Find your nearest PEP radio station

Do you know where your nearest PEP radio station is? PEP (Primary Entry Point) radio stations are battle-hardened commercial radio stations, usually in the medium wave (AM) band, that serve as initial entry points for national Emergency Alert System traffic.They must have a backup generator for 30 days on the air, along with various other stringent requirements, so in a widespread disaster situation (commonly known as a "SHTF" situation) they could be vital information sources if local infrastructure is down. PEPs are not well known though - to the extent that there are very few places you can find a list of them (I found one in a forum post). So to make life easier, here is a Google Map I created to show the locations of the current 33 PEP's (you can click on markers to show the frequency and station name). According to FEMA, a slew of new PEP stations are being added, so when I get the data on these I will add them to the map.

View EAS PEP Radio Stations in a larger map

Meteor attacks and resilience

I always find it interesting that we can be quite imaginative in thinking about potential new kinds of ways for disasters to happen, but it's not really until we have a real-life event that it sparks enough impetus in us to actively prepare for it. Then we have a buzz of activity, then interest slowly dies off again. Perhaps as humans we just need something concrete and recent to work off.  Yet, the probability of these unlikely events (terrorist attack, solar flares, infrastructure failures, volcanic eruptions) presumably remains the same independent of our recent experience.

Well, the latest imaginative event to become concrete is, it seems, a meteor attack, after hundreds are reported injured today after a meteor exploded over a Russian city, breaking windows and damaging buildings. We will all of course need now to examine the risks of a meteor hitting our community: what is the probability? potential impact? mitigation steps? Should it be in our hazard analysis? What about other things falling from the sky like comets and satellites?

I think it's quite right we should do this, but perhaps even more important is something many in emergency management are starting to talk about: building resilience. This is something I've talked about before in relation to survivalism and emergency management. It also has a cultural connection: for example, as a native Brit who moved to the U.S., it's apparent that the "Dunkirk spirit" that infuses British culture leads to huge resilience, because people naturally band together and help each other out.

So perhaps a good question in response to this is: "what can I seed in my community that will help make it more resilient, whatever happens?"

Trends in Flu Trends

If you're not already familiar with it, Google Flu Trends (see above) has proven amazingly good at predicting outbreaks of flu a week or so in advance of the CDC, by analyzing search terms on Google. However something interesting is happening right now - CDC is showing a drop in positive flu tests and Influenza-Like Illness (ILI) hospital visits in latest data, but it's not reflected in the Google Flu Trends data (although there is a slight reduction in the increase). We'll see what happens next!

Crowdsourced Disaster Assessment for Hurricane Sandy

All I can say is, this is fantastic. FEMA, the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) and MapMill have teamed up to make a crowdsourced disaster assessment tool for the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Very simple - just go to the site, you'll be shown a high resolution image of an area affected by Sandy taken by CAP, with a little magnifying glass. You then follow some simple rules for classifying damage as light, moderate or heavy.  Results are then used to prioritize assessment done by experts at FEMA. A beautifully designed tool, a great example of the use of informatics in disasters, and a great innovation by FEMA.

Firefighting with the Semantic Web

I spend most of my time on this blog talking about social media, emergency management and disaster preparedness. However, most of my academic research is about large scale data aggregation, integration and analysis, with a focus on drug discovery data. Particularly, we have shown how semantic technologies (otherwise known as Semantic Web) can be used to elegantly address a long standing problem of integrating complex heterogenous data sources in a way which enables interesting and critically important patterns to be detected that cross the data sets (for more on this, see http://djwild.info). For a long time I've thought there is a huge potential for applying these techniques to the complex streams of data related to emergencies and disasters, in order to improve emergency response and situational awareness.

So I'm really excited to have stumbled upon the work of Bart van Leeuwen, a firefighter turned Semantic Web expert in Amsterdam who has not just prototyped such a system, but has shown how it can positively impact real world, everyday firefighting operations in the busy city of Amsterdam. For those of us in the U.S., this shows what could be possible if we (academics, computation experts and practitioners) put our minds together!

A good place to start is with the video (also embedded below) of Bart's presentation at SemTechBiz West 2012, along with the associated text description. He also is @semanticfire on Twitter and runs a blog. He also runs a company called Netage related to this work.

Hurricane Sandy Resources

This post is now kept as an archive

Hurricane Sandy is expected to make landfall around 6pm Monday. Most severe effects expected include major flooding, storm surge, wind damage and heavy snowfall. Significant effects are ongoing along the US eastern coast including New York City and Washington DC

Here are some resources for tracking Hurricane Sandy. The storm is predicted to make an unusual westward curve into the Eastern U.S. coast late Monday into early Tuesday, and will likely combine with another weather system to form a significant threat. I will keep this page updated as the storm develops. Please also check out the dashboard and resources tabs on this site for more resources.

For those in the path of Sandy, you can get official general forecasts from the National Hurricane Center, and local information from the NWS Hurricane Local Statements. You can also find twitter feeds of your local emergency management officials on the excellent Map of reliable twitter feeds which was originally set up for Hurricane Irene. General preparation advice can be found on the FEMA blog.

Check out this book and this book to help you prepare for the next disaster!

NEW: Twitter meta list, follow @allhazardsblog/sandy

New York news sources and resources
New York City Office of Emergency Management
Google map of shelters and evacuation zones in NYC
Map of Zone A evacuation areas
NotifyNYC Twitter Feed
New York Times Live Updates on Sandy
WABC-TV
CBS New York
NY Daily News (including live storm updates)

Tracking tools and general information sources

National Hurricane Center - official watches, warnings, advisories, probability cones, etc
Hurricane Local Statements - for specific areas

Stormpulse - high quality maps and tracking tools (subscription)

Weather Underground Sandy Tracking Page - nice tracking resources 
Weather.com SandyTracking Page
VueToo Sandy Situation Page - multiple concurrent maps of the storm's status
Hurricane Tracker iPad app
Hurricane Tracker iPhone app
FEMA blog (weather updates) - updates and preparation information.
Hurricane Sandy Wikipedia Page

Social media tools

Google News on Hurricane Sandy- hits for Sandy on Google News
Google Crisis Map for Sandy (see above)
Tweak the Tweet (TtT) event map for Sandy
Map of reliable twitter feeds - shows feeds of local emergency management agencies, etc (originally for Irene)

Twitter updates for #hurricane OR #sandy

Gulf Coast Hurricane Tracker - blog with updates and discussion
ESRI Tweet Map - map with hurricane track and tweets
Red Cross Shelters on map
Humanity Road aggregation site

Other tools and information

Hurricane Watch Net - streaming audio during active events
Hurricane Sandy Zello channel - 2-way voice chat on Hurricane Sandy

Radio Reference Wiki Major Events - radio frequencies and such like for major disasters (should they happen)

The 7 core areas of preparedness

If you get a chance, go out and buy Backwoods Home magazine this month (Jan/Feb 2012). It's worth the $6 just to read Patrice Lewis' superb article on the 7 core areas of preparedness. There are lots of articles and guides out there that treat this subject trivially (as I've mentioned in one of my previous posts), but this one really nails the family preparedness steps you should be thinking about. Hopefully the article will come out on the Backwoods Home Website before long.