In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

The American Red Cross today unveiled new and updated technology  – an improved “Safe and Well” site and a real-time way to find shelter — to help families during a disaster.
According to the Red Cross news release:
Safe and Well is a secure and easy-to-use online tool that allows people inside a disaster-affected area to list [...]

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The Colorado Division of Emergency Management and READYColorado are among the most innovative and energetic state operations in the nation when it comes to citizen preparedness.
So, it’s not surprising that the agencies are developing a special social media response team comprised of teenagers to assist the state’s efforts in dealing with disasters. Tentatively called the [...]

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Mark Twain would probably be happy to know that finally citizens aren’t going to be limited to talking about the weather, but now they can do something about it –or at least something about the National Weather Service (NWS).
That’s because the Service is now soliciting public input on its draft Strategic Plan using an online [...]

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On Friday evening at 8:19 PM, I received the following notification (via both text and e-mail) from New York City’s NotifyNYC alert system:
“Alert issued 7/23/10 at 8:20 PM. The National Weather Service has issued a Tornado Warning until 9:00 PM for Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx. Immediately go indoors and/or to the lowest floor [...]

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I wanted to post an article from Mashable about CrisisCommons and its first CrisisCongress which took place last week. I was lucky to participate in the inaugural Crisis Camp last year and have been incredibly impressed by its meteoric development and impact here in the U.S. and in locations around the world as it looks [...]

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As social media becomes an increasingly important way for emergency managers to distribute disaster preparedness information to the public, officials are facing communications issues they have not dealt with before. One such issue — should FEMA be sending information in Spanish as well as English to the feed it sends its ‘fans’ on Facebook? – has [...]

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BBC News has an interesting article “Making Sense Of The Web During A Crisis,” about SwiftRiver, an open source software platform that uses algorithms and crowdsourcing to validate and filter news. It is being developed by a partnership including Ushahidi and will be released in beta version later this summer.
According to the SwiftRiver website:
User-generated content is [...]

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FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate released a short video today promoting — and demonstrating – how disaster survivors for the first time can apply for government assistance with their smart phones through the agency’s mobile site, m.FEMA.gov.
Throughout his tenure, Fugate has been a major advocate of personal technology (particularly smart phones) as a disaster preparedness and response tool [...]

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In MIT Tech Review, Christopher Mims writes about a study by Vasileios Lampos, Tijl De Bie and Nello Cristianini of the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the University of Bristol (UK) about the utility of Twitter for tracking flu outbreaks.
The work builds on research pioneered in 2008 by scientists at Google that resulted in Google.org’s Flu Trends. [...]

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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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