In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

Starting today, NotifyNYC, New York City’s emergency alert system, will cover the entire Big Apple. Notify NYC was first launched on a limited basis in December 2007, offering participants in four pilot areas of the City the ability to register for alerts and notifications about significant events in their communities. Notify NYC services are available by email, text [...]

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I have written before about the importance of offering the public some kind of incentive when it comes to trying to spur preparedness. One example is that New York City Fire Department regularly gives away batteries at public events to encourage New Yorkers to keep their smoke alarms working. Recently, I took this photo of [...]

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Fifteen minutes ago (at 9:58am), I received an E-mail and text alert from New York City’s Notify NYC alert system saying:
This is a message from Notify NYC. Notification 1 issued 05/11/09 at 10:00am. As per the FAA, a military plane will fly down and back up the Hudson River between the hours of 10:30 to [...]

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New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced a new initiative, NYC Service, to increase volunteering in the Big Apple. Emergency preparedness is one of the program’s six priority areas. ”The NYC Service program has three main goals,” according to the City’s press release, “channel the power of volunteers to address the impacts of the current [...]

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The Aspen Institute has released a very interesting new study “New York City’s Preparedness For Terrorism (And Catastrophic Natural Disasters)”. The report offers a unique view of the preparedness efforts of major institutions in the New York City-area. It is the result of a three-day workshop which featured presentations from leaders in the governmental, business, non-profit and [...]

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New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly recently announced that he wants to create a special high security zone in midtown Manhattan with surveillance cameras, license plate readers and highly equipped personnel at a cost of $58 million. The initiative, however, has yet to be fully funded, according to an article in the New York Times:
The [...]

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For the blog’s next Book Contest, we are giving away Christopher Dickey’s terrific new Securing The City: Inside America’s Best Counterterror Force — The NYPD. Thanks to Dickey and his publisher, Simon & Schuster. 
Contest Rules: “Securing The City” provides a great behind-the-scenes look at the anti-terrorism efforts of the New York Police Department which is considered [...]

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A new study from Columbia University’s National Center For Disaster Preparedness says that organizational factors delayed evacuation from the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 and offers recommendations to improve evacuations in the future. The team, headed by Robyn R. Gershon, Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, found that the Trade Center evacuation:  
“…was delayed [...]

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Over this Valentine’s Day weekend, the City of New York gave away hundreds of thousands of condoms as part of its NYC Condom ’safe sex’ social marketing campaign. Since it launched the program on Valentine’s Day in 2007, the City’s Department of Health has distributed a total of 70 million free samples. 
Now, obviously there are [...]

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Though today’s 5.4 earthquake in Los Angeles was fortunately not too serious, some experts are already saying it was a “warning” of a major one to come.
But the question is whether this warning will actually spur civilian preparedness. That’s why I was happy to see the Los Angeles Fire Department quickly take advantage of the small [...]

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