In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

Hurricane Season is starting soon. How soon? You can know exactly: FEMA is offering a hurricane season countdown widget (below) which not only marks, to the second, the time until May 1st (correction: June 1st), but also provides a link to flood preparedness and insurance information. The widget can be found on the FEMA website here.

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The Aspen Institute has released a very interesting new study “New York City’s Preparedness For Terrorism (And Catastrophic Natural Disasters)”. The report offers a unique view of the preparedness efforts of major institutions in the New York City-area. It is the result of a three-day workshop which featured presentations from leaders in the governmental, business, non-profit and [...]

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As the nation deals with a health emergency, Microsoft has just released Vine, a new social networking application that could be very helpful to the public — providing information and locating friends & family — during emergencies.  According to Seattle’s Tech Flash, Vine aims to:
connect Facebook, Twitter, text messages, traditional phone calls, email and other forms of communication [...]

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There’s new management at one of the most informative homeland security news and analysis resources I know of, the Homeland Security Watch blog. Jonah Czerwinski, a good friend of this blog, who wrote HLS Watch for the past 13 24 [corrected] months is taking a job in government. He has recently been replaced, quite ably, by a trio [...]

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Martin Jones, creator of the informative National Terror Alert website, has just launched the Homeland Security Response Network, “an online, collaborative community of concerned citizens, and government and community leaders” which is “designed to promote discourse and community involvement, and help to create safer, more secure communities, with an emphasis on engaging citizens at the community [...]

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Former U.S. Senator Bob Graham (D-Fl), Chair of the Commission On The Prevention Of Weapons Of Mass Destruction On Proliferation And Terrorism says that educating Americans on the threat of WMD’s should be an “urgent” priority of the Obama Administration because without an informed citizenry the nation cannot maximize its security.
Graham’s WMD commission released a report, “World [...]

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As someone who has gone through the preparedness process from an average citizen’s point of view, I realize that it is not easy to do. There are many questions, small and large, that come up when you try to prepare yourself and your family for emergencies. As a result, I’ve always felt it was unrealistic [...]

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I just finished reading a new book that I think will be of great interest to many of the readers of this blog. The Survivors Club: The Secrets & Science That Could Save Your Life (Grand Central Publishing), written by Ben Sherwood, examines the questions of human survival in crises — Who survives and who doesn’t? [...]

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I am happy to report that a helpful weekly email resource is going daily beginning this Monday. The Biosecurity Briefing, published by the Baltimore-based Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, is being expanded. I have found the weekly edition useful in following developments on biosecurity and other threats so I look forward [...]

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Thanks to the Homeland Security Policy Institute’s Twitter coverage of its citizen preparedness forum I found out about an interesting new study, “A Social Infrastructure For Hometown Security: Evolving The Homeland Security Paradigm”. It is co-written by David Kaufman and Robert Bach from CNA. Kaufman mentioned the study at the preparedness forum, which was reported [...]

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