situation would have been dealt with more easily.