It’s been a quiet one, with H1N1 taking all the news space this season. National Geographic details why this hurricane season has been so Pacific-focused in a great article here.
In the wake of the 2005 Gulf Coast Hurricanes, coordination and collaboration challenges created obstacles during the government’s response and recovery efforts. Because of the many stakeholders involved in recovery, including all levels of government, it is critical to build collaborative relationships. Building on GAO’s September 2008 report which provided several key recovery practices from past catastrophic disasters, this report presents examples of how federal, state, and local governments have effectively collaborated in the past. GAO reviewed five catastrophic disasters—the Loma Prieta earthquake (California, 1989), Hurricane Andrew (Florida, 1992), the Northridge earthquake (California, 1994), the Kobe earthquake (Japan, 1995), and the Grand Forks/Red River flood (North Dakota and Minnesota, 1997)—to identify recovery lessons. GAO interviewed officials involved in the recovery from these disasters and experts on disaster recovery. GAO also reviewed relevant legislation, policies, and the disaster recovery literature.
What GAO Recommends
GAO recommends the Secretary of Homeland Security direct the Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA) to create a mechanism focused on sharing information and lessons learned regarding disaster recovery, including good collaborative practices. The Department of Homeland Security concurred with our recommendation.
The idea of looking for ‘lessons learned’ across a different types of disasters struck me as interesting. We tend to see research done on the after-effects of hurricanes, for example, but why shouldn’t there be lessons for emergency planners in all types of disaster recoveries?
I’m away next week, so I won’t be blogging, but this week has been a banner one for interesting items.
The National Library of Medicine maintains a collection of more than 30 environmental health websites under the auspices of the Environmental Health and Toxicology SIS (Specialized Information Services). Topics covered range from the specific (Health effects from the collapse of the World Trade Center) to the general (Tornadoes). The links contained within each page vary, but most begin with a set of ‘Overview’ links, all from US Government sites, and then may go on to include links to glossaries, data and research sites, and law and policy. Almost all include links to specialized research from the National Library of Medicine’s databases, such as Pubmed, Toxline, Hazardous Substances Data Bank, ChemID Plus, Household Products Database, Tox Town and Medline Plus.
New hurricane guides available “The Hampton Roads Emergency Management Committee and the Virginia Department of Emergency Management and VDEM have redesigned the Virginia Hurricane Guide. As part of the Ready Virginia public information campaign, the guide contains essential hurricane season information, such as evacuation routes, traffic reversal plans along Interstate 64, bridge/tunnel/ferry closure plans in the Hampton Roads area and family preparedness.
New sections of the guide explain staying in place versus evacuation, the importance of storm surge, and how public shelters are designed to help evacuees. The revised evacuation route section clarifies that I-64 is only one of many evacuation routes, and the guide gives detailed instruction about how to make a family emergency plan, get an emergency supply kit and stay informed during emergencies.
For the 2009 hurricane season, 250,000 copies of the guide were printed; most will be distributed by state and local agencies, private businesses and nonprofit organizations. Any organization interested in distributing the guides should contact the VDEM Public Affairs Office at (866) 782-3470. An interactive, Web-based version is also available at www.ReadyVirginia.gov. A federal homeland security grant paid for the printing costs.”
This article, from Inside Higher Ed, is a nice overview of how several colleges and universities are using the summer to better prepare for an outbreak of H1N1 on campus. Seeing this prompted me to investigate what our campus has done about H1N1, as Virginia is one of the handful of states with a recorded “widespread” outbreak.
This follows last month’s H1N1 Summit, hosted at the National Institutes of Health. I can’t seem to find an archived copy of the webcast, which was streamed live, but this blog post by J. Solomon (“In case of emergency, read blog…”) gives a great overview and links to video from several key speakers.
It’s been interesting to watch publishers open up their H1N1 articles and resources to the general public. (Disclaimer: I know that part is only interesting to me as a librarian. But the question remains: Is the future of publishing a ‘hybrid’ open-source model? Hmmm….)
Here’s a summary:
Scientific American mainly sums up blog entries from the “60 Second Science” blog. But there’s also a detailed interview transcript with Dr. Chris Olsen, Director of the Olsen Laboratory, a veterinary medicine lab in Wisconsin where Influenza ‘A’ viruses are studied, and a link to the April 2009 cover story called, “How to Prevent the Next Pandemic” that describes the work of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative.
The Lancet (a British medical journal) has also opened their pages:
“The Lancet’s H1N1 Resource Centre is the result of a collaborative effort by the editors of over 40 Elsevier-published journals and 11 learned societies who have agreed to make freely available on this site any relevant content. All papers have been selected by a Lancet editor, grouped by topic and fulltext pdfs made available to download free of charge.”
(If you haven’t seen an Elsevier price quote, you can’t appreciate the magnitude of this – Elsevier articles are notoriously expensive.)
Gov. Tim Kaine has approved the Commonwealth of Virginia Emergency Operations Plan Pandemic Influenza Incident Annex VI, now available at http://www.vaemergency.com/library/plans/index.cfm. The annex represents nearly two years of collaboration with many state agencies and provides guidance for non-medical response operations in Virginia to a pandemic influenza event.
Between last year’s energy crisis, the bad economic news and the Tri-Delts walking into the library in their hippy-chick summer dresses, it’s like we’re back to the 70’s. And now, swine flu…
Several librarians have put together ‘meta’ pages of resources relating to the outbreak (not yet an official pandemic or even an epidemic), so I won’t try to re-invent the wheel.
Chris Childs, at the University of Iowa’s Hardin Library for the Health Sciences, has put together a Libguide page of Swine Flu information. (This is the type of guide we’ll be moving to for our subject research guides over the summer, so if you are a user of my ESM Research Guide, this is what you’ll see in the fall. Good stuff.)
This report, from a commercial investment research analysis company, compares this outbreak to SARS and other influenza outbreaks, and focuses on the [possible] economic effects of this particular flu.
Finally, I’ve referenced this site before, so I’ll reference it again: the CDC has a great “Pandemic Influenza” site that links to many resources for planning for and dealing with an outbreak.
Stay well out there. Let’s keep this in the category of “live drill” rather than “real thing”. Wash your hands, don’t touch your face, stay home if you are sick…
The USGS website is a gift that keeps on giving as far as historic information on earthquakes is concerned. Need a list (with descriptions) of the earthquakes which caused 1000 or more deaths since 1900? Here you are. What about US National Seismic Hazard Maps (so people can keep arguing about whether or not earthquakes are predictable events)? Here, along with Seismic Design Values for Buildings, a Java-based calculator which can provide Hazard Curves, design parameters from ASCE and international building codes, and “uniform hazard response spectra”. How about an estimate of the number of people and the names of cities exposed to severe shaking following significant earthquakes worldwide? Yup, that’s here too, under the “PAGER – Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response” heading. Because I’m working on a loaner computer, I can’t look at the Google Earth tools, but I’ve bookmarked them for later because so many of them look interesting. Finally, a page of preparedness-related website links gives great resources for students in our ESM/Disaster Science program, including the LA City Fire Department Earthquake Preparedness Handbook, the NEHRP (the Federal Government’s earthquake risk reduction program), and others.
I know I’m a bit behind, but with the changeover in administrations in Washington comes a change over at FEMA.
Craig Fugate
Craig Fugate, formerly Director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management (a post he held for 8 years), has been named to head FEMA, with Jason R. McNamara coming on as his Chief of Staff. McNamara was formerly Director of Emergency Management at Dewberry, one of FEMA’s largest contractors.
Here’s a video of Fugate at work in his previous job. This is a great example of a fully-stocked “Media Center” with public service announcements, lessons learned, and even sessions with school children available in video format, coupled with copies of disaster plan materials: emergency checklists, disaster supply lists and even links to help Florida businesses create business plans.
