In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

On the Canadian Red Cross’s blog, Red Cross Talks, John Saunders, “Disaster Dude/Director of Disaster Management, Ontario,” has a post, Twittering About Emergency Preparedness. Saunders says that Twitter has helped the organization reach an audience — “Upward mobile, professionals between ages 30 – 45″ — which he says is often difficult to get to on [...]

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I just wanted to mention something quickly, which I thought was a nice – albeit small – touch. The Louisiana Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness has a Twitter feed @GOHSEP which has been very active during the oil spill response. It has been distributing a lot of spill-related information for the public, [...]

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Whether the U.S. was lucky or good (or little of both) that the attempted terror incidents in Times Square last week and on the airliner near Detroit on Christmas Eve failed, the fact is that terrorists are going to pull off a successful attempt at some point, maybe soon. So, it is important that the Administration [...]

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In today’s Washington Post Outlook section, former presidential terrorism adviser Richard Clarke has an op-ed piece, “The Times Square Bomb Failed. What Will We Do When The Next Bomb Works.” Clarke’s overall theme is that another terror attack is inevitable, and “right now, after a near-miss, there is a better opportunity to adjust than in [...]

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It was clearly not the aim of the alleged Times Square bomber to spotlight the role of the citizen as part of the U.S.’s homeland security effort in one of the nation’s most high profile — and lit — places. But he did. The T-shirt vendors who tipped off a New York City Police Department (NYPD) [...]

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In Slate, Christopher Beam has an interesting piece, “Oh Well: Why We’re So Bad At Dealing With Unlikely Disasters Like The Louisiana Oil Spill,” about how we as a nation think about, prepare for, and ultimately learn from unlikely but disastrous events. His conclusion: not well.
…the real lesson of the oil spill may be how [...]

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In an interesting new op-ed, “Gimme Shelter: The Need For A Contemporary Civil Defense Program,” on the website of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Stanford University professor Lawrence Wein argues that the federal government should immediately start a comprehensive public education campaign about the benefits of sheltering during a nuclear terrorist attack.
Wein along with two graduate [...]

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On the subject of incentives mentioned in the above post, I just saw an online preparedness campaign created by Mynorthwest.com called, “3 To Get Ready Preparedness Challenge”. The campaign asks Washington state residents to take 3 preparedness steps and reach out to 3 friends through either Facebook, Twittter or email — and offers a prize package, [...]

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With April being Earthquake Preparedness Month, the always creative Robin Parker from the Red Cross Oregon Trail Chapter has a guest post on the American Red Cross blog with some ideas for “interesting items you could add to your earthquake preparedness kit. Or, as they to call them,”prepare-aphernalia”. The post with links can [...]

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As part of its public outreach, the Department of Homeland Security has launched the National Cybersecurity Awareness Campaign Challenge whose goal is “to get the best ideas from organizations and individuals for clearly and comprehensively communicating about cybersecurity with the American public.” (I’m a little late on this, but it was announced while the blog was [...]

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