In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

The National Weather Service has just launched an experimental program that will be using Twitter ‘tweets’ to help monitor “significant weather information.” The Weather Service website explains:
Why Twitter?
An advantage of searching Twitter for weather reports is the capability to utilize recently added “geotagging” — geographical information that is associated with something, in this case individual [...]

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The current issue of the always useful Disaster Research e-newsletter of the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center has an article, “National Flood Insurance Program: Back, Not Necessarily on Track,” with an update on the effort to finance and possibly overhaul the program:
Congress reinstated the National Flood Insurance Program Monday. But the beleaguered plan is [...]

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The Federal Alliance for Safe Homes is launching the Great Hurricane Blowout, an outreach campaign created to encourage and inspire residents in hurricane-prone states to be proactive about their personal hurricane preparedness during storm season. According to the website:
Join the Blowout now and stay with us throughout April and May as surprise celebrities and experts will guide [...]

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A day after Colorado State University released their forecast that the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season will be “above average”, FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate has recorded a video urging the public to begin preparations.
The preliminary report, according to CNN.com, predicts 15 named storms and eight of those becoming hurricanes:
Forecasters William Gray and Phil Klotzbach said that [...]

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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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