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Disaster Response

Exercise 24: Using Social Media for Crisis Response

submitted by Samuel Bendett

      

worldfinancialreview.com - By George H. Bressler, Murray E. Jennex & Eric G. Frost

“Can populations self-organize a crisis response? This is a field report on the first two efforts in a continuing series of exercises termed Exercise 24 or X24. These exercises attempted to demonstrate that self-organizing groups can form and respond to a crisis using low-cost social media and other emerging web technologies.”

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Predicting Locations of Emergency & Damage During Disaster Using VGI Data

submitted by Alister Wm Macintyre

                                                     (CLICK ON IMAGE BELOW - TO ENLARGE)

      

ushahidi.com - by Prateek Budhwar

The VGI data obtained from the Ushahidi-Haiti platform during the first 72 hours of Earthquake in Haiti can be used for predicting the locations of ‘Emergency and damaged areas’ using Ushahidi Reports in Port-au-Prince. Two rapid and very successful VGI deployments helped coordinate disaster response after a devastating magnitude 7 earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) project volunteers working outside Haiti created a digital street map of Port-au-Prince and other places in Haiti very rapidly using fine-resolution imagery to trace vector maps of streets and other features.

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Mexico Quake Tweet Volume and Characteristics

submitted by Samuel Bendett

Sender: crisismappers
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:55:14 -0700
To: <crisismappers>
ReplyTo: crisismappers
Subject: [CrisisMappers] Mexico quake tweet volume and characteristics
Some relatively random data points...

We've saw about 10,000 English tweets in the first hour and 23,000 in the second. Third hour is down, will be about half the rate of the second hour if sustained.

Recurring themes include words like rattle, suffer, long slow roller, hard, saddened, worried, awful, hate, bad.

I'm seeing a fair bit of "help us report" tweets, which is coming from a tweet that said "earthquake preparedness helps us report none to minor damage and no victims so far," from Mexico City.

English-language tweets from Mexico are making up 8 percent of the total. 55 percent are from the U.S.

Spanish tweets - 488 in the first hour, 1,400 in the second and current rate will product about 1,000 in the third hour.

Most common words in the Spanish tweets are disfrutar and malo.

Spanish tweets are coming almost 50/50 from Mexico and the U.S.

Almost 75 percent of the Spanish tweets were from men, v. a close to 50/50 split for English.

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Save the Date - Second Annual Conference on “Building Resilience through Public-Private Partnerships”

Save the Date!

                                                       Second Annual Conference on

                                 "Building Resilience through Public-Private Partnerships"

                                              July 23 - 24, 2012, Colorado Springs, CO

Sponsored by United States Northern Command in collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA

US RIO+2.0 Conference at Stanford

If you have an interest in joining the US RIO+2.0 conference on sustainability remotely, go to:

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Creation of Next-Gen Public Safety Comms Net Should Be Managed by Non-Profit, Says Study

submitted by Mike Kraft

gsnmagazine.com - by Mark Rockwell - February 1, 2012

The next generation public safety communications network should be managed by a non-governmental, non-profit organization that could impartially reconcile the myriad standards and procedures affecting emergency responders nationwide, said a report by an independent government advisory committee.

It also recommended that such a network should take advantage of “assigned public safety spectrum.” Congress has been trying to get spectrum for a national public safety network for years, battling over whether to assign the spectrum directly to first responders or auction it off to communications companies, so they can share it with responders and manage its back-office functions.

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Report on the Domestic Natural Disaster Health Workforce is officially released

The National Center for Disaster Medicine and Public Health - ncdmph.usuhs.edu - February 1, 2012

Greetings NCDMPH Stakeholders,

The NCDMPH is extremely proud to release the Report on the Domestic Natural Disaster Health Workforce, a landscape analysis describing selected aspects of the health professions workforce who would respond to a catastrophic domestic natural disaster.

As the main output of our workforce project, the report analyzes the core Federal departments supporting Emergency Support Function #8 (ESF#8) by examining three key occupational sub-groups (emergency and critical care physicians, emergency and critical care nurses, and paramedics) at the national, state and local levels.

The report offers 14 recommendations on a number of issues, including: double counting of responders, volunteer failure to respond, an aging medical workforce, human capital development, personnel asset visibility, readiness and the deployment of subunits.

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New NRC Hazard Analysis Earthquake Study Released

submitted by Kay Goss

                 

US NRC study released today on "New Seismic Model Will Refine Hazard Analysis at U.S. Nuclear Plants" and performs studies at many central and eastern U.S. susceptible locations. The Central and Eastern United States Seismic Source Characterization for Nuclear Facilities (CEUS SSC) Project was conducted from April 2008 to December 2011 to develop a new, regional seismic source model for use in conducting and reviewing probabilistic seismic hazard analyses (PSHAs) for nuclear facilities in the CEUS. PSHA is a method for assessing site-specific seismic hazard that includes getting the best estimate of ground motions and a transparent quantitative accounting of uncertainty. The results of PSHA are used in seismic design and in calculating seismic risk. 

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FEMA Urges Greater Public-Private Cooperation in Disaster Response

submitted by Samuel Bendett

Homeland Security News Wire - January 24, 2012

       

New Orleans, La., Jan. 17, 2012 -- FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, guest speaker for the International Disaster Conference and Expo, emphasizes the Federal Government's initial response to a disaster is to get people to safety, transport the injured and assist in the reestablishment of infrastructure. Restoration of infrastructure is critical and involves getting private sector entities up and running so gas stations, food establishments, hotels and other essential private businesses are operable. This allows volunteers, non government organizations and emergency responders to effectively help the affected community in response and recovery operations. FEMA/Ralph Simcox

Speaking at the International Disaster Conference and Exposition, Craig Fugate, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), urged emergency planners to take a broader view of disaster response and include the private sector.

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Resilience Alliance

There are many definitions of resilience from simple deterministic views of resilience anchored in Newtonian mechanics to far more dynamic views of resilience from a systems perspective, including insights from quantum mechanics and the sciences of complexity.  One baseline perspective of resilience sees it in terms of the viability of socio-ecological systems as the foundation for sustainability.  For those that are ready to look beyond resilience as the ability to return to the "normal state" before a disaster, take a look at:

http://www.resalliance.org/

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