In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

On Friday evening at 8:19 PM, I received the following notification (via both text and e-mail) from New York City’s NotifyNYC alert system:
“Alert issued 7/23/10 at 8:20 PM. The National Weather Service has issued a Tornado Warning until 9:00 PM for Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx. Immediately go indoors and/or to the lowest floor [...]

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I wanted to post an article from Mashable about CrisisCommons and its first CrisisCongress which took place last week. I was lucky to participate in the inaugural Crisis Camp last year and have been incredibly impressed by its meteoric development and impact here in the U.S. and in locations around the world as it looks [...]

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As social media becomes an increasingly important way for emergency managers to distribute disaster preparedness information to the public, officials are facing communications issues they have not dealt with before. One such issue — should FEMA be sending information in Spanish as well as English to the feed it sends its ‘fans’ on Facebook? – has [...]

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With Tropical Storm Bonnie heading towards the U.S., I thought I would post some financial preparedness tips for the public just offered by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Consumer Reports.
On the IRS website, the agency posted “Four Tips on Preparing for a Disaster”:
Recordkeeping — Take advantage of paperless recordkeeping for financial and tax records. [...]

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I wanted to briefly highlight an interesting disaster-related cause marketing campaign you may have seen, Tide’s “Loads of Hope”. The initiative brings mobile laundromat facilities to areas struck by a natural disaster to provide free cleaning services to survivors.
“Loads of Help” was created in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and since then has cleaned more [...]

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When it comes to the subject of what citizens should be doing to improve their disaster preparedness too often the focus is solely on emergency supplies or plans. Less attention is paid to what each of us can do as citizens to improve our community’s and nation’s preparedness by participating in the political process as [...]

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In the recent issue of Emergency Management magazine, Elaine Pittman has an interesting article, “Emergency Managers Warm To The Idea Of Climate Change”. It focuses on how state and local government officials are increasingly taking climate change and its impact on potential disasters into account in their disaster planning.
I wanted to post the article, because it [...]

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BBC News has an interesting article “Making Sense Of The Web During A Crisis,” about SwiftRiver, an open source software platform that uses algorithms and crowdsourcing to validate and filter news. It is being developed by a partnership including Ushahidi and will be released in beta version later this summer.
According to the SwiftRiver website:
User-generated content is [...]

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“On January 12, 2010, Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, was struck by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake that caused widespread destruction and killed approximately 222,000 people. The next month, Chile was hit by an 8.8-magnitude earthquake — approximately 500 times stronger than that in Haiti — but only 500 people died. Why the disparity?”
That’s the question addressed in an interesting [...]

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Last week, I wrote about a new partnership between the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the International Association of Chiefs of Police to research how to improve the public’s response to suspicious activity. The findings will help the government as it expands the “See Something, Say Something” campaign nationally which was announced earlier this month [...]

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