In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

“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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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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Earlier this month, I wrote about a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) group from New York City that went to Haiti to train earthquake survivors in emergency preparedness and response.

CERT team members along with their Haitian students
Herman Schaffer, the NYC team leader, kept an interesting journal of the experience and posted it on the City’s Office [...]

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Four hundred Haitian earthquake survivors are graduating today from a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) training in disaster preparedness and response. They have been trained by a delegation of New York City  CERT instructors at a ‘displaced persons’ camp.
The team has been teaching the CERT program to classes of 40 to 50 people over a 10-day [...]

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New York City’s Office of Emergency Management (NYC OEM) will be sending NYC OEM Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) Program Staff, CERT Instructors from the Fire Department, and Department of Health and Mental Hygiene staff to train up to 400 Haitian residents in CERT. The team will leave for Haiti on June 7th. According to the [...]

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Thanks to the Recovery Diva, Claire Rubin, for sending me an article from the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, “Public Indifference To Civil Defense Drills Highlights Israeli Apathy” about the Mideast nation’s Turning Point 4 exercise this week.
Israel is often cited as a model of civil defense and the nationwide Turning Point drill includes significant civilian involvement. [...]

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Israel yesterday began its 4th annual Turning Point national civil defense drill Sunday. The five-day exercise, developed in response to a concern about the nation’s preparedness, involves the Israeli public of all ages. Though the U.S. does not face the daily threats of Israel, the Turning Point exercise offers useful guidance for this country’s public [...]

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On Wednesday, China held its second National Day of Disaster Prevention and Reduction. May 12th is the anniversary of the 8.0-magnitude 2008 earthquake that hit the nation’s Sichuan Province. China joins Japan which has its Disaster Prevention Day on the anniversary of the catastrophic 1923 Tokyo earthquake.

Students drilling in Donghu Primary School, Nanchang City, Jiangxi [...]

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Nathan Hodge of Wired.com’s Danger Room blog has a good post, Preparing For The Next Haiti, With Maps, Texts, And Tweets, which discusses the impressive high-tech volunteer response to the earthquake. Hodge attended the Haiti Tech Meetup yesterday at the U.S. State Department yesterday and spoke to a number of those involved in the recovery [...]

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As the concept of ‘resilience’ in homeland security gains prominence here in the U.S., the Homeland Security Policy Institute (HSPI) at George Washington University hosted a timely speech by Brigadier-General (ret.) Meir Elran, of The Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, “The Israeli Experience: From Civil Defense To Resilience.” According to the HSPI summary [...]

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