In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

Mike Coston, a friend of this blog, who writes the really terrific Avian Flu Diary suggests that every American have a “disaster buddy” as part of their preparedness planning.
In a post today, “In An Emergency, Who Has Your Back?”, Coston explains that such a buddy would be “someone who prearranges to help a friend, relative, [...]

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FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate released a short video today promoting — and demonstrating – how disaster survivors for the first time can apply for government assistance with their smart phones through the agency’s mobile site, m.FEMA.gov.
Throughout his tenure, Fugate has been a major advocate of personal technology (particularly smart phones) as a disaster preparedness and response tool [...]

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Dr. Rick Knabb, a hurricane expert with the Weather Channel, has just published a list of “Top 5 Hurricane Vulnerable Cities” which “have been selected based on a combination of the amount of people and property at high risk, and how long it has been since the area has been directly affected by a very [...]

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NPR.org has a story today pointing out that “more American colleges are offering classes that teach students to deal with a shrinking and increasingly dangerous world.” I’m posting the article because a) it’s an interesting phenomenon and b) to me, it just underscores the fact that government officials should not be afraid to raise “scary” [...]

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John Pistole, the new head of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) used his inaugural post on the TSA’s blog to ask the flying public for feedback. In the post, “Talk To TSA: I Want To Hear From You,” Pistole writes:
What better way to start my first blog post than to let you know I am [...]

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“Friday Night Lights” is one of my favorite tv programs, and the Red Cross is one of my favorite organizations. The show is filming at the Cotton Bowl stadium Friday and Saturday night and are looking for extras; the production is offering to donate $20 to the Red Cross Dallas chapter for each person who [...]

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency is soliciting nominations from citizens for “Individual Achievement Awards” honoring Americans “who have made a difference in making their community safer and better prepared.” According to the Citizen Corps webpage:
“These are people who have given their time and energy, offered skills and capabilities, been leaders in providing education and training, responded [...]

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In MIT Tech Review, Christopher Mims writes about a study by Vasileios Lampos, Tijl De Bie and Nello Cristianini of the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the University of Bristol (UK) about the utility of Twitter for tracking flu outbreaks.
The work builds on research pioneered in 2008 by scientists at Google that resulted in Google.org’s Flu Trends. [...]

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There are a couple very exciting disaster preparedness and response events occurring in Washington, D.C. at the end of this week — the CrisisCommons Roundtable and the First International CrisisCommons. (I was hoping to attend but my medical treatment prevents me from traveling right now.) The good news that if you cannot make it to the [...]

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FEMA’s Ready Campaign has just announced that a National Preparedness Month widget is now available to provide more information about this September’s activities.

The site also has widgets for other FEMA readiness efforts, including hurricane preparedness.

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

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