In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

I wanted to post an article from Mashable about CrisisCommons and its first CrisisCongress which took place last week. I was lucky to participate in the inaugural Crisis Camp last year and have been incredibly impressed by its meteoric development and impact here in the U.S. and in locations around the world as it looks to bring technologies promise to bear of disaster preparedness and response. Unfortunately, a treatment appointment prevented me from attending the Congress in person.

The article, “How CrisisCommons Is Helping The Tech Community Help Others,” by Geoff Livingston offers an excellent review of the work thus far and analysis of why it has been so successful so quickly:

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As social media becomes an increasingly important way for emergency managers to distribute disaster preparedness information to the public, officials are facing communications issues they have not dealt with before. One such issue — should FEMA be sending information in Spanish as well as English to the feed it sends its ‘fans’ on Facebook? – has stimulated a bit of a debate online this week among those FEMA fans.

Over the past few days as Bonnie has been forming in the Atlantic, FEMA decided to send out preparedness information on its Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/FEMA) for the first time in Spanish as well as English. The appearance of a bilingual announcements sparked some surprise and concern from a few commenters on the page and has launched a spirited discussion online with the balance of the posts were supportive of the approach.

For example, FEMA’s 14,022 ‘fans’ received these two posts on their feed back-to-back:

The addition of a Spanish post provoked reaction from commenters. A sample pro/con:

Chris Bartus: “…I understand it’s important to communicate but I don’t want to read the Spanish posting anymore than I want to read the German or French posting. It won’t help me.”

Michelle O’Leary: “Clear communication is essential when it comes to disaster preparedness and response and this is great, especially for those who haven’t quite mastered the (American) English language. Thanks, FEMA!”

I can understand that it was a little surprising for some of FEMA’s Facebook ‘fans’ to see a Spanish posting on their pages. But I do think it makes sense for the agency to use the full potential of social media to distribute information to specific populations. In fact, one commenter, Terry Akins, raised a bigger question that FEMA and all emergency management agencies will be wrestling with going forward:

“…I am curious how many fans does FEMA have that use Spanish as a primary language? Are you truly having effective outreach through the use of Facebook to minority communities? If so,that’s great! But I wonder how truly effective this medium is to ESOL populations…..I’d enjoy the feedback on this please.”

What I thought was particularly interesting and refreshing about the online debate was less the issue itself but that it gave the public a chance to weigh in directly with government officials in developing policy dealing with the public. It also led to discussions on other Facebook pages, including an independent Facebook site managed by Citizen Corps volunteers, which posed this further question to its users: ”To continue on the discussion about the power of FB and communication in multiple languages. What about emergency alert systems, should/shouldn’t they be communicated in multiple languages?”

I spoke to Jason Lindesmith from FEMA New Media this morning about the language debate. He said that the agency decided to disseminate Spanish versions of the preparedness information this week on Facebook since the storm was over Puerto Rico and was headed to South Florida, both areas with large Hispanic populations. Lindesmith says that the agency’s Facebook presence is still a “work in progress,” and that it will be developing ways for users to tailor their own access to various languages in the future.

Ironically, Lindesmith’s boss, Administrator Craig Fugate, could have used some Russian translation today for his Twitter feed. He tweeted (below) only in English that he is in Moscow today signing an agreement with his Ministry of the Russian Federation for Affairs of Civil Defence, Emergencies and Disaster Relief (EMERCOM).

With Tropical Storm Bonnie heading towards the U.S., I thought I would post some financial preparedness tips for the public just offered by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Consumer Reports.

On the IRS website, the agency posted “Four Tips on Preparing for a Disaster”:

Recordkeeping — Take advantage of paperless recordkeeping for financial and tax records. Many people receive bank statements and documents by e-mail. This method is an outstanding way to secure financial records. Important tax records such as W-2s, tax returns and other paper documents can be scanned onto an electronic format. You can copy them onto a ‘key’ or ‘jump drive’ periodically and then keep the electronic records in a safe place.

Document Valuables — The IRS has disaster loss workbooks for individuals that can help you compile a room-by-room list of your belongings. One option is to photograph or videotape the contents of your home, especially items of greater value. You should store the photos in a safe place away from the geographic area at risk. This will help you recall and prove the market value of items for insurance and casualty loss claims.

Update Emergency Plans — Emergency plans should be reviewed annually. Individual taxpayers should make sure they are saving documents everybody should keep including such things as W-2s, home closing statements and insurance records. Make sure you have a means of receiving severe weather information; if you have a NOAA Weather Radio, put fresh batteries in it. Make sure you know what you should do if threatening weather approaches.

Count on the IRS – In the event of a disaster, the IRS stands ready to help. The IRS has valuable information you can request if your records are destroyed. If you have been impacted by a federally declared disaster, you may receive copies or transcripts of previously filed tax returns free of charge by submitting Form 4506, Request for Copy of Tax Return, or Form 4506-T, Request for Transcript of Tax Return, clearly identified as a disaster related request.

And, on Consumerreports.org’s Money Blog, a post titled, “Emergency-preparedness, tax-wise and otherwise,” recommends:

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I wanted to briefly highlight an interesting disaster-related cause marketing campaign you may have seen, Tide’s “Loads of Hope”. The initiative brings mobile laundromat facilities to areas struck by a natural disaster to provide free cleaning services to survivors.

“Loads of Help” was created in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and since then has cleaned more than 30,ooo loads of laundry in disaster sites around the U.S., most recently in flooded Tennessee and Kentucky. It is funded in part by the sales of vintage t-shirts and a percentage of Tide sales.

The campaign is a clever example of cause marketing in which a corporation finds an appropriate, related and useful problem to take on and build brand equity. It is also a rare example of a business that has branded itself through disaster response. Tide’s corporate parent, Proctor & Gamble, has also benefited from the use of its Dawn liquid soap’s in cleaning oil-fouled wildlife.

When it comes to the subject of what citizens should be doing to improve their disaster preparedness too often the focus is solely on emergency supplies or plans. Less attention is paid to what each of us can do as citizens to improve our community’s and nation’s preparedness by participating in the political process as a citizen. So, I am always on the lookout for things that I think Americans should be telling their elected officials that would make us more prepared and secure.

One such idea — streamlining the onerous Congressional oversight of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — was discussed in a recent National Public Radio story, “Who Oversees Homeland Security? Um, Who Doesn’t?”

Currently, there are 108 U.S. House & Senate committees, subcommittees and caucuses that get briefings or hear testimony from DHS officials on Capitol Hill. There is bipartisan agreement from Homeland Security officials from both the Bush and Obama Administrations that the present  setup not only takes up too much time but more importantly also leads to policy confusion. Streamlining oversight was actually a recommendation of the 9/11 Commission in 2004, but no action has been forthcoming. (And, in fact, the number of congressional panels has gone up from 86 to the current 108 since then.) According to the NPR piece:

Advocates of streamlining, including Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) who chairs the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, say there is a perfectly good model for overseeing the sprawling Department of Homeland Security. It’s the way the Congress oversees the Defense Department.

“We have one Senate Armed Services Committee,” he says. “It oversees the entire Department of Defense, which has a budget, oh probably 15 times the size of the DHS budget. So this is doable.”

Despite the bipartisan agreement that the current oversight does not serve the nation’s security or preparedness, Lieberman told NPR he doesn’t expect any action. That is, he says, unless the president and the Homeland Security secretary choose to make a big issue of it.

Or, I would add, if individual citizens also tell their elected representatives they support a change.

The 108 Congressional committees, subcommittees and caucuses that officials from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security must report to (Graphic: Adrienne Wollman/NPR)

In the recent issue of Emergency Management magazine, Elaine Pittman has an interesting article, “Emergency Managers Warm To The Idea Of Climate Change”. It focuses on how state and local government officials are increasingly taking climate change and its impact on potential disasters into account in their disaster planning.

I wanted to post the article, because it has been a regular theme of this blog that trying to convince and activating the public on emergency readiness, the disaster preparedness community could learn from the climate change movement. I made this point in a post last year:

The global warming campaign can and should be a model for citizen emergency preparedness in a variety of ways, including getting kids to lead the way and more extensively involving the media and entertainment industries. But preparedness will also require the same kind of governmental and corporate commitment, high profile public spokespeople and incentives that has boosted the climate change effort. Yes, global warming has some skeptics, but so does emergency preparedness — ironically they are usually not the same people which may conveniently add to its complementary synergy.

In an interview last year, former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff expressed to me his frustration that disaster preparedness had not received the same public attention as climate change:

“I’ll tell you what’s fascinating. If you look at like this whole global warming thing. At some point, it captured the imagination of somebody and it became a big media thing. And then all of a sudden, every kid was coming home with information about global warming. And I wish we could get that media attentiveness in the area of preparedness, so that kids come – because this – actually, this is an area where it could make a difference if everybody had the plans and the kit and everything. You could actually see every individual could make a difference.”

Hopefully, the increased connection that emergency managers are viewing between the two issues which Pittman writes about in her article will be useful in making some new inroads with the public on preparedness.

The global warming campaign can and should be a model for civilian emergency preparedness in a variety of ways, including as Chertoff noted somewhat enviously, getting kids to lead the way and involving the media. But preparedness will also require the same kind of governmental and corporate commitment, high profile public spokespeople and some governmental incentives that has boosted the climate change effort.

The two campaigns are complementary and should be more linked closer together in the public’s mind — and actions. In both, society is being asked to mobilize in order to avert or mitigate potential disasters, and both are part of strengthening the nation’s general national resilience. Yes, global warming has some skeptics, but so does emergency preparedness — ironically they are often not the same people which may conveniently add to its complementary synergy.

BBC News has an interesting article “Making Sense Of The Web During A Crisis,” about SwiftRiver, an open source software platform that uses algorithms and crowdsourcing to validate and filter news. It is being developed by a partnership including Ushahidi and will be released in beta version later this summer.

According to the SwiftRiver website:

User-generated content is becoming an increasingly important source of information during emergency events while traditional media continues to play a pivotal role in documenting events as they unfold. These trends are expected to continue well into the future. The challenge, then, becomes filtering this growing torrent of information. There is an apparent tradeoff between crowdsourcing (opening the floodgates) and validation (the filter). One of the strengths of crowdsourcing is the ability to collect a high volume of information from highly diverse channels like Twitter, email, news sites, blogs, and SMS.

SwiftRiver acts as the verifying filter for these different channels and is possible precisely because of the volume of information available from these sources. The more information generated, the more the community interacts with it, and the easier it becomes to identify mutually trusted sources.

“On January 12, 2010, Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, was struck by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake that caused widespread destruction and killed approximately 222,000 people. The next month, Chile was hit by an 8.8-magnitude earthquake — approximately 500 times stronger than that in Haiti — but only 500 people died. Why the disparity?”

That’s the question addressed in an interesting piece on ForeignAffairs.com, “Disaster Politics: Why Earthquakes Rock Democracies Less,” by Alastair Smith and Alejandro Quiroz Flores.

The authors conclude that a nation’s political system may be the most important indicator of disaster preparedness and response success:

The recent earthquakes in Chile and Haiti are illustrations of this dynamic. Given the extremely high magnitude of the earthquake in democratic Chile, the resulting 500 casualties were relatively few, and the government has been rightly praised for its effective response. Though Bachelet was nearing her term limit at the time of the earthquake, her management of the crisis helped her party and is expected to benefit her if she runs for reelection in 2014. On the other hand, the more autocratic Haitian government has failed to provide even basic recovery services for the 230,000 victims buried in rubble. Elections in Haiti are notoriously corrupt, and the regime has already used the earthquake as an excuse to postpone even these half-hearted contests. Although there have been a few protests, the regime seems likely to endure despite its abject failure to help its people.

Political survival lies at the heart of disaster politics. Unless politicians are beholden to the people, they have little motivation to spend resources to protect their citizens from Mother Nature, especially when these resources could otherwise be earmarked for themselves and their small cadre of supporters. What is worse, the casualty count after a disaster is a major determinant of the amount of international assistance a country receives. Relief funds can even enhance a nondemocrat’s hold on power if they are used to buy off supporting elites. Given such incentives, autocrats’ indifference to disaster-related deaths will continue. The fix can only be political — leaders will not use the policies already available to mitigate the effects of natural disasters until they have the incentives to do so.

The full article can be found here.

Repair efforts in Chile after this year’s earthquake.

Last week, I wrote about a new partnership between the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the International Association of Chiefs of Police to research how to improve the public’s response to suspicious activity. The findings will help the government as it expands the “See Something, Say Something” campaign nationally which was announced earlier this month by U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

I am supportive of this new initiative. But I received two critical comments on the post, which I think nicely represent the skepticism that a good deal of the public has about these citizen terrorism awareness campaigns. They prompted me to write this separate post pointing out the difficult (yet do-able) challenge facing DHS and FEMA in designing both the content and then carefully implementing a meaningful program.

(This skepticism will only be increased by the publication this week of a major Washington Post series, “Top Secret America”, which will raise more questions among the public about the need to further expand security. Its thesis: ”The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”)

The two comments I received last week on the blog post:

“Hmmm, to what extent do these programs produce valuable intelligence versus wasting law enforcement time and effort and infringing citizen privacy and rights by putting public security surveillance in the hands (and eyes) of untrained people.” (Roberto)

“FEMA is wasting tax money by interfering with local law enforcement citizens and law enforcement have already demonstrated capacity to respond but FEMA has not FEMA needs to do what it is qualified to do: write checks.” (Dr. Marchand)

These are typical of the reaction I hear from some Americans — coming from all political stripes — who question such a citizen role whether it be for philosophical or logistical reasons. It echoes the feedback Janet Napolitano heard last year at a major speech on public involvement in homeland security she made at the Council on Foreign Relations.

A small portion of her remarks that morning touched on her plans to have the agency take “a much closer look at how we can support and inform our greatest asset, individual citizens, and with them the private sector. You are the ones who know if something is not right in your communities, such as a suspicious package or unusual activity…with basic training, every one of us can become better first preventers as well as first responders.”

Afterwards, it was a little surprising but revelatory that the much of the question-and-answer portion was taken up by audience members expressing concern about that making Americans better “first preventers” might impinge on civil liberties. And, this was from a politically friendly and highly sophisticated crowd.

So, as DHS and FEMA start planning how to expand the program, I wanted to relay the input I have received on this issue. These comments have only reinforced my reporting that it will be challenging to develop and implement a program that really does capitalize on the public as a homeland asset but does so in a careful, sensitive and useful way. It will require research on how these unfamiliar threats should be best communicated to the public using new technologies.

It will need to show specifically how the public can be helpful in helping law enforcement and share more success stories as models. And, it should emphasize that any anti-terror initiative will ask the same things of the citizenry that many of us are already doing in our communities on crime prevention as part of efforts like Neighborhood Watch.

The Washington Post series will undoubtedly raise questions about creating even more security initiatives and might have an impact on the development of the national “See Something, Say Something” campaign. But I think that would be a mistake. There is a need to further involve the public as an asset in the nation’s homeland security. But what it does underscore is that any program needs to have a sharp focus, clear objectives, ongoing communication and followup if it is to work.

Mike Coston, a friend of this blog, who writes the really terrific Avian Flu Diary suggests that every American have a “disaster buddy” as part of their preparedness planning.

In a post today, “In An Emergency, Who Has Your Back?”, Coston explains that such a buddy would be “someone who prearranges to help a friend, relative, or neighbor during a personal or local emergency.” It was an idea that Coston had originally for dealing with the flu (his expertise) and now believes could be useful for disaster preparedness in general. He writes:

We are truly only prepared as our friends, families, and surrounding community are. There are roles to play for everyone, including civic organizations, schools, and church…

Now – before a disaster occurs – is the time to sit down and talk to your friends, family, and neighbors about how you will help one another during a personal or community wide crisis…

Frankly, having (and being) a `Disaster Buddy’ to friends, neighbors, and relatives should be part of everyone’s family disaster plan…

This concept isn’t new of course. It is what friends, neighbors, and families have done for each other for thousands of years.

Well said. The full post can be found here.