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A $52,000 Homeland Security grant has given Oregon an opportunity to be better prepared for taking care of livestock in natural disasters.
Four enclosed cargo trailers owned by the Oregon Department of Agriculture are supplied to counties throughout the state as part of a plan to rescue animals facing dangers due to disasters, such as floods.
Each trailer comes with a set of tools to help emergency responders.
"When natural disasters affect pets and livestock, it puts an additional burden on emergency response teams to find a way to take care of those animals," explains Don Hansen, ODA state veterinarian. "We've been working hard with emergency managers in the counties to develop plans that include what to do about companion animals and livestock should disasters strike Oregon."
A key part of the plan is the trailer fleet, designed to carry cages and watering and feeding tools. During a disaster, the trailers can be mobilized to the site and provide a portable corral and other equipment to hold livestock.
"We have pretty much everything you would need to set up a short term animal shelter," says Hansen.
"Having the ability to handle animals during disasters has been a major challenge. These trailers will save uncounted hours in getting needed shelter to a given location during an emergency situation."
Securing the federal grant was a joint effort on the part of ODA and Oregon Emergency Management. It is one of the latest pieces in an overall plan that considers the well-being of livestock in a disaster.
Each Oregon county has developed specific emergency response plans as part of an overall statewide effort led by ODA.
"We've aimed at uniformity around the state, but it would be naïve to think that one plan could be developed to fit every scenario in every county," says Hansen. "Each county has developed its own plan for evacuation to address its own capabilities and limitations."
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
Thanks to the Twitter feed of READYColorado for bringing this my attention.
The challenge of citizen preparedness is well illustrated by this letter to the editor to a newspaper in Canada during that nation’s Emergency Preparedness Week. I think anyone involved in public preparedness will empathize:
To the editor:
I guess everyone in Scugog Township is prepared for any emergency that may arise.
They must be, because at the end of Emergency Preparedness Week, on Saturday May 8, the No. 1 fire hall in Port Perry was open to everyone to learn about numerous ways to prepare for emergencies, and no one came.
I know my wife and I were not the only ones disappointed with the turnout. Five speakers were lined up to discuss anything and everything needed to prepare for disasters and emergencies of all kinds.
Some of the emergency situations noted in the past that have affected residents of Scugog were H1N1, increasing windstorms and severe summer weather numerous times, resulting in downed trees and other damage as well as the blackout of 2003.
Do you remember what you and your family went through during that blackout? Were you prepared? It could happen again. Will you be ready? Have you ever considered what could happen if flooding were to occur here? Think about broken dams, torrential rain and backed-up storm drains and septics.
At the seminar, tables were set up with giveaway information and supplies. Volunteers were on hand to inform and assist with information and to answer questions. Enbridge set up and prepared hot dogs, hamburgers and pop for visitors.
We want to thank the chief, the mayor and councillors and all the volunteers that were on hand for this event.
Bruno and Darlene Gauweiler Caesarea
To the editor:
I guess everyone in Scugog Township is prepared for any emergency that may arise.
They must be, because at the end of Emergency Preparedness Week, on Saturday May 8, the No. 1 fire hall in Port Perry was open to everyone to learn about numerous ways to prepare for emergencies, and no one came.
I know my wife and I were not the only ones disappointed with the turnout. Five speakers were lined up to discuss anything and everything needed to prepare for disasters and emergencies of all kinds.
Some of the emergency situations noted in the past that have affected residents of Scugog were H1N1, increasing windstorms and severe summer weather numerous times, resulting in downed trees and other damage as well as the blackout of 2003.
Do you remember what you and your family went through during that blackout? Were you prepared? It could happen again. Will you be ready? Have you ever considered what could happen if flooding were to occur here? Think about broken dams, torrential rain and backed-up storm drains and septics.
At the seminar, tables were set up with giveaway information and supplies. Volunteers were on hand to inform and assist with information and to answer questions. Enbridge set up and prepared hot dogs, hamburgers and pop for visitors.
We want to thank the chief, the mayor and councillors and all the volunteers that were on hand for this event.
Bruno and Darlene Gauweiler Caesarea
Thursday, May 13, 2010
current statistics on citizen readiness “very concerning and frankly kind of frightening,”
Speaking at the Center For National Policy recently, Timothy Manning, FEMA Deputy Administrator for Protection & National Preparedness, said that the current statistics on citizen readiness “very concerning and frankly kind of frightening,” and he spoke about some of the agency’s efforts to strengthen the nation’s resilience to disasters.
At the Center’s event, “Disasters & Resilience,” Manning was questioned by the moderator Stephen Flynn, the Center’s new President, and one of the leading experts on the subject. The full text can be found here. It’s worth reading for those interested in preparedness policy.
In response to a question from Flynn about making preparedness and resilience part of the national culture, Manning acknowledged the challenge:
…the numbers are very concerning and frankly kind of frightening I think. We did a survey last year as part of our community preparedness programs, where we found the same numbers we’ve seen for a great number of years. So what we’ve been doing, we’ve been trying to engage the public for about 50 years in roughly the same way, all through the civil defense era, the Cold War, and to traditional emergency management now. And it’s really about PSAs and talking to the public about – some variation on have a plan, get involved. It’s really been about the same message and engaging the same way. And we’ve always seen the response engagement of the public in about 50 percent, hasn’t really moved. Slides a little bit here and there.
But what’s most concerning is that when you actually deconstruct that number and you ask, “have you actually done this, have you done this, have you done this,” the things that we mean when we say “are you prepared,” the number’s actually in the 30s. It’s actually about 37 or 40 percent. Most people, as like 67 percent of respondents, say that they plan on relying on government, that they won’t take any actions and they plan on relying on government in the first couple of days.
It’s very concerning. And we’re just discussing that the best response is the one we don’t have to mount. What we need to do is build our communities, build our societies to a point where they are prepared. But I think, like we’re trying to do across the whole spectrum of homeland security preparedness, we have to recognize our communities and we have to plan for the community, not just plan for easy. So we have – we say preparedness means this. Maybe we need to be a little bit more sophisticated than that. Maybe what we need to say is these are the things you can do to be prepared. But work at a more – work through our actual communities.
One interesting community-based initiative that Manning mentioned is an effort to build the preparedness of Los Angeles firefighters and their families to develop them as leaders (along the lines of the CERT program) in a potential disaster response.
There were a number of useful preparedness and resilience related topics covered during the discussion. But I wanted to highlight one point that Manning addressed on whether the agency was embracing an “all hazards” philosophy:
All-hazard – the old – the traditional doctrinal approach to emergency management has been one of preparing for all hazards and that was really the catch phrase, “all hazards emergency management.” And what that really meant was a maximization of resources, a realization that where the majority of the work, the preparedness and response work, happens is at the community level. It’s not at the federal level. The federal government’s job is mainly to step in and assist governors in assisting their local communities in a response. And when you get to the community level, the largest of the communities, in cities like New York and Los Angeles, notwithstanding those resources just aren’t there to do the level of detail planning required for each particular eventuality.
What we also know is that there is so much variation in any particular hazard that that doesn’t really bring a lot of value to the table sometimes. I think a good example is in the pandemic flu preparedness work that we’ve done over the past couple of years. It was really predicated on avian influenza and then influenza virus migrating from Asia, in East Asia.
When H1N1 popped up in North America, it was a novel virus really originating here, much of the detailed work we did was not as usable as it could have been had we taken a broader approach. The all-hazard preparedness is a way to think about that. Where it gets or it can get difficult or it can get tricky is that there are obviously very specific things that are required for some specific hazards. There is those large percentages, that 50 to 60 percent of the work that you need to do to prepare for a hurricane is also the same you need to do in response to an earthquake or an accident or a terrorist attack. But there are those – the balance of things are very different.
The response, the capability, the equipment, the training you need to respond to a nuclear, a ND, a nuclear detonation is different than the response, the capability, the training, the equipment you need to respond to a radiological accident. So we have to keep that in mind. So while we can focus a great deal of our efforts on those few things that have value across the whole spectrum of accidents, the normal daily public safety to natural disasters or intentional terrorist attacks, we cannot lose sight of those things that are specific to the individual hazards or a particular attack tactic.
There are large numbers of things that we need to individually focus on as well. But if I may, I think that another important piece to this, though, it’s not just been an all-hazard preparedness in the way that we’ve been doing it for a long time. That there is a – there can sometimes be a tendency to say that all-hazard emergency management is simply a back to the future, a slide back to the way we had done in the 1990s. But that loses sight of what we’ve learned. And the recent shift towards thinking of things in the terms of resilience is really another way to think of all-hazard emergency management, where it’s less about what are the discrete preparedness things we need to do to be able to respond to this set of disasters, but what are those things that we can do in our communities that offer second and third order effects. They get us where we want to be.
I agree with Manning that the old ‘all hazards’ framework is not adequate for the range of present threats — for policy makers, responders and the public. From a citizen perspective on what we need to know to be prepared and informed, there are definitely commonalities between hazards. However the differences, as Manning points out, can be important. In fact, I have argued on the blog that when it comes to what the public should be aware of there are sometimes commonalities that cut across hazards (ie. pandemic/bioterror attack) rather than all hazards and some threats may need to be redefined to reflect their real impact (ie. should a ‘dirty bomb’ or chemical attack be considered a WMD along with a nuclear and biological attack?).
But modifying the all hazards approach also raises the stakes for the government to inform the public of what more they need to know about various threats (which by and large has not been done). And, I would contend that the more Americans have been told beforehand will only increase their resilience and ability to bounce back quickly from disasters (particularly terrorism).
At the Center’s event, “Disasters & Resilience,” Manning was questioned by the moderator Stephen Flynn, the Center’s new President, and one of the leading experts on the subject. The full text can be found here. It’s worth reading for those interested in preparedness policy.
In response to a question from Flynn about making preparedness and resilience part of the national culture, Manning acknowledged the challenge:
…the numbers are very concerning and frankly kind of frightening I think. We did a survey last year as part of our community preparedness programs, where we found the same numbers we’ve seen for a great number of years. So what we’ve been doing, we’ve been trying to engage the public for about 50 years in roughly the same way, all through the civil defense era, the Cold War, and to traditional emergency management now. And it’s really about PSAs and talking to the public about – some variation on have a plan, get involved. It’s really been about the same message and engaging the same way. And we’ve always seen the response engagement of the public in about 50 percent, hasn’t really moved. Slides a little bit here and there.
But what’s most concerning is that when you actually deconstruct that number and you ask, “have you actually done this, have you done this, have you done this,” the things that we mean when we say “are you prepared,” the number’s actually in the 30s. It’s actually about 37 or 40 percent. Most people, as like 67 percent of respondents, say that they plan on relying on government, that they won’t take any actions and they plan on relying on government in the first couple of days.
It’s very concerning. And we’re just discussing that the best response is the one we don’t have to mount. What we need to do is build our communities, build our societies to a point where they are prepared. But I think, like we’re trying to do across the whole spectrum of homeland security preparedness, we have to recognize our communities and we have to plan for the community, not just plan for easy. So we have – we say preparedness means this. Maybe we need to be a little bit more sophisticated than that. Maybe what we need to say is these are the things you can do to be prepared. But work at a more – work through our actual communities.
One interesting community-based initiative that Manning mentioned is an effort to build the preparedness of Los Angeles firefighters and their families to develop them as leaders (along the lines of the CERT program) in a potential disaster response.
There were a number of useful preparedness and resilience related topics covered during the discussion. But I wanted to highlight one point that Manning addressed on whether the agency was embracing an “all hazards” philosophy:
All-hazard – the old – the traditional doctrinal approach to emergency management has been one of preparing for all hazards and that was really the catch phrase, “all hazards emergency management.” And what that really meant was a maximization of resources, a realization that where the majority of the work, the preparedness and response work, happens is at the community level. It’s not at the federal level. The federal government’s job is mainly to step in and assist governors in assisting their local communities in a response. And when you get to the community level, the largest of the communities, in cities like New York and Los Angeles, notwithstanding those resources just aren’t there to do the level of detail planning required for each particular eventuality.
What we also know is that there is so much variation in any particular hazard that that doesn’t really bring a lot of value to the table sometimes. I think a good example is in the pandemic flu preparedness work that we’ve done over the past couple of years. It was really predicated on avian influenza and then influenza virus migrating from Asia, in East Asia.
When H1N1 popped up in North America, it was a novel virus really originating here, much of the detailed work we did was not as usable as it could have been had we taken a broader approach. The all-hazard preparedness is a way to think about that. Where it gets or it can get difficult or it can get tricky is that there are obviously very specific things that are required for some specific hazards. There is those large percentages, that 50 to 60 percent of the work that you need to do to prepare for a hurricane is also the same you need to do in response to an earthquake or an accident or a terrorist attack. But there are those – the balance of things are very different.
The response, the capability, the equipment, the training you need to respond to a nuclear, a ND, a nuclear detonation is different than the response, the capability, the training, the equipment you need to respond to a radiological accident. So we have to keep that in mind. So while we can focus a great deal of our efforts on those few things that have value across the whole spectrum of accidents, the normal daily public safety to natural disasters or intentional terrorist attacks, we cannot lose sight of those things that are specific to the individual hazards or a particular attack tactic.
There are large numbers of things that we need to individually focus on as well. But if I may, I think that another important piece to this, though, it’s not just been an all-hazard preparedness in the way that we’ve been doing it for a long time. That there is a – there can sometimes be a tendency to say that all-hazard emergency management is simply a back to the future, a slide back to the way we had done in the 1990s. But that loses sight of what we’ve learned. And the recent shift towards thinking of things in the terms of resilience is really another way to think of all-hazard emergency management, where it’s less about what are the discrete preparedness things we need to do to be able to respond to this set of disasters, but what are those things that we can do in our communities that offer second and third order effects. They get us where we want to be.
I agree with Manning that the old ‘all hazards’ framework is not adequate for the range of present threats — for policy makers, responders and the public. From a citizen perspective on what we need to know to be prepared and informed, there are definitely commonalities between hazards. However the differences, as Manning points out, can be important. In fact, I have argued on the blog that when it comes to what the public should be aware of there are sometimes commonalities that cut across hazards (ie. pandemic/bioterror attack) rather than all hazards and some threats may need to be redefined to reflect their real impact (ie. should a ‘dirty bomb’ or chemical attack be considered a WMD along with a nuclear and biological attack?).
But modifying the all hazards approach also raises the stakes for the government to inform the public of what more they need to know about various threats (which by and large has not been done). And, I would contend that the more Americans have been told beforehand will only increase their resilience and ability to bounce back quickly from disasters (particularly terrorism).
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
2010 Ushers In Increased Wildfire Risk For NW
Wed, 12 May 2010 08:34:45 -0500
SEATTLE, Wash. -- El Nino weather patterns and a relatively mild winter left Idaho, eastern Washington and south central Oregon drier than normal and vulnerable to wildfire. In addition to urging extreme caution with campfires, fireworks, trash fires, grills and other heat sources, FEMA Acting Regional Administrator Dennis Hunsinger encourages residents living on wooded lots and wildland/urban interface areas to stay informed on local conditions.
SEATTLE, Wash. -- El Nino weather patterns and a relatively mild winter left Idaho, eastern Washington and south central Oregon drier than normal and vulnerable to wildfire. In addition to urging extreme caution with campfires, fireworks, trash fires, grills and other heat sources, FEMA Acting Regional Administrator Dennis Hunsinger encourages residents living on wooded lots and wildland/urban interface areas to stay informed on local conditions.
USFA Releases Grill Fires on Residential Properties Report
Contact:
USFA Press Office: (301) 447-1853
Washington, DC — The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) United States Fire Administration (USFA) issued a special report today examining the characteristics of grill fires on residential properties. The report, Grill Fires on Residential Properties, was developed by USFA’s National Fire Data Center and is further evidence of FEMA’s commitment to sharing information with fire departments and first responders around the country to help them keep their communities safe.
“Grills, hibachis, and barbecues on residential properties continue to be a high fire risk,” said Kelvin J. Cochran, United States Fire Administrator. “It is crucial that households be mindful of fire safety when using these pieces of equipment, especially as the summer season approaches. Please join with the USFA in sharing this report’s information with your communities so that the necessary precautions can be taken to help prevent fires and save lives.”
The report is part of the Topical Fire Report Series and is based on 2006 to 2008 data from the National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS). According to the report, an estimated 5,700 grill fires on residential properties occur annually in the United States, resulting in an estimated average of 10 deaths, 100 injuries, and $37 million in property loss. Over half (57 percent) of grill fires on residential properties occur in the four months of May, June, July, and August and almost half (49 percent) of these fires occur during the hours of 5 to 8 p.m. In addition, 32 percent of grill fires on residential properties start on patios, terraces, screened-in porches, or courtyards, while an additional 24 percent start on exterior balconies and unenclosed porches. Finally, propane is the power source in 69 percent of all grill fires on residential properties.
The topical reports are designed to explore facets of the U.S. fire problem as depicted through data collected in NFIRS. Each topical report briefly addresses the nature of the specific fire or fire-related topic, highlights important findings from the data, and may suggest other resources to consider for further information. Also included are recent examples of fire incidents that demonstrate some of the issues addressed in the report or that put the report topic in context.
For further information regarding other topical reports or any programs and training available at the United States Fire Administration, visit www.usfa.fema.gov.
USFA Press Office: (301) 447-1853
Washington, DC — The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) United States Fire Administration (USFA) issued a special report today examining the characteristics of grill fires on residential properties. The report, Grill Fires on Residential Properties, was developed by USFA’s National Fire Data Center and is further evidence of FEMA’s commitment to sharing information with fire departments and first responders around the country to help them keep their communities safe.
“Grills, hibachis, and barbecues on residential properties continue to be a high fire risk,” said Kelvin J. Cochran, United States Fire Administrator. “It is crucial that households be mindful of fire safety when using these pieces of equipment, especially as the summer season approaches. Please join with the USFA in sharing this report’s information with your communities so that the necessary precautions can be taken to help prevent fires and save lives.”
The report is part of the Topical Fire Report Series and is based on 2006 to 2008 data from the National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS). According to the report, an estimated 5,700 grill fires on residential properties occur annually in the United States, resulting in an estimated average of 10 deaths, 100 injuries, and $37 million in property loss. Over half (57 percent) of grill fires on residential properties occur in the four months of May, June, July, and August and almost half (49 percent) of these fires occur during the hours of 5 to 8 p.m. In addition, 32 percent of grill fires on residential properties start on patios, terraces, screened-in porches, or courtyards, while an additional 24 percent start on exterior balconies and unenclosed porches. Finally, propane is the power source in 69 percent of all grill fires on residential properties.
The topical reports are designed to explore facets of the U.S. fire problem as depicted through data collected in NFIRS. Each topical report briefly addresses the nature of the specific fire or fire-related topic, highlights important findings from the data, and may suggest other resources to consider for further information. Also included are recent examples of fire incidents that demonstrate some of the issues addressed in the report or that put the report topic in context.
For further information regarding other topical reports or any programs and training available at the United States Fire Administration, visit www.usfa.fema.gov.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Preparing For The Next Haiti, With Maps, Texts, And Tweets
Nathan Hodge of Wired.com’s Danger Room blog has a good post, Preparing For The Next Haiti, With Maps, Texts, And Tweets, which discusses the impressive high-tech volunteer response to the earthquake. Hodge attended the Haiti Tech Meetup yesterday at the U.S. State Department yesterday and spoke to a number of those involved in the recovery effort:
In the weeks following the January 12 earthquake, the relief effort in Haiti relied in part on crowdsourcing: an army of volunteers in the United States and elsewhere helped sift through emergency text messages, translated them and send them on to first responders on the scene. According to Rob Munro, a graduate fellow at Stanford who works with the nonprofit Energy for Opportunity, about 40,000 useful text messages came through the system in the first six weeks, meaning that thousands of Haitians received timely requests for food, water or medical help.
At the height of the crisis, texts were arriving every few seconds. But volunteers were able to receive a message, translate it and and send a grid location to teams on the ground within a matter of minutes. But the high-tech Haiti volunteer response also depended in large part on personal connections, and the mobilization of the Haitian diaspora in North America, for it to work. Now development agencies, relief workers and even the U.S. government are looking at ways to reproduce the experiment in the next emergency…
The full article can be found here http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/05/preparing-for-the-next-haiti-with-maps-texts-and-tweets/
In the weeks following the January 12 earthquake, the relief effort in Haiti relied in part on crowdsourcing: an army of volunteers in the United States and elsewhere helped sift through emergency text messages, translated them and send them on to first responders on the scene. According to Rob Munro, a graduate fellow at Stanford who works with the nonprofit Energy for Opportunity, about 40,000 useful text messages came through the system in the first six weeks, meaning that thousands of Haitians received timely requests for food, water or medical help.
At the height of the crisis, texts were arriving every few seconds. But volunteers were able to receive a message, translate it and and send a grid location to teams on the ground within a matter of minutes. But the high-tech Haiti volunteer response also depended in large part on personal connections, and the mobilization of the Haitian diaspora in North America, for it to work. Now development agencies, relief workers and even the U.S. government are looking at ways to reproduce the experiment in the next emergency…
The full article can be found here http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/05/preparing-for-the-next-haiti-with-maps-texts-and-tweets/
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