In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

I recently watched a DVD of “Katrina’s Children”, an engrossing new feature-length documentary about 19 youths from different New Orleans neighborhoods. The film explores the impact of Hurricane Katrina using both their words and their art. It is both heartbreaking and inspiring – a celebration of the children’s extraordinary resilience and a tribute to New Orleans’ [...]

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When I was visiting Mary and Frank Fetchet at the Voices of September 11th offices in New Canaan, Connecticut last month, I met Linda Ellman, the director/producer of the documentary “On Native Soil” which chronicles the effort to effort to create the “9/11 Commission” and follows its proceedings. I had not seen the movie when it first [...]

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Videos posted by citizens on YouTube during and after disasters are increasingly part of the new media landscape (whether it be Hurricane Ike, Hurricane Gustav, the Midwest floods, or the major earthquake in China earlier this year). However, there is not nearly as much video content on the topic of preparing for disasters in advance. Maybe that will change [...]

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I wanted to bring your attention to a very helpful and timely online resource produced by the prestigious Natural Hazards Center of the University of Colorado. Disaster Research is a “moderated e-mail newsletter for creators and users of information regarding hazards and disasters”. 
Disaster Research comes out biweekly and offers articles about new developments, policies, conference announcements, job vacancies, resources, [...]

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When Jennings Carney is not writing and editing the very helpful “Ready Communities Partnership Update” of the National Congress for Secure Communities, he is on the keyboardist of the band Pontiak.
In June, Jennings and the band were touring the Midwest in support of their new album Kale. They found themselves in the midst of the terrible weather and [...]

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I wanted to bring your attention to About.com’s Terrorism Issues site written by Amy Zalman. It’s a helpful resource I’ve been using for the last couple years. I subscribe to her free weekly newsletter, and she also has a blog. The main site is a very good resource with articles, fact sheets and other features on terrorism.
This week, [...]

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One of the simplest but most ingenious uses of the internet for disaster preparedness is the New Orleans Times Picayune’s list of reader hurricane preparedness lessons learned mostly as a result of Hurricane Katrina.
The Times-Picayune, which did such heroic coverage during and after Katrina, solicited these ideas from readers in 2006 and printed them weekly [...]

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Welcome to listeners of the public radio show “Homeland Security Inside & Out” who are arriving here at this blog for the first time. I hope you’ll stick around.
I did an interview for the show about the blog that appears on this week’s show. 
As I have written before, I am a big fan of “Homeland [...]

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I recently had the opportunity to meet Claire B. Rubin for the first time in Washington. Claire is a long-time emergency management consultant and scholar whose work I have followed in several types of media for awhile, and I wanted to bring them to your attention. She is a co-editor (with John Harrald) of the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency [...]

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I recently had the opportunity to participate in a “Blogger Roundtable” on emergency preparedness with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Michael Chertoff and Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) chief R. David Paulison held at DHS Headquarters in Washington, D.C. I joined Jonah Czerwinski of the Homeland Security Watch and Rich Cooper of Security Debrief as one of three questioners. The full transcript can be found here. 
It was a wide-ranging, [...]

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