In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

Phil Palin from the blog HLS Watch has an interesting, somewhat provocative post this morning. In “Accident or Intention: Responding With Outrage or Deliberation,” Palin asks if the reaction would be different had yesterday’s Metro crash in Washington, D.C. been a terrorist bombing. He suggests that the deliberative, balanced and constructive approach (as opposed to [...]

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Thanks to CaliforniaVolunteers, I have 10 disaster kits to give away. I originally posted this contest last month, but I am going to extend it. To win a kit, send me one of the following: an emergency preparedness tip, something you have done to prepare for a disaster, or a suggestion to improve preparedness in your community to the Comment [...]

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As part of the Obama Administration’s voluntarism initiative, the United We Serve summer service program launches today. It will conclude with the National Day of Service and Remembrance on September 11.
You can participate in United We Serve events across the nation this summer by visiting the new White House website, Serve.gov (http://www.serve.gov/).  To encourage participation in [...]

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With all the attention being given to Twitter’s important role for citizens in crises (such as currently in Iran), Pete Cashmore from Mashable tweeted this humorous reminder now going around the Twittersphere that it should not be used in every emergency:

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

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A new study released by the group Save The Children contends that only seven states are meeting crucial minimum standards to ensure that schools and child-care facilities are prepared to respond to the needs of children during a disaster.
The report, “The Disaster Decade: Lessons Unlearned for the United States.” reviewed four standards in all 50 states and [...]

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Periodically, I’ll collect and post articles I’ve read over the past several weeks on the topic of emergency preparedness and response that I thought were interesting in case you hadn’t seen them:
“Walking The Emergency Preparedness Talk”/Emergency Management Magazine — How and why to prepare (as well as the role of passion and personal anecdotes) from [...]

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As I mentioned previously, I completed a “Ready NY Presenter Training” last month for CERT members interested in doing public preparedness presentations in the community. At the end of the training, each of us had to narrate five of the Ready NY presentation slides and were evaluated by New York City Office of Emergency Management [...]

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From the same folks who brought you the Cross Blog comes “Ready Radio”, an internet-based biweekly show dedicated to emergency preparedness and related subjects. I just listened to the first episode, and I can tell you that hosts Lise Harwin and Robin Parker of the Red Cross/Oregon Trail Chapter bring the same creativity, enthusiasm and [...]

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The paperback edition of Amanda Ripley’s wonderful book, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes And Why, goes on sale today. It includes a new section called, “How to Boost Your Survival Odds” which she added “because so many people asked for action items to apply the book’s conclusions.” To celebrate the paperback release, I [...]

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The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has just started a new blog called The Blog @ Homeland Security”, an addition to the Department’s web presence “designed to increase transparency and facilitate the dialogue between DHS and the American public.”  It will augment the existing Leadership Journal blog, which, according to DHS New Media Specialist Graves [...]

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