The American Red Cross today unveiled new and updated technology  – an improved “Safe and Well” site and a real-time way to find shelter — to help families during a disaster.
Safe and Well is a secure and easy-to-use online tool that allows people inside a disaster-affected area to list themselves as “safe and well†and for loved ones to search for these messages. Launched in 2006, the redesigned site now allows people to customize messages for loved ones and update their Facebook and Twitter statuses right from the site. In addition, a new mobile version of the site will make it easy for people to register or search from a smart phone.
Linking Safe and Well to Facebook and Twitter is an important step for the site and those who use it. In a recent Red Cross online survey, nearly half of all respondents said they would use social media sites to let their loved ones know they are safe in an emergency. Facebook was the most popular choice, named by 86 percent of those who would use social media to reassure their loved ones. Now, the Red Cross makes it easy to register on Safe and Well, and at the same time, participate in social media.
There are several ways to register on or search the Safe and Well site. From a computer, visit www.redcross.org and click on the “List Yourself or Search Registrants†link under “How to Get Help.†From a smart phone, visit www.redcross.org/safeandwell and click on the “List Yourself as Safe and Well†or “Search for friends and family†link. From any phone, call 1-800-RED-CROSS (1-800-733-2767) and one of our operators can help you register.
The Red Cross’ “Find Shelter†is a new tool that pulls information from the National Shelter System and allows people to view a Google map of open Red Cross shelter locations and search for shelters closest to their location.
To access shelter information, visit www.redcross.org and click on the “Find Shelter†link. Shelters that are currently open will be displayed on the map or in the search results. The National Shelter System is owned and operated by the Red Cross and used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), state and local governments, and other community agencies to track and report shelter information.
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There’s a new dog on Twitter, and she’s tweeting some helpful pet preparedness advice. Jade Thompson, a 17-year old cow dog and spaniel mixed breed, has just launched a new feed, @RedCrossDog. She’s getting editorial help from her owner Chris Thompson (a.k.a. @RedCrossMom) who knows first hand the value of being prepared for animal emergencies having saved Jade from drowning on a couple of occasions.
New Twitter user and pet preparedness expert, Jade Thompson
Chris recounts several lessons she learned from this nightmare scenario.
“Just like a child, even if they are not intending to swim, pets should have a life jacket on,†said Thompson.
She also added, “You actually can revive a dog if you react quickly enough. You just need to know how to resuscitate him. I am very grateful for what Red Cross classes taught me.â€
Chris, who runs her own disaster response non-profit group, Humanity Road, hopes she and Jade can turn their scary experiences into a positive by disseminating helpful information to pet owners through the new Twitter feed which you can find here.
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U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano yesterday announced a series of initiatives to support state and local law enforcement, community groups and the public in identifying and mitigating terror threats.
“Homeland security begins with hometown security, and our efforts to confront threats in our communities are most effective when they are led by local law enforcement and involve strong collaboration with the communities and citizens they serve,” said Napolitano. The announcement came in conjunction with last evening’s “National Night Out”.
The new measures are based on recommendations made by the Homeland Security Advisory Council’s (HSAC) “Countering Violent Extremism†Working Group—comprised of chiefs of police, sheriffs, community leaders and homeland security experts—on ways DHS can better support community-based efforts to combat violent extremism in the United States. Secretary Napolitano asked the HSAC to work with state and local law enforcement, as well as relevant community groups to develop and provide these recommendations, six months ago.
The expansion of the community and citizen role in homeland security has been encouraged by the blog, and I think yesterday’s announcement is a terrific development.
Most of the new initiatives are directed towards bolstering the work of state and local law enforcement organizations — including a series of regional summits beginning this fall on successful community-oriented policing and other crime reduction programs. But Napolitano also announced some proposals focused directly on the public:
To increase public awareness and preparedness about signs of criminal activity and violent extremism, DHS continues to expand its national “If You See Something, Say Somethingâ€Â campaign in coordination with law enforcement, the private sector, and community groups, integrating this effort with the National Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative and the transportation, sports, travel, and law enforcement sectors.
In the coming months, DHS will continue to expand the campaign nationally with public education materials, advertisements and other outreach tools to engage travelers, businesses, community organizations and public and private sector employees to remain vigilant and play an active role in keeping the country safe.
And, I would suggest that DHS officials include the public, when possible, in some of the terror prevention information sharing programs for local and state law enforcement announced yesterday, such as:
DHS will produce a series of unclassified case studies examining recent incidents involving violent crime and terrorism to educate and inform state and local law enforcement personnel and community members about common behaviors and indicators exhibited by the suspects.
DHS will produce a series of intelligence products regarding tactics, techniques and plans of international and domestic terrorist organizations—including the recruitment and training of individuals living in the United States – to better inform state and local law enforcement personnel about threats facing the homeland and their local communities.
We will be continuing to closely cover these initiatives on the blog as they develop.
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Washington, D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier yesterday announced a series of new community-focused, anti-terror measures (Associated Press photo).
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I was thrilled tonight to be able to join my CERT team for the first time since my leukemia returned last November. I took part in the “National Night Out” along with members of our local NYPD precinct in Manhattan. We handed out ReadyNewYork pamphlets, though as I am still building up my stamina I didn’t last long on the streets.
According to its website, “National Night Out” is designed to: heighten crime and drug prevention awareness; generate support for, and participation in, local anticrime programs; strengthen neighborhood spirit and police-community partnerships; and send a message to criminals letting them know that neighborhoods are organized and fighting back.
NYPD 19th Precinct Commander Matthew Whelan with a very happy to be back CERT member.
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I recently watched an American Red Cross video that actress Jamie Lee Curtis made last year called “What’s In My Kit”. (see below). In the two-minute spot, Curtis shows how she has personalized her emergency kit to “make it more user friendly”. It’s a pretty straight forward video, but I wanted to highlight it, because I think the approach underscores an important but often overlooked point about citizen preparedness communications — there is a need for high profile people both in and out of the emergency management field to personalize and discuss publicly their own family preparedness efforts as a model for the rest of the community.
In the video, Curtis a long-time Red Cross volunteer, says she has added a family picture, chocolate, candy, games, rechargeable flashlight, dental floss, almonds and chips to her kit. And she adds: “I live in earthquake country, where there will be a lot of broken glass, so I suggest solid shoes for every member of your family.” [I have personalized my kit with earplugs (after spending a day in a shelter while playing a victim in New York City hurricane drill), a deck of playing cards, stuffed animals (for the kids) and an extra BlackBerry battery.]
To me, one of the biggest gaps in citizen preparedness communications is the lack of personalization and humanization. The messaging is far too institutional, and the result is that people largely do not respond. Expert officials ask average citizens to create emergency plans and kits, research threats and do practice run-throughs, but they never show them how (and if) they do it for themselves. The fact is that I have found many of them have not actually gone through the process.
As a result, they do not have a full understanding of the challenges for the public in taking what seem to be simple preparedness steps but are not particularly easy for laypeople — there are always many questions and hidden obstacles for civilians going through the preparedness process. But those are almost never addressed in a personal way by those in authority, which is a major reason why the messages do not largely get through to the public. While officials are always asking the public “what’s your plan?” or “what’s in your kit?” but rarely tell us what’s in their plan or their kit.
The reality is that it’s not so easy to do a plan, make a kit and get informed on sometimes unfamiliar and scary topics, and feel that you are actually doing something that will really help you in an emergency. Citizens have to rely on others (ie. schools, workplaces, doctors, government offices) in accessing information to put together these contingency plans, which again is not so straightforward.
In fact, just to take one of those institutions we are asking the public to rely on, a recent Save the Children study found that “fewer than one quarter of all states and the District of Columbia have enacted four basic safeguards to protect kids who are in school or child care during disasters, such as requiring all licensed child care centers to have a plan to reunite children with their families and requiring schools to have a clear written evacuation plan in place.”
Jamie Lee Curtis’ American Red Cross preparedness video, “What’s In My Kit”.
Now, it is true that emergency management officials are not going react like regular citizens in a disaster but instead will be likely be working managing the situation. So, they may not have to plan for themselves in the same way an average person would. However, most have families who are going to prepare and respond along with the rest of the public. Former White House Terrorism Adviser Fran Townsend told me that even though she would normally be engaged during a crisis, she had developed an emergency communications plan with her husband and kids.
And ex-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff described to me trying to locate his daughter on 9/11 when he was in the Justice Department; to me it humanized disaster preparedness and planning in a way that a list on website just never can. I encouraged him to use that story as a way to get through to other parents. The fact is that every emergency management official is also a citizen; it would be helpful for other citizens if officials show that perspective more, and it would be similarly useful for leaders to take that point of view more in their preparedness planning and communications.
Along the lines of the Jamie Lee Curtis video, I think it would be useful if those government emergency management leaders offered the public more information their own efforts to prepare. It would also be interesting if other Red Cross folks (leaders, staff and volunteers of chapters around the U.S., including President Gail McGovern) talked about their own family emergency planning. And, frankly in this celebrity-driven society, having other high profile personalities like Curtis would be helpful as well in providing models and inspiration — how about Kiefer Sutherland a.k.a. Jack Bauer talking about the challenge of creating an emergency plan for his family without the help of CTU?
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It asks the public to do five things: get a flu vaccination and other recommended immunizations, create a family communications and evacuation plan, have an emergency preparedness kit, protect their pets, and encourage their community to get ready. APHA is encouraging citizens to organize preparedness events on Get Ready Day, September 21st, as part of National Preparedness Month.
The APHA’s Audrey Pernik told me that the “promise” concept has worked before for other Association campaigns so it decided to use the idea for preparedness this year. The hope is that by getting individuals to take the first step online it will encourage them to take family readiness stepss. Asking more and getting more is similar to the philosophy of Orange County READYOC’s “Promise To Prepare” campaign that I wrote about last month. Pernik said that 1600 people have already made the pledge in the first week it has been on the web.
An interesting aspect of the APHA preparedness initiative is that it includes immunization as a part of preparedness, which is central to the group’s work but is not normally part of emergency management’s standard outreach message (other than last year when the H1N1 flu was a major focus). Though it is an extra step, I see how including immunization in public preparedness recommendations might be useful because it is a more pedestrian, non-disaster action which could be a good way to get citizens into emergency preparedness in a less threatening way.
An article yesterday by the Washington Post’s excellent homeland security reporter, Spencer S. Hsu, “Arrest of Va. man spotlights al-Qaeda’s new American recruiters,” looks at how al-Qaeda and its affiliates are “increasingly are relying on a new generation of American recruiters to radicalize other Americans.”
It’s an interesting piece about how this potential growth of domestic-based terrorism, but in this post I wanted to highlight a specific aspect of the article — why it is that U.S. officials when they warn the public about specific terrorism threat often feel they need to do it anonymously and as a result why they are generally unwilling to talk directly?
In the article, Hsu writes:
…attack plots against the United States have proliferated and grown more diverse. Over the past 18 months, the federal government has charged 34 U.S. citizens with direct involvement in terrorism. The Fort Hood, Tex., shootings in November, the May 1 Times Square car bombing attempt, and last year’s New York subway plot were each allegedly carried out by Americans inspired from or trained abroad.
The killing of many of al-Qaeda’s senior operatives has weakened the group, but the growing role of Americans may reflect the inability of its core leaders to mount more effective operations, authorities said. Still, even less sophisticated attacks can be deadly.
“The threat is complicated and diverse and in many ways more difficult for us to figure out,” a senior U.S. intelligence official said, speaking on condition of anonymity so he could freely discuss counterterrorism analysis. [my italics]“The training is quicker and tolerance [for less spectacular and successful plots] are much greater . . . but the likelihood of a mass 9/11-style attack is a lot smaller.”
Reading this struck me: why does that U.S. intelligence official need to speak on a “condition of anonymity” when all he or she is doing is informing the public and the media about the government’s best guess about future terrorism here. It would seem that this type of briefing would be best done by top leaders — including sometimes the President — who could bring attention to the subject, best instruct the public on what (if anything) they should be doing and thinking about the changing threat, and establish an open and trusted line of communication/dialogue with citizens on terrorism prevention and preparedness. Using anonymity makes it seems as somehow there is something wrong or secret about broadly informing the public about the nation’s terror situation
I’m not saying there necessarily is a lot of information that has to be disseminated to the public on this right now, but there is news (positive and negative) here on the changing scope of the terrorist threat, and I don’t understand why it cannot be done in a more planned, open and straightforward way rather than anonymously in response to a newspaper reporter.
I was doing some research on separate blog posts for next week on the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) and the need for government to better personalize citizen emergency preparedness communications. I happened to see a small example that actually involves both subjects and thought I’d pass it on.
As I’ve discussed before, the LAFD is a pioneer in the use of communications technology including social media to inform and engage the public. I am a subscriber to its text/e-mail breaking news notification system, LAFD_Alert, which provides has provided as much up-to-date information direct to the citizenry as any governmental emergency agency that I am aware of. This can be particularly useful for those in the Los Angeles area in quickly changing situations such as wildfires. Officials can use the alerts and the LAFD blog to disseminate information about fires (or other incidents such as a building explosion in South Los Angeles), and the Department’s response and instructions for the public.
What I wanted to highlight today is more trivial, but I thought was worth a mention. In two of his news alerts Friday, LAFD PIO Erik Scott added some humanity to a communications form that tends to be pretty straightforward and antiseptic. He wrote hopefully about the aftermath of a structure fire in which a one adult male was killed but another was “critically burned but *ALIVE*”.
From: lafdlistmaster@lacity.org
Subject: [LAFD ALERT] Structure Fire 7/30/2010
Date: July 30, 2010 5:09:15 PM EDT
To: LAFDLISTMASTER@LACITY.ORG
*UPDATE: 936 E 59th St* CORRECTION: 2 total victims: 1st patient- Adult male DECEASED due to electrocution. 2nd patient- Adult male critically burned but *ALIVE* [my bold]Â Â in ICU at California hsp & will be tsp to USC hsp. – Erik Scott###
From: lafdlistmaster@lacity.org
In a subsequent text, Scott offered an update adding a small editorial and human comment: “Sadly Both victims have deceased.”
Subject: [LAFD ALERT] Structure Fire 7/30/2010
Date: July 30, 2010 3:01:22 PM EDT
To: LAFDLISTMASTER@LACITY.ORG
*UPDATE: 936 E 59th St* Sadly Both victims have deceased [my bold], 1 from the blast & the other from electrocution. The fire was caused by illegal tampering w/ gas meter. NFD – Erik Scott###
I’m not saying that every governmental emergency alert needs to have that personal touch on each message. However, as the authorities increasingly try to get citizens to subscribe to these useful notification systems it can only be helpful if the messages are sometimes more engaging than usual government communications. Anyway, I will have some more thoughts about personalization in citizen preparedness messaging on Monday.
The LAFD Breaking News alert widget
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In today’s New York Times, there’s an interesting article by Matthew Wald that raises the question whether “alarm fatigue” has led to major accidents, such as the BP Deepwater Horizon incident.
When an oil worker told investigators on July 23 that an alarm to warn of explosive gas on the Transocean rig in the Gulf of Mexico had been intentionally disabled months before, it struck many people as reckless.
Reckless, maybe, but not unusual. On Tuesday, the National Transportation Safety Board said that a crash last year on the Washington subway system that killed nine people had happened partly because train dispatchers had been ignoring 9,000 alarms per week. Air traffic controllers, nuclear plant operators, nurses in intensive-care units and others do the same.
Mark R. Rosekind, a psychologist who is a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, said the cases had something in common. “The volume of alarms desensitizes people,†he said. “They learn to ignore them.â€
James P. Keller Jr., vice president of the ECRI Institute, formerly the Emergency Care Research Institute, has a name for it: “alarm fatigue.†In a recent Web seminar for health care professionals, he asked participants if their hospital colleagues had become desensitized to any important alarms in the last two years. Three-quarters said yes. “This suggests it’s a pretty pervasive problem,†he said.
The article focuses on the impact of “alarm fatigue” on industry workers. However, I think it is also relevant to how alarms, warnings and alerts are communicated to the broader public. The full piece can be found here.
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According to an article in the Miami Herald, officials in Key West are considering the prohibition of alcohol sales during hurricanes under a little known law that allows local officials to ban booze during a declared state of emergency:
Last year, as officials of the Southernmost City reviewed their emergency plans, they again considered the possibility of a prohibition during a storm, said Craig Marston, division chief of emergency management and training at the Key West Fire Department.
Safety first, they decided. If a hurricane seems threatening enough, they might declare a ban.
The problem, as they see it, is that famous Keys attitude. Boozers could be too tipsy to take precautions and too drunk to leave during a mandatory evacuation, they fear, and too wobbly to wield chainsaws for the post-hurricane cleanup.
“We have to protect ourselves from ourselves,” Marston said. Monroe County hospitals are required to close during evacuations, so “something as simple as a broken leg can be a life-threatening injury.”
But many Keys residents and business owners think they should be able to relieve their hurricane-related stress with alcohol — before, during and after the storm.
I’d be curious what emergency managers, including Florida’s former head EM head Craig Fugate, think about this idea. The full article can be found here.
Key West residents ’sheltering in place’?
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