In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

In December of  2009, the Center for Biosecurity of UPMC held a conference in Washington, D.C., “Resilient American Communities: Progress In Practice And In Policy”. The aim was “to apply state-of-the-art knowledge of resilience to the design of federal policies that will strengthen local communities and their environments to withstand disasters, epidemics, and terrorism.”
Co-sponsors included [...]

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The challenge of citizen preparedness is well illustrated by this letter to the editor to a newspaper in Canada during that nation’s Emergency Preparedness Week. I think anyone involved in public preparedness will empathize:
To the editor:
I guess everyone in Scugog Township is prepared for any emergency that may arise.
They must be, because at the end [...]

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Anyone interested in participating in the 2010 National Preparedness Month (NPM) may want to sign up for a webinar held by the FEMA’s Ready Campaign. It will introduce the 2010 Toolkit and offer information on how to be a take part as well as become a Coalition partner. September will mark the the seventh annual [...]

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To mark National Animal Preparedness Day, I am reposting a video I shot of Allison Cardona, the Director of Disaster Services for the American Society for the Protection of Animals (ASPCA). It was done at a pets’ emergency preparedness event held last year by the ASPCA and New York’s Office of Emergency Management.
In the short video, Allison [...]

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This blog has long been an advocate of better integrating the public and its perspective into major governmental emergency drills. So, it was good to hear about some citizen-focused initiatives employed during Liberty RadEx, the National Tier 2 full scale exercise sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It was held in Philadelphia late last month [...]

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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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I wanted to bring your attention to a recent panel held by George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute. The title of the event was “Improvised Explosive Devices: Perceptions and the Domestic Threat” After watching the webcast, I was struck by how each of the panelists, including the Washington D.C. police chief, highlighted the centrality [...]

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Today, November 19th, is the 34th annual “Great American Smokeout” aimed at helping smokers “use the date to make a plan to quit, or to plan in advance and quit smoking.” Here in New York, the Department of Health is continuing its aggressive anti-smoking effort by handing out free nicotine gum and patches at sites throughout the [...]

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As I had mentioned last week, the first-ever Random Hacks of Kindness took place this weekend in Mountain View, California. The event — which came out of discussions at the inaugural Crisis Camp held in May of 2009 in Washington, D.C. — was aimed at identifying key challenges and developing technological solutions to ‘real world’ problems [...]

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Today, I attended the second in a series of “stakeholder forums” being held by the Obama Administration’s “Long-Term Disaster Recovery Working Group” to solicit input and ideas.
The White House Working Group — co-chaired by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan and composed of the Secretaries [...]

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