At 1am last Sunday morning, Bill Pilbeam was called into work at Abingdon Tesco Extra near Oxford. The store manager arrived to see waves of water entering the car park and it was only thanks to his deputy's ingenious use of four pallets of children's play sand, which were swiftly deployed as sandbags, that the floodwater was prevented from entering the store. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to stop Abingdon shutting up shop for three and a half days. But in some ways, it was one of the lucky ones. Tesco's sophisticated business continuity plan meant fresh food stocks were rapidly diverted to nearby unaffected stores and the store was fully restocked when it opened again on Wednesday afternoon. In short, it could have been worse. The stark reality is many retailers and manufacturers do not have business continuity plans. And 80% of them will not recover from a major incident like a flood, even if they've got insurance cover, according to the Association of British Insurers. Plenty are not even insured, certainly not against business disruption, or are only partly insured - historically, many farmers have been sanguine about flood risk and are not covered for crop damage, for instance. After two devastating floods in as many months, and with insurance claims set to top £2bn from the second wave alone, it is surely time for businesses to dig out those insurance documents to check whether they've got adequate cover, and put much more rigorous business continuity plans in place. This won't be the last of the bad weather. With 10% of the UK and up to 185,000 businesses in danger of flooding, next time it could be yours. Forget Stuart Rose's recent pronouncement. It's ignoring the weather that's for wimps.

Topics