In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

In a speech concluding National Preparedness Month, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano urged Americans — when they are in their workplaces and social organizations — to ask a simple question:

“…we’re asking you to raise your hand and ask whenever you are in one of those groups, ‘What’s our plan? You know, the next time your group meets or your staff gathers for lunch, I want you to raise your hand and ask, “What’s our plan?” Any time that you’re with your family and you have a moment, take a moment, say, “What’s our plan?”, and take time to discuss what will happen if disaster strikes—if there’s an emergency of any type, so that we respond with resilience and preparedness, not with fear.”

It is a simple request but one that can have a lot of impact, particularly as a catalyst for action. I say that from experience. As some of you may know, it was a similar simple question from my wife that led me to my current involvement in citizen preparedness. I wrote about it in an article for the Washington Post:

In the weeks after 9/11, my worried wife asked me, “What should we be doing?” We lived directly across the street from the Manhattan hospital where a woman had just died from anthrax exposure; I worked only a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center. Initially, I thought that the answer to her question would be pretty straightforward. But 6 1/2 years later, I’m still trying to pin it down.

I have found that there can be a lot of value in asking the basic — some might say the ‘dumb’ — question when it comes to public preparedness, in part because the often it has not been fully answered (or in some cases not even asked). I hope that DHS follows up on the Secretary’s call to Americans and highlights how workplaces and social organizations respond.

By the way, Napolitano will be answering a lot of questions — some basic and ‘dumb’ but also probably illuminating — later today when she appears here in New York City as a guest on both the “The View” and “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”.