In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

Jeannette Sutton has a terrific post on her Disaster Sociologist blog, “The Cavalry is Assembling: Two Social Media Responses to Hurricane Ida.” She describes how two different online initiatives — the Hurricane Information Center and Emicus.com — began mobilizing to respond to what was initially predicted to be a major storm.
In the end, Ida ended [...]

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Andy Carvin, who spearheaded creation of the innovative Hurricane Information Center during Gustav and Ike last summer, has announced on his Twitter feed that the site is looking for online volunteers to help with preparations for what is now Tropical Storm Ida. The Center serves as a comprehensive clearinghouse and aggregator of information/content in addition [...]

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Mike Tolson from the Houston Chronicle offers an interesting list of “5 lessons we could learn from Hurricane Ike” on the storm’s first anniversary. As I think that Tolson’s lessons are useful for all communities, I’ve reprinted it below in its entirety:
Our success weathering the storm depended on how prepared we were and how much [...]

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An editorial in Friday’s USA Today summarizes some of the lessons learned and not learned from Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath. Among the positives, according to “Four years after Katrina, a mix of progress and inertia,” are the rebuilding of FEMA as well as that:
–The New Orleans levees so easily breached in 2005 are in better shape. [...]

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Four years after Hurricane Katrina, the United States is “dangerously unprepared” for another major disaster with many key functions of disaster preparedness, response, relief, and recovery continuing to lack capacity to deliver core services and programs before and after a major disaster, due to the ineffectiveness of FEMA to sufficiently coordinate over 20 agencies and [...]

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As Tropical Storm Danny moves up the East Coast and the nation marks the 4th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it is a good time to mention a robust volunteer program called SkyWarn. I have wanted to highlight this citizen preparedness opportunity since being reminded of the program by the new (and helpful) Citizen Corps Twitter feed [...]

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Ron Callari of The Inventor Spot blog has put together a thoughtful and useful list: “10 Social Media Methods To Fight Hurricane Season”.
Many of the methods will be familiar to readers who follow social media and disasters, but Callari offers some new ideas and resources for preparing and responding to hurricanes and other emergencies. His list [...]

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With Hurricane Bill gathering steam in the Atlantic, I wanted to highlight a new book, At War With The Weather: Managing Large-Scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophies (MIT Press) by Howard C. Kanreuther and Erwann O. Michel-Kerjan. The authors, professors at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, look at how the [...]

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This past weekend, my family and I had a great opportunity to explore New York Harbor on the retired fireboat, the “John J. Harvey”. The trip was part of City of Water Day, an event sponsored by the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance (MWA), a non-profit organization I am involved with. More than 10,000 people participated in the [...]

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In last week’s “Homeland Security Inside & Out” radio show, Amanda Ripley, author of The Unthinkable, had some interesting criticisms of how authorities currently warn people on impending hurricanes:
*In response to questions from interviewer Dave McIntyre, Ripley said a fundamental problem is that the way we inform citizens of hurricane threats is “flawed. It’s not [...]

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