In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

At a White House press briefing yesterday, FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate reported that many Tennessee flood survivors who had been displaced from their homes were accessing the agency’s new mobile version of its website, M.FEMA.gov, with their mobile phones and PDA’s to get information and register for recovery relief.
It underscores the fact that the mobile device may [...]

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Nathan Hodge of Wired.com’s Danger Room blog has a good post, Preparing For The Next Haiti, With Maps, Texts, And Tweets, which discusses the impressive high-tech volunteer response to the earthquake. Hodge attended the Haiti Tech Meetup yesterday at the U.S. State Department yesterday and spoke to a number of those involved in the recovery [...]

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I just wanted to mention something quickly, which I thought was a nice – albeit small – touch. The Louisiana Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness has a Twitter feed @GOHSEP which has been very active during the oil spill response. It has been distributing a lot of spill-related information for the public, [...]

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All three cable news channels offered blanket coverage Friday afternoon of the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) investigation of a “suspicious” package in Times Square. It was only one of several phone tips that the NYPD’s Bomb Squad had checked out that day. Each turned out to be a false alarm but clearly more people [...]

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Whether the U.S. was lucky or good (or little of both) that the attempted terror incidents in Times Square last week and on the airliner near Detroit on Christmas Eve failed, the fact is that terrorists are going to pull off a successful attempt at some point, maybe soon. So, it is important that the Administration [...]

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From the HerNashville.com website is an article, “Geeking out for a cause: Nashville flood response takes to the web,” which nicely describes how local residents have helped galvanize the city’s relief efforts using technology:
I’m just in awe of the way Nashville is responding in the face of this surreal, overwhelming crisis. And the way Nashville’s [...]

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In today’s Washington Post Outlook section, former presidential terrorism adviser Richard Clarke has an op-ed piece, “The Times Square Bomb Failed. What Will We Do When The Next Bomb Works.” Clarke’s overall theme is that another terror attack is inevitable, and “right now, after a near-miss, there is a better opportunity to adjust than in [...]

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William R. “Bill” Cumming has joined the blogosphere with the launch of the Vacation Lane Blog. Bill is a former FEMA official who now runs the Vacation Lane Group. He is a frequent commenter on homeland security blogs, and I am sure I wasn’t the only person who suggested he should definitely start one of his [...]

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To mark National Animal Preparedness Day, I am reposting a video I shot of Allison Cardona, the Director of Disaster Services for the American Society for the Protection of Animals (ASPCA). It was done at a pets’ emergency preparedness event held last year by the ASPCA and New York’s Office of Emergency Management.
In the short video, Allison [...]

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This blog has long been an advocate of better integrating the public and its perspective into major governmental emergency drills. So, it was good to hear about some citizen-focused initiatives employed during Liberty RadEx, the National Tier 2 full scale exercise sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It was held in Philadelphia late last month [...]

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