In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

One of the most impressive public-private citizen emergency preparedness partnerships in the U.S. is Oklahoma’s McReady campaign now in its sixth year statewide. As part of McReady, Oklahomans can enter a contest to win a safe room and emergency radios.
The campaign includes displays in McDonald’s restaurants throughout the state with information focusing on floods, tornadoes, lightning, emergency [...]

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Amanda Ripley has an interesting article in the current issue of Governing, “Run for Your Lives, Please”. Amanda examines the issue of how best to alert people in advance of a disasters. She points out that before Hurricane Ike made landfall the National Weather Service put out a rare “certain death” warning which got the attention [...]

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Over this Valentine’s Day weekend, the City of New York gave away hundreds of thousands of condoms as part of its NYC Condom ’safe sex’ social marketing campaign. Since it launched the program on Valentine’s Day in 2007, the City’s Department of Health has distributed a total of 70 million free samples. 
Now, obviously there are [...]

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I am excited to report that a bill which would create a ‘tax holiday’ for preparedness supplies and “Go-Bags” was just re-introduced in the New York State Assembly by Assemblyman Jonathan L. Bing as Bill A00783.  
Under the legislation, New Yorkers would be able to buy emergency supplies without paying state sales tax between September 1st-11th and purchase pre-made “Go-Bags” tax free throughout the month. The bill would [...]

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With New York and other states now debating the creation of a tax-free period for emergency preparedness supplies to spur public disaster readiness, I decided to check to see how the idea went in two states — Virginia and Louisiana — that tried it for the first time this May.
Though they have no sales figures [...]

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