In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

A new study by the Virginia Department of Emergency Management found that most people in the National Capital Region would follow instructions to stay where they are after a radiological dispersion device, or “dirty bomb.” The survey, “Population Behaviors in Dirty Bomb Attack Scenarios: A Survey of the National Capital Region,” explored how people get their information in an emergency, information sources residents trust, the amount of advance preparation people have completed, and the actions they would take under increasing levels of personal threat.

According to the Department, three scenarios – at minimum, moderate and maximum hazard levels – were created for the survey, starting with a single dirty bomb released in the region, but not near the survey respondent. The maximum level involved a situation with multiple dirty bombs released throughout the region and exposing the population to radiation. The scenarios were varied to learn the effects of four factors: the level of hazard, whether the respondent was at home or at work, whether there was prior notice of the event, and the source of information and instructions about the event.

Among the overall findings from the report (which was done for the state by the University of Virginia Center for Survey Research and the Center for Risk Management of Engineering Systems):

* Of those at home during the event for all three scenarios, nearly 80 percent decided to stay home.

* For those at work during a minimal event (in which no shelter-in-place order is given for the respondent’s area), only 41 percent would stay at work, with 33 percent leaving to go home.

* For those at work during a moderate or maximum event when a shelter-in-place order is given, approximately 70 percent would stay at work.

Other findings include:

*The president, the Department of Homeland Security and the governor were cited as the most trustworthy sources of information, with the youngest respondents giving the president the highest level of trust.

*During the first 48 hours after a major local emergency, whether they chose to stay or to evacuate, residents expect emergency managers to supply information about the emergency and help with any needed decontamination, more than they expect food distribution or anti-looting patrols.

*About 54 percent have prepared a personal emergency plan, an emergency supply kit, or arranged a meeting place away from home for use by family members. Only 13 percent had done all three.

This appears to be a thorough, comprehensive study of an important issue — how the public would react to a dirty bomb — that has been discussed extensively on the blog. The findings would seem to report the good news that most citizens would be willing to ’shelter in place’ in their homes if that was the correct response and would follow instructions from authorities during a dirty bomb emergency. It also appears to show a relatively high level of knowledge about the dirty bomb threat among Washington-area residents.

As officials will be using the report to help develop emergency plans for the National Capital Region and surrounding areas, I would offer a couple of thoughts. I would be encouraged by the findings. But I do think that the unfamiliarity and newness of a radiological device that Americans have never experienced is something that really cannot be fully captured in a survey. These numbers might lead the authorities to think that there isn’t as much need for public education about the dirty bomb and other threats or more explanation about ’shelter in place’ vs. evacuation, or discussion of how workplaces and schools would be integrated into the response (ie. will parents be willing to stay home or at work if they don’t know what their kids are doing). That would be the wrong conclusion.

I am also concerned that there may be a little too much confidence among the survey respondents in the capacity of emergency responders (including the survey result: “During the first 48 hours after a major local emergency, whether they chose to stay or to evacuate, residents expect emergency managers to supply information about the emergency and help with any needed decontamination.”) That may not be the case in a post radiological situation. There needs to be more information provided on what those expectations really should be when it comes to radiation. And, the time to do it is not after the incident has occurred.

The survey will not only provide data for emergency planning but also help raise the profile of the issue of dirty bomb civilian response. I hope the authorities in National Capital Region and across the nation will also use it in helping to better educate and prepare their residents for this important — and unfortunately somewhat likely — possibility.

A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report says that since 2005 the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has “made progress in expanding and strengthening its tsunami warning and mitigation capabilities but faces challenges in both areas, as well as in moving its tsunami research to application.”

On the citizen and community preparedness front, the GAO urged NOAA to expand the TsunamiReady program and examine why participation has been limited among at risk areas:

“Although the number of TsunamiReady communities has increased from 27 in 2006 to 74 as of February 2010, overall participation in this voluntary program remains relatively low among the more than 760 communities identified as at risk for a tsunami. In this regard, GAO recommended in 2006 that NOAA conduct an assessment to identify potential barriers to program participation. Although NOAA has not yet conducted this assessment, GAO continues to believe that such an assessment is needed to help inform the agency’s strategic planning efforts.”

According to GAO, “NOAA reviewed a draft of this report and agreed with its recommendations.” You can find a podcast and transcript with the GAO staffer in charge of the report, Anu Mittal, here. (Thanks to the Natural Hazards Center for bringing the report to my attention.)

FEMA today announced the launch of the agency’s new mobile website, m.FEMA.gov. According to the FEMA press release:

The mobile website makes it easier to access critical information regarding emergency preparedness and what to do before and after a disaster right on a smartphone.

“Smartphones are becoming more prevalent, affordable, reliable and more viable to locate and obtain information and assistance,” said FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate. “This service will provide yet another avenue for the sharing of important information that is so critical to ensuring the public is prepared for emergencies. As we’ve seen in recent cases, often times after a disaster, mobile devices become a crucial lifeline to provide information to survivors.”

The new site is laid out in a user friendly, question and answer format, providing users with the answers to their top questions, such as:

What should I do in a disaster? Where can I find assistance? How can I help others?

FEMA will be making several enhancements to m.fema.gov in the coming months, including the ability to apply for individual assistance when a disaster has been declared by the President, check on the status of an application and update an existing application.

Today’s announcement of the launch of m.fema.gov comes just over a month until the start of this year’s hurricane season on June 1. The mobile site is just one way that FEMA is reaching out to ensure that the public has the tools they need to be prepared for any emergency. Families are also encouraged to log onto www.ready.gov and learn more about the simple steps they can take to ready for this season.

Administrator Fugate recorded a short video about the mobile website (below):

The National Weather Service has just launched an experimental program that will be using Twitter ‘tweets’ to help monitor “significant weather information.” The Weather Service website explains:

Why Twitter?

An advantage of searching Twitter for weather reports is the capability to utilize recently added “geotagging” — geographical information that is associated with something, in this case individual Tweets. This allows the NWS to correlate each Tweet to its location when it was sent. This capability will help to enhance and increase timely and accurate online weather reporting and communication between the public and their local weather forecast offices. The reports will be carefully evaluated during the experiment to ensure quality and timeliness.

Who Can Participate?

Anyone with a Twitter account can participate. Note: Trained storm spotters should use pre-established communication methods (toll-free line, eSpotter, etc.), when possible, to send severe weather reports to the NWS.

The site also shows how to use the Twitter geotagging feature as well as how to report without a geotag. As far as what to report, the Weather Service instructs:

You can tweet any weather event that occurs in your local area, but we are most interested in significant events: snowfall, severe weather, flooding, etc. In particular:

Damage from winds–briefly describe what was damaged and time it occurred; Hail–include size of hail and time it fell; Tornadoes or funnel clouds; Flooding–briefly describe what is occurring; Snowfall during an event and storm total. When reporting snowfall, include the time period when it fell; Freezing rain or freezing drizzle producing a ‘glaze’ on objects or roads; Dense fog restricting visibility to less than a half mile.

This outreach initiative builds upon the Weather Service’s SkyWarn program which includes 260,000 Storm Spotters across the U.S. who have been trained to help report dangerous conditions. (Thanks to Keith Robertory for bringing the new program to my attention.)

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, including a t-shirt, whistle and keychain flashlight if they do so.

There are a couple of elements of the campaign I particularly like. First, is that it gives the participants some tangible — albeit not enormous — incentive to participate. Second, it has integrated Twitter and Facebook and made things easy for users to promote the campaign to others. The bad news is that I just heard about it, and the Challenge (which is tied to Washington’s Disaster Preparedness Month) ends on April 30th. If you want more information on the campaign, click here.

Virginia has announced that it will be holding its 3rd Annual Hurricane Preparedness Sales Tax Holiday from May 25-31. The development of the Commonwealth’s event can be instructive for other government preparedness authorities.

During the Holiday, citizens can purchase emergency preparedness-related supplies without paying the 5% state sales tax. According to the Virginia Department of Taxation, in 2009 consumers saved $2.3 million in taxes on preparedness products up 5% from the year before.

A key to the tax free preparedness week has been the state’s ability to recruit several major retailers to participate in a significant way. It has turned the Holiday into a win-win proposition. For the stores, it’s more people in their stores buying preparedness (and other) products. For the state, preparedness gets the type of marketing muscle rarely is given to the issue, including full-page newspaper, radio and tv advertisements.

In addition, the state is also reaching out to local TV meteorologists for their support, as research shows that Virginians consider their local weather forecaster to have a great deal of influence on preparedness actions. They will also be partnering with Radio Disney to reach families during live events planned throughout May. This type of multi-platform approach, supported by real financial savings, is the way to break through to the public on preparedness.

This blog has long been an advocate of the use of incentives to spur public preparedness. To me, it is unrealistic to expect the public to prepare for disasters –that incur not insignificant economic and logistical cost — without some kind of enticement. In this society, when the government wants to influence social behavior it does so through incentives or disincentives (though the carrot is more appropriate than the stick on this issue). What we do know is that solely putting information on websites — promoted largely by PSA’s running in donated time —  has proved not adequate to move the needle substantially.

I would urge officials at the local, state and federal levels consider a tax free holiday or other incentives (ie. tax writeoffs) — along with integrated private sector marketing support — as a way to really get the attention of Americans and show they are serious about preparedness. (In New York State, a bill establishing September as a tax free month was introduced in part on the prompting of this blog. It is currently awaiting action by the legislature.)

Andy Carvin, the social media strategist at National Public Radio, has been a pioneer in the use of technology by the public and others in responding to disasters. At the TED-NYED conference in New York, Carvin gave an interesting presentation, “The New Volunteers: Social Media Disaster Response And You,”

He offers a nice overview of the evolution of citizen involvement using new technology to respond to major emergencies — from the 1995 Kobe earthquake to 9/11 to the Indian Ocean tsunami, hurricanes Katrina, Ike and Gustav up through the recent Haiti disaster during which organizations like Open Street Maps and Crisis Commons mobilized citizen volunteers to use (and create) technology applications to help in the response.

This may be a familiar story to some readers, but it’s worth watching for anyone interested in a good  summary of this topic. The video is below and the accompanying slides can be found here.

Andy Carvin’s presentation, “The New Volunteers: Social Media, Disaster Response And You”

The current issue of the always useful Disaster Research e-newsletter of the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center has an article, “National Flood Insurance Program: Back, Not Necessarily on Track,” with an update on the effort to finance and possibly overhaul the program:

Congress reinstated the National Flood Insurance Program Monday. But the beleaguered plan is more than $18 billion in debt, and a strategy to put the program back on an even keel seems nearly unreachable. According to a Government Accountability Office report released Wednesday, the NFIP is not “actuarially sound” and suffers from operational issues as well. The program, which was created in 1968 to fill gaps in private sector flood insurance, is poorly structured for providing coverage, the report stated.

“NFIP cannot do some of the things that private insurers do to manage their risks,” according to the report summary. “For example, NFIP is not structured to build a capital surplus, is likely unable to purchase reinsurance to cover catastrophic losses, cannot reject high-risk applicants, and is subject to statutory limits on rate increases. In addition, its premium rates do not reflect actual flood risk.”

Even so, a recent 18-day funding lapse that closed NFIP offices, leaving hundreds in home-buying limbo, highlighted the need for some sort of stopgap flood coverage. Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota estimated that 1,400 prospective homeowners a day couldn’t close on mortgages without access to the NFIP, according the Associated Press.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which operates the program, has made improvements, according to congressional testimony given by FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate Wednesday. Among the advances he cited were the creation of an NFIP Reform Working Group, an extensive update of the nation’s flood insurance rate maps, and a push for community awareness and participation.

We learned two very valuable things from the [NFIP Reform Group] listening sessions,” Fugate stated in the testimony. “First and foremost, we learned that the NFIP still provides an essential service to the American people that would be otherwise unavailable or unaffordable. Second, we confirmed that the NFIP requires meaningful reform.”

The GAO recommends that those reforms include stepping up rates to reflect risks and providing more oversight of companies that sell flood policies. The current NFIP funding extension is set to expire again on May 31.

There was an interesting and provocative post yesterday by Mark Chubb in the Homeland Security Watch blog, “Volunteer Does Not Equal Free.” Chubb, a senior civil servant in an emergency management agency, writes about a recent meeting in which he heard feedback from local Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) volunteer team leaders. He was struck by some of the frustration and even anger about the lack of support, guidance and gratitude that some of the participants expressed:

As a result of my reporting as well as first person experience here in New York, the need to reexamine the CERT program has been a regular theme of this blog. Though the CERT is good idea and members have made a definite impact in their communities, it is a resource not being used to its potential. Doing so, however, will not be easy. But in this the 25th year since the program was first conceived by the Los Angeles Fire Department it would seem to be an appropriate moment to take a new look at the program.

In his post, Chubb lays out both the possibilities and the challenges of CERT:

…teams have largely been left to organize and administer themselves. Team leaders receive little additional training and no formal mentoring. Anyone who receives training is welcome to play or not play according to their individual willingness to do so. No one is excluded from training due to age, physical ability, prior criminal history, or other limitations or associations. As such, our volunteer corps, although quite diverse, is not necessarily representative of all segments of our community, nor organized to instill confidence in those who do not participate.

From the outset, program managers and volunteers alike have assumed that in the event of a serious emergency, such as a major earthquake, the teams would deploy themselves without need of instructions or assignments from a central command authority. Their training would dictate the priorities and rules of engagement as situations warranted: Assess damage, identify and isolate hazards, organize bystanders and others, render assistance when able, communicate conditions and resource requirements to the nearest fire station, and follow the instructions of emergency responders when they arrive. Until recently, the system managed to get along in spite of itself.

But recently, as the community responded to the H1N1 pandemic by establishing community vaccination clinics, it became evident that things were not working as well as some of us had assumed or perhaps simply hoped.

Chubb says the pushback on the pandemic disclosed other more general concerns from the CERT volunteers:

For starters, people were reluctant to step forward. This sort of mission was not what they had in mind when they signed up for training. Others expressed concern that they would be exposed to the disease and might become ill themselves or transmit the illness to someone in their household who was otherwise vulnerable. And still others found it difficult to accommodate the commitment in already busy schedules crowded with other obligations.

All of these explanations seemed reasonable enough and were little cause for concern. What we did not expect was a backlash from some quarters that suggested we were taking advantage of our volunteers to provide free labor for something that the government had not adequately prepared for and which they considered could hardly be called an emergency. Others complained that they were being asked to come to the aid of others besides their neighbors since most clinics were organized in poor communities with inadequate access to health care and a high number of uninsured residents. And still others questioned whether we knew what we were doing at all since no one had prepared them for such responsibilities much less organized them to respond to such situations beforehand.

Chubb concludes:

…we as a larger community of emergency management and homeland security professionals and policy-makers have assumed for far too long that volunteer means free. This can be taken one or both of two ways: 1) free as in without cost and 2) without responsibility or accountability. As it turns out, neither assumption is correct.

The opportunity cost of ignoring volunteers in exchange for making investments in hardware and software rears its ugly head sooner or later. Eventually, disgruntled if not disorganized volunteers will, as ours did Monday night, remind you that the liveware — the people and relationships that make up a community — are assets to be invested in not just protected or neglected.

I think Chubb’s post helps explain both the promise of and problems with CERT. Government officials have promoted the program to tap the interest of the public to contribute and assist the authorities, particularly in emergencies. And in a number of ways, it has been successful as teams have been set up in communities across the U.S. But, as Chubb’s report helps show, there is a need to better elucidate what is the role of CERT, and what are the resources, training and management necessary to accomplish that. FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate has repeatedly expressed his enthusiasm for the CERT program. As CERT marks its 25th year, it is time for the Agency along with local partners to take a new look at the program for its next quarter century.

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 be found here:

QuakeHold straps, fasteners, and putty to help keep your heavy stuff (bookshelves, vases, water heaters…) safely in place.

Safe Hold Security Picture Hangers. Yet another system for keeping those heavy frames from swinging off the wall.

The earthquake-resistant bed. With a hard, carbon-fiber canopy, it looks a little more like a futuristic pod car than a bed. We don’t know if it has had any real-world test runs, but it is an intriguing concept. And if you’re already into ultra-mod decor, hey, why not?

Another heavy (and expensive) thing you don’t want toppling in a quake? Wine bottles. A company called Newood has designed the “earthquake-proof wine rack,” made of laminated layers of Oregon pine, which results in the flexibility of wood with the strength of steel. It was tested by the earthquake engineers at Oregon State University and is said to be able to withstand a 7.1 magnitude earthquake.

Of course a basic emergency kit is a must to have on hand for any disaster. If you have a starter kit, great. You could augment it with treats like canned cheese, canned curry, canned bacon, or even canned cheeseburgers! It may sound silly , but tasty food can be a major comfort in times of disaster.

And last but not least, we can’t forget the pets. For the little Fido or Felix in your life, a company in Japan has come up with wearable earthquake kit vests. Maybe more cute than practical? We’re not sure. In any case, you should probably brush up on both your human and pet first aid skills in case one of you gets injured in either the quake or just the struggle of trying to get a cat to wear a vest!

More prepare-aphernalia can be found on the Oregon Trail Chapter’s blog.

They’re also holding an “Let’s Get Ready To Rumble” Earthquake Preparedness Contest. Just take a photo of your emergency kit, and you can enter to win for a $50 gift certificate.

“Earthquake-Proof Wine Rack”