In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

At one of the opening panels of the recent Citizen Corps’ National Conference On Community Preparedness, I heard a terrific presentation on San Francisco’s new preparedness initiative, “Prep SF Because It Rocks!”, given by Rob Dudgeon, the Deputy Director of  the City’s Department of Emergency Management (SFDEM), and Kristin Hogan from the consultancy CirclePoint who helped [...]

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He’s back! The much anticipated return of @Disastersrus (a.k.a. Florida Emergency Management Director Craig Fugate) to Twitter with a new identity and under a new management occurred yesterday as now Federal Emergency Management Administrator Fugate launched his new feed @CraigatFEMA.
Based on @Disastersrus and his public statements thus far as Administrator, I can almost guarantee that @CraigatFEMA [...]

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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 the hurricane season now picking up in earnest, I wanted to highlight the daily FEMA “National Situation Update”. Every morning, it offers a quick snapshot of FEMA’s activities with information and graphics gathered from a variety of sources including other federal agencies and departments, state and local governments, and the news media. Earlier this month, [...]

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My friend David Stephenson has a terrific post on the Huffington Post today, “New Anti-Terror Weapons: You, Me, iPhone & Twitter”. It picks up on Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano’s speech late last month in which she said: “For too long we’ve treated the public as a liability to be protected rather than an asset in our [...]

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Just a reminder that you have until the end of Sunday to participate in the initial round of the “Dialogue on the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review.” As discussed in a post earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is now conducting the “Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR),” which will help guide the [...]

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To kick off the launch of the “National Dialogue On The Quadrennial Homeland Security Review,” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) held a “Blogger Roundtable” yesterday at the agency’s headquarters featuring Assistant Secretary For Policy David Heyman.
DHS is conducting the first-ever “Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR),” a Congressionally-mandated strategic review which aims to help guide the Department [...]

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I wanted to bring your attention a very interesting and useful study on the role of social media in crises. The newly-released report, “Expert Round Table on Social Media and Risk Communication During Times of Crises: Strategic Challenges and Opportunities,” comes out of a day-long workshop in March at the American Public Health Association (APHA) [...]

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I am not an iPhone user so I will not be able to take advantage of the emergency apps highlighted in a very useful (for iPhone users) post by Ben Parr of Mashable, “Seven iPhone Apps That Can Save Your Life”. Parr writes:
“What can’t iPhone applications do? There are apps for almost every interest and [...]

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In a post on the Software Advice blog, “Twitter Growing Virally But Can It Stop Viruses?”, Chris Thoman argues that Twitter could play a significant role in epidemiology. He writes:
The combination of Twitter and epidemiology presents an interesting opportunity: What if doctors twittered about symptoms they observed and diagnoses they made? What if that information [...]

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