COPE Preparedness

COPE Preparedness Conducting a Workshop on 5/15/13

Lonna Calhoun — Sat, 11 May 2013 23:00:40 +0000

If a disaster occurred today would you be prepared? Would your family be OK if you could not reach or communicate with them for hours or days?

Disasters will happen, we are all vulnerable but we can take easy basic steps that could mean survival. This FREE workshop will give you information and resources to prepare your household with a simple plan that will protect yourself, your family and your neighborhood.

Workshop Topics: Harbor Area specific hazards to be aware of and prepare for; The basics of family preparedness; How to survive the loss of power, water, food, medical services, shelter, communication, ATM’s and transportation;

DATE: Wednesday, May 15, 2013
TIME: 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Location: Harbor Gateway Library (24000 S. Western, Harbor City)

How to create a neighborhood plan to help each other with resources, supplies, skills and communication in those first critical hours or days when our first responders cannot be there.

In conjunction with the Harbor City Neighborhood Council Meeting

Workshop Presenter: Lonna Calhoun, CEM, Founder and Director of COPE Preparedness, FEMA and IAEM Certified Emergency Manager, Ambassador, American Red Cross

Preparing Local Hospitals for Disasters

Lonna Calhoun — Sat, 11 May 2013 21:36:25 +0000

By Christopher Riccardi: Emergency Preparedness, Safety & Security, Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center San Pedro

Mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery…these are actions that Emergency Preparedness personnel take to heart. These are more than idle words. These are the driving mantra in any successful emergency management program. Hospitals, EMS agencies, cities and communities across the country go to great lengths to prepare for and to respond to disasters. Disasters come in the form of natural and or human induced events. As we have seen recently with the Boston Marathon bombings, the West Texas fertilizer plant explosion and Super Storm Sandy that being prepared can and will reduce the number of casualties due to a disaster event. Practice prepares us for real life. Working together saves lives! Imagine the outcome in Boston if the First Aid station was not in immediate proximity to the explosions. What if NYU didn’t evacuate their patients prior to being inundated by the storm surge? These are lessons to be learned for all, but are also experiences that hospitals take very seriously. On April 26, 2013, Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center San Pedro conducted a Full Scale Disaster Exercise in conjunction with local Fire Departments and in excess of 100 local college Nursing student victims to test their capabilities if a disaster happened on the hospital campus. This event was based on an explosion at one of the local petrochemical facilities. This potential threat is identified in the Hazards and Vulnerability Analysis and thusly, one that the hospital will mitigate and prepare for. Hospital response to these events are crucial to enable them to provide medical care to their community in times of crisis. To conduct an exercise of this magnitude truly tests their ability to respond and to educate staff in what to expect in managing a large number of victims. These exercises are evaluated for what went well as well as opportunities for improvement. Take comfort in knowing that hospitals take their responsibilities to the community seriously. A well prepared community through groups like COPE Preparedness, enable the hospitals to deliver medical care in responding to disasters.

NOTE: COPE Preparedness Board Member Christopher Riccardi is the Disaster Coordinator for Providence- Little Company of Mary Medical Center Torrance/San Pedro. He was one of the driving forces behind organizing the comprehensive full scale exercise described in this article.

SAN PEDRO (CBSLA.com) — First responders participated in a mock disaster drill at a South Bay hospital Friday morning involving a fake bombing.

Planned for more than a year, the disaster drill was held at Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center San Pedro at 8 a.m. and included participants from emergency response agencies.

“The horrific bombing at the Boston Marathon and the explosion in West, Texas, last week are solemn reminders of the need for hospitals and first responders to train for disaster,” officials said.

The mock disaster stemmed from an unknown natural bomb blast and included more than 100 victims and a unified command center staffed with law enforcement and medical personnel.

“We have a combined incident command center today that will include the Torrance Fire Department, LA County Fire Department, LA City Fire Department and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department as well as Providence Little Company of Mary San Pedro employees,” nurse Colleen Wyllie said.

Healthcare volunteers from across the state who want disaster training also participated.

The drill was completed at 10 a.m.

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2013/04/26/medical-teams-first-responders-to-hone-disaster-response-skills-in-fake-bombing-drill/

Why Boston’s Hospitals Were Ready

Lonna Calhoun — Wed, 08 May 2013 16:44:10 +0000

The bombs at the Boston Marathon were designed to maim and kill, and they did. Three people died within the first moments of the blast. More than a hundred and seventy people were injured. They had their limbs blown off, vital arteries severed, bones fractured, flesh torn open by shrapnel or scorched by the blasts’ heat. Yet it now appears that every one of the wounded alive when rescuers reached them will survive.

Medically speaking, this is no small accomplishment. We’ve seen bombs like this in the battlefields of the Middle East, but rarely in cities like Boston. In the past century of wartime conflict, explosive devices have escalated to become the predominant cause of military casualties. Among American personnel wounded in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they have accounted for three-quarters of injuries; gunshot wounds for just twenty per cent. It has been an historic accomplishment for military medical units to bring case-fatality rates from such injuries down from twenty-five per cent in previous conflicts to ten per cent today. And according to data from the Israeli National Trauma Registry, explosives used in terror attacks have tended to be three times deadlier than those used in war—because civilians don’t have armor, because victims span a wider range of age and health, and because preparedness tends to be less systematic. Nonetheless, in Boston, they survived.

How did this happen? Something more significant occurred than professionals merely adhering to smart policies and procedures. What we saw unfold was the cultural legacy of the September 11th attacks and all that has followed in the decade-plus since. We are not innocents anymore.

The explosions took place at 2:50 P.M., twelve seconds apart. Medical personnel manning the runners’ first-aid tent swiftly converted it into a mass-casualty triage unit. Emergency medical teams mobilized en masse from around the city, resuscitated the injured, and somehow dispersed them to eight different hospitals in minutes, despite chaos and snarled traffic.

My hospital, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, received thirty-one victims, twenty-eight of them with significant injuries. Seven arrived nearly at once, starting at 3:08 P.M. All required emergency surgery. The first to go to surgery—a patient in shock, hemorrhaging profusely, with inadequate breathing and a near-completely severed leg—was resuscitated and on an operating table by 3:25 P.M., just thirty-five minutes after the blast. The rest followed, one after the other, spaced by just minutes. Twelve patients in all would undergo surgery—mostly vascular and orthopedic procedures—before the evening was done.

This kind of orchestration happened all across the city. Massachusetts General Hospital also received thirty-one victims—at least four of whom required amputations. Boston Medical Center received twenty-three victims. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center handled twenty-one. Boston Children’s Hospital took in ten children, ages two to twelve. Tufts Medical Center and St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center each treated eighteen victims. One emergency physician told me he’d never heard so many ambulance sirens before in his life.

There’s a way such events are supposed to work. Each hospital has an incident commander who coördinates the clearing of emergency bays and hospital beds to open capacity, the mobilization of clinical staff and medical equipment for treatment, and communication with the city’s emergency command center. At my hospital, Stanley Ashley, a general surgeon and our chief medical officer, was that person. I talked to him after the event—I had been out of the city at the time of the explosions—and he told me that no sooner had he set up his command post and begun making phone calls then the first wave of victims arrived. Everything happened too fast for any ritualized plan to accommodate.

So what did you do, I asked him.

“I mostly let people do their jobs,” he said. He never needed to call anyone. Around a hundred nurses, doctors, X-ray staff, transport staff, you name it showed up as soon as they heard the news. They wanted to help, and they knew how. As one colleague put it, they did on a large scale what they knew how to do on a small scale. They broke up into teams of six or so people, one trauma team for each patient. A senior nurse and physician stood at the door to the ambulance bay triaging the patients going to the teams. The operating-room director handled triage to, and communication with, the operating rooms. Another staff member saw the need for a traffic cop and began shooing extra clinicians into the waiting room, where they could stand by to be called upon.

Richard Wolfe, the chief of the emergency department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, told me he had much the same experience there. Of twenty-one casualties, seventeen were serious and seven required emergency surgery. One patient came in with both legs almost completely amputated already. Another’s leg was too mangled to save. Numerous victims had open, bleeding wounds, with shrapnel and shards of fractured bone. One had a lung injury from the blast. Another was burned on over thirty per cent of the body. One had to have an eye removed. Wolfe arrived in the emergency department expecting to take charge of assigning everyone responsibilities.

“But everybody spontaneously knew the dance moves,” he said. He didn’t have to tell people much of what to do at all.

I spoke to Deb Mulloy, the nurse in charge of our operating rooms that afternoon, and a few of the other nursing leaders to find out how they knew the dance moves. Mulloy began mobilizing as soon as she saw the news flash onto a television screen. Others learned through Twitter, text messages, smartphone news apps. They all began to act before the alarm had been sounded.

“We just knew this was real,” Mulloy said, “and a lot of people could be hurt.”

Change of nursing shift is at three o’clock. So she immediately notified the day shift to stay on. No one wanted to leave, anyway. This doubled the available staff.

The nurses put all scheduled surgery on hold and began readying eight rooms. They ordered equipment trays for vascular and orthopedic procedures to be brought up from stock supply. They called an orthopedics-manufacturer representative for extra hardware to be mobilized. They got in touch with the blood bank, which was already securing blood from other states. They communicated with other operating rooms around the city to make sure they had enough supplies of equipment, too.

How did they know to get eight rooms ready, I asked. And how did they know to get them ready for vascular and orthopedic procedures? “Did someone tell you?”

“No,” said Brenda McKonly, one of the senior nurse leaders. She just saw the descriptions of the explosion like everyone else, made a surmise about the injuries, and recognized that they needed to get as many rooms ready as they could. To be on the safe side, the staff also got equipment for one room to be ready for a neurosurgical injury and another for a thoracic injury. But as word filtered down from the emergency department, it became clear that their original surmise was correct. All eight rooms would be required, and nearly all the cases involved vascular and orthopedic injuries.

Talking to people about that day, I was struck by how ready and almost rehearsed they were for this event. A decade earlier, nothing approaching their level of collaboration and efficiency would have occurred. We have, as one colleague put it to me, replaced our pre-9/11 naïveté with post-9/11 sobriety. Where before we’d have been struck dumb with shock about such events, now we are almost calculating about them. When ball bearings and nails were found in the wounds of the victims, everyone understood the bombs had been packed with them as projectiles. At every hospital, clinicians considered the possibility of chemical or radiation contamination, a second wave of attacks, or a direct attack on a hospital. Even nonmedical friends e-mailed and texted me to warn people about secondary and tertiary explosive devices aimed at responders. Everyone’s imaginations have come to encompass these once unimaginable events.

Hence the grim efficiency with which the city responded. Organizers halted the race. Runners who’d trained for weeks for the event turned away from the finish line in bewildered but stoic acceptance. The press, for the most part, rightly hesitated to amplify unsubstantiated claims about the identity of the perpetrators.

Risks of further attack required assessment. Panic had to be averted. Criminal evidence had to be secured. And above all, victims needed to be saved.

What prepared us? Ten years of war have brought details of attacks like these to our towns through news, images, and the soldiers who saw and encountered them. Almost every hospital has a surgeon or nurse or medic with battlefield experience, sometimes several. Many also had trauma personnel who deployed to Haiti after the earthquake, Banda Aceh after the tsunami, and elsewhere. Disaster response has become an area of wide interest and study. Cities and towns have conducted disaster drills, including one in Boston I was involved in that played out the scenario of a dirty-bomb explosion at Logan Airport on an airliner from France. The Massachusetts General Hospital brought in Israeli physicians to help revamp their disaster-response planning. Richard Wolfe at the Beth Israel Deaconess recalled an emergency physician’s presentation of the medical response required after the Aurora, Colorado, movie-theatre shooting of seventy people last summer. From 9/11 to Newtown, we’ve all watched with not only horror but also grave attention the myriad ways in which the sociopathy of killers has combined with the technology of inflicting mass casualty.

We’ve learned, and we’ve absorbed. This is not cause for either celebration or satisfaction. That we have come to this state of existence is a great sadness. But it is our great fortune.

Last year, after the Aurora shooting, Ron Walls, the chief of emergency medicine at my hospital, gave a lecture titled “Are We Ready?”

In Boston, it turns out we all were.

Photograph, of a patient being transported to an ambulance at Copley Square, by John Blanding/The Boston Globe/Getty.

Learn About Emergency Preparedness

Lonna Calhoun — Sun, 05 May 2013 23:37:57 +0000

The Los Angeles Fire Department’s Community Emergency Response Team, or CERT, wants to help locals find out what happens in the event of an emergency.

The LAFD is sponsor a workshop to help area residents learn about what happens during an emergency as well as the role the National Guard plays when it comes to responding to a disaster, according to CERT Battalion Coordinator Chris Nevil.

The seminar is also “oriented to the tens of thousands of Angelenos that have been CERT-trained in the past 25 years, as well as others with an interest in emergency preparedness,” Nevil said.

Information, including what types of disasters the National Guard responds to, how they work with police, fire and other first responders as well as with local volunteers will be addressed.

A top National Guard emergency management of?cial, Sergeant Oscar Soto, is scheduled to speak.

The free workshop will take place from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Tuesday in the training room of Fire Station Five located at 8900 South Emerson in Westchester.

To find out more information or to RSVP, email lafdbatt4cert@gmail.com.

Emergency Preparedness in American Cities Since 9/11

Lonna Calhoun — Sun, 05 May 2013 23:32:57 +0000

The police response to Monday’s bomb attacks in Boston was a sign that cities across the US are far better prepared for random attacks than they once were.

Anecdotally, at least, the police and emergency response in Boston Monday was efficient and effective, says Bruce Hoffman, an expert in terrorism studies at Georgetown University.

“At least from what we know about it, it was even more organized than the response to the July 7th, 2005 bombings in London.

“Certainly in the decade since 9/11 in the United States, the training, the instruction, the knowledge, [and] the rehearsals that federal, state and especially local law enforcement and emergency responders have engaged in left them well prepared to deal with completely unexpected and tragic developments like yesterday’s.”

NYC as ‘Exemplar and Model’

After the attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, the 9/11 Commission made many recommendations to mitigate the threat from terrorism. But American cities didn’t wait for that report to get going.

“There’s a complete cross-fertilization across the United States with, in many respects, the New York City Police Department serving as the exemplar and model,” says Hoffman. “Very impressive inroads [have been] made in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago–all major cities.”

In New York, at least, private businesses have strengthened security since September 11th, too, with many buildings installing advanced access systems and surveillance.

Greg Cintron, an EMT in New York since 1993, teaches preparedness classes in the city. Many companies require that workers complete such courses as a condition of employment. Cintron says that post-9/11 people started signing up for themselves too.

“The mindset is there now,” he says. “It wasn’t so much in the past: in the past it was pretty much, ‘well it happened, but it won’t happen to me, it won’t happen in my backyard’. People now want to know.”

Time to Move On?

But elsewhere in the United States, many people want to move on. With Osama Bin Laden dead, there’s been a sense that the country could finally attend to other things: the economy, gun control, or immigration.

But, says Bruce Hoffman at Georgetown, we can’t wish the terrorism threat away, be it foreign or domestic.

“As much as we may want to believe that we’ve turned a decisive corner, this is a threat that is probably more cyclical than perennial–but it’s probably both.

“And it’s precisely when we lower our guard that the shock of these events is so much greater.”

Now debates in Washington about the appropriate scope and size of federal counter-terrorism programs will start up again.

Still, Hoffman rejects that idea the American should simply accept terrorism in American cities as a permanent state of affairs: it’s not a matter of resilience, he says.

Only that it’s a very hard problem, one that, as New York City EMT Greg Cintron reminds me, everyone has a part to play in solving.

“As the old saying goes, if you see something, say something.”

By Alex Gallafent

Alex Gallafent is the New York-based correspondent for The World. His reporting has taken him to Swaziland, Turkey, Chile, and India, among other places.

Most Schools Are Ill-Prepared for an Active Shooter Scenario

Lonna Calhoun — Sun, 05 May 2013 23:27:00 +0000

By: Jim McKay on April 08, 2013

It will take an all-hazards tactic, additional campus safety personnel and a new approach to building design for schools to become more hardened against the threat of an active shooter on campus.

But before all of that happens, we will undoubtedly see more events like the one that shook the country on Dec. 14, 2012, when 20 kids and six staff members were shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

“The chilling fact is, it’s happened before and it will happen again,” said Bo Mitchell of 911 Consulting. “One danger here is that we always prepare for the last crisis, so we are all preparing for Hurricane Sandy and the Newtown massacre. Both were devastating but employers have to prepare for all hazards — bomb threats, suspicious packages, bullying at work and bullying at school are examples.”

There are people planning the next attack now, according to Bill Lowe, associate professor of emergency management and terrorism at Jacksonville State University in Alabama. He said copy-cats often fantasize about killing large numbers of people, but some never go through with it. They may post a threat on Facebook or talk about it, but their actions don’t go beyond the planning stage. “The ones I’m concerned about are the ones who aren’t stupid enough to put it on Facebook. They’re doing it silently, and it’s happening right now.”

Lowe said at some point schools will have to be built more strategically to harden them against intruders. That would mean building a school where access could be controlled by having fewer entrances, Lowe said. “The goal is to deny access to the building and delay access to victims.”

Lowe advocates having an all-hazards security officer on campuses. The officer would be trained for many different scenarios and be armed. “If you can justify having a librarian in the school, then how do you justify not having someone responsible for intruder protection, fire protection — someone trained to deal with emergencies?” Lowe asked. “I see this person being sort of multi-capability officer.”

During a traditional school year, this multidimensional first responder could work for the school district for nine months and the police or sheriff’s department for three, Lowe said. “The sheriff’s or police department could pay a quarter of his or her salary, and the school district pays the rest,” he said. “If you have somebody who can fill multiple roles, then you’re amortizing that cost over many different things.”

In addressing whether teachers should carry firearms, Lowe said, “I don’t know that I embrace that.”

He said as children get older their propensity for violence increases and that makes colleges a likelier target of gun violence. The older children have more issues with mental health, access to drugs and firearms, and the capability to use them.

Many colleges and universities have a full-time police department and understand the risks, however, an active shooter situation is unknown until it happens. “If you were to ask any police chief or sheriff, ‘Is your community prepared for an active shooter event?’ all of them would say, ‘Absolutely,’” Lowe said. “That’s what they think, but they won’t be tested until it happens.”

An example is the Aurora, Colo., shooting where a gunman killed 12 people in a movie theater last July. The gunman began his rampage by releasing two canisters of pepper spray, which hampered police and emergency medical efforts. That was a new twist, Lowe said. “[Pepper spray] hangs around for a long time and once it’s on the victims, it affects them for a long time.”

Most Unprepared

In general, Mitchell said, schools and businesses can and should examine their emergency plans and how they would respond, not only during a shooting but also during various potential hazards.

Emergency plans should be for all hazards, not just for an active shooter situation and should include trainings that incorporate everyone associated with that school or business, according to Mitchell.

Mitchell said schools are employers first and most employers are not well prepared. “For every one organization that is well planned, trained and exercised, there are 10 that are not,” he said. “Every employee has a legal right to review their employer’s emergency plan. That’s federal law.”

Schools and businesses all have the same problem: They think they are well prepared but they’re not. Mitchell said there is ample research done by the Government Accountability Office, the National Association of School Resource Officers and other national organizations that point to a lack of preparedness for K-12 schools and businesses.

The research shows that most schools have paperwork they call a plan, but it’s not all hazards and they don’t train all of their employees as required by federal law. “They’ll train ‘the team,’ but they don’t train all employees, and for emergency purposes that’s the contractors, the cafeteria staff, the security people and grandma who volunteers in the gift shop,” Mitchell said.

“They should train coaches, temps, volunteers, everyone because when something goes wrong, all those people will be considered employees at court, even if they didn’t get a paycheck.”

Mitchell said research indicates that schools aren’t well prepared because they don’t exercise. “Table top exercises, full-scale exercises done with and without emergency services in concert — both are great and more is better, but they aren’t doing it,” he said. “Some of this is, ‘Oh, we’ll scare the children or we’ll scare the parents.’ That’s bull. Locking down a school is very difficult, but that doesn’t alleviate your responsibility to do that.”

The “Plan”

Every principal will answer in the affirmative when asked if his or her school has a disaster plan. But is that plan being exercised or is it “on the shelf?”

“A lot of it is on the shelf, a lot of it isn’t all hazards, a lot of it isn’t trained,” Mitchell said. “OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] says school is a workplace.

It says before you’re a school, you’re a workplace and every employee shall be trained in emergency planning, annually in a classroom. This is not happening on a wide spectrum from Maine to California.”

The reasons vary, from lack of education, to politics to denial and, of course, a lack of resources.

The feeling that “it won’t happen to us” is ubiquitous in the U.S., including schools and businesses. Couple that with the fact that school administrators aren’t emergency managers and that parents of students attending those schools may not know what questions to ask those administrators about emergency plans, which and it equals lack of preparation.

“Public schools tend to turn to their police chiefs and fire chiefs, which is all well and good but they’re busy people, and if all schools showed up at the police and fire departments, the system would collapse,” Mitchell said.

He also said politics play a role in that police officers and firefighters aren’t going to go to parents because they’d be going over the heads of boards of education. And boards of education are reluctant to turn to parents because they’re busy running schools and taking on security too is a daunting thought.

Mitchell said parents should ask school administrators if they have a plan, if it’s all hazards, if it conforms to the NFPA 1600 Standard on Disaster/Emergency Management and Business, have they trained it annually in a classroom and have enough people been trained, including the grandma volunteering in the gift shop.

Lowe said there are indications that Sandy Hook Elementary School personnel did some things that saved lives in the few minutes of chaos. “Keeping doors closed, turning off lights and keeping children quiet,” were smart things to do, he said. “It’s all about cover and concealment. How do you conceal yourself from the predator? Out of sight, out of mind and out of sound, out of mind. If the predator can hear people screaming and yelling out of fear, that just increases the prey drive.”

Attack at the Boston Marathon and the Value of Emergency Planning

Lonna Calhoun — Sun, 05 May 2013 23:21:26 +0000

By: Anthony Mangeri, American Military University on April 16, 2013

Just more than four hours into the Boston Marathon there were two explosions within a few blocks of the finish line. Federal officials believe both devices were small and at least one device was placed in a trash container. The explosions killed three and wounded more than 180.

More than a terrorist incident, this attack was one of many mass casualty incidents that have occurred this year. Today’s special event contingency planning requires emergency planners to work extensively with local, state and federal emergency professionals to plan for mass causality contingencies. Hospitals were already on standby for marathon runners. Doctors, nurses and emergency medical staff were also onsite to address the needs of the runners and spectators.

According to the Massachusetts Standing Committee on Multiple Casualty Incident Planning and Evaluation’s Emergency Medical Care Advisory Board, a multiple casualty incident (MCI) is defined as “one in which the number of people killed or injured in a single incident is large enough to strain or overwhelm the resources of local EMS providers.” In urban areas, such as Boston, there are significant resources to address the day-to-day pre-hospital needs of the city. However, special events like the Boston Marathon can strain resources and personnel.

Contingency planning is essential for the worst-case scenario. All indications are that the response in Boston appeared well planned and well executed. Police, fire, EMS and even the Massachusetts National Guard responded to and stabilized the incident quickly and decisively. This does not occur without well developed policy, operational plans and exercises to ensure that responders understand their role and that agencies have the resources needed to execute plans quickly.

Each community must have an MCI plan that defines: incident leadership, the role and responsibilities of all first responders, the community’s capabilities, and mutual aid systems to address potential threats. Special permitted events must also be required to work with local officials to ensure that there are contingency plans in place to meet the potential needs based on a comprehensive risk analysis of the event, venue and host community.

It needs to also be noted that an overwhelming number of those who responded to the injured were spectators and bystanders. This attack reminds all in emergency management that large-scale incidents can occur anywhere at any time. Emergency planning must address the community’s needs based on available resources and work to integrate regional and state resources to address large-scale incidents.

Anthony Mangeri has more than 30 years of experience in emergency management, response and recovery operations. During the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mangeri served as the operations chief at the New Jersey EOC. Currently, Mangeri is the manager of Fire and Emergency Service Initiatives at American Public University System. He is also an assistant professor in the American Military University School of Public Service and Health.

You may use or reference this story with attribution and a link to

http://www.emergencymgmt.com/disaster/Boston-Marathon-Emergency-Planning.html

21 Complete Emergency Preparedness Training

Lonna Calhoun — Sun, 05 May 2013 23:04:50 +0000

The new members learned about preparing for emergencies at home, schools, work and in the neighborhood and community, according to George Butts, MBCERTA president.

They engaged in team-building activities, learned about disaster psychology, fire suppression, search and rescue, disaster medical operations, triage and homeland security and terrorism awareness. They also participated in hands-on exercises, including extinguishing small fires and assisting firefighters with hose lines.

The training was held at the city’s Public Works facility on Bell Ave.

Visit the MBCERTA website for information about the organization and its many events and activities.

Online Survey to Gauge Disaster Preparedness in Malibu

Lonna Calhoun — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 23:58:01 +0000

The city of Malibu is encouraging residents to take part in a survey that aims to gauge disaster preparedness in Malibu and other nearby cities.

The survey is meant to provide a forum for public input on the level of disaster preparedness in the community. It also aims to identify risks in the area, according to Brad Davis, Malibu’s Emergency Services Coordinator.

The survey is being conducted in the communities of the five member cities of the Las Virgenes-Malibu Council of Governments, including Agoura Hills, Calabasas, Hidden Hills, Malibu and Westlake Village.

“The data gathered will be used to help local officials better plan for disasters, as well as communicate with citizens and residents on mitigation steps to reduce the risk of disaster-related loss,” Davis said.

Click here to take the online survey.

The purpose of the survey is to provide a forum for public input on the level of disaster preparedness in the community.

Tsunami Preparedness Week Observed in California

Lonna Calhoun — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 23:44:59 +0000

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Two years after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan and caused millions of dollars in damage to California coastal communities, the state’s Emergency Management Agency and the California Geological Survey continue to work with their local, state and federal partners to reduce the impacts of future tsunamis in California.

During the week of March 24-30, Cal EMA and CGS will again join with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and their local and state partners to observe Tsunami Preparedness Week. Recent preparedness efforts have included testing the tsunami warning communications system, participation in table-top exercises and public education forums, and the development of brochures, videos and other materials for children, boaters and the general public.

A new study published by the U.S. Geological Survey, “Community Exposure to Tsunami Hazards in California,” provides first responders, emergency planners and other stakeholders, with valuable new information about the people who live in, work in, and visit tsunami hazard areas in 20 counties and 94 incorporated cities located along the state’s coast. This information provides local planners with a new tool to help refine their tsunami outreach efforts, as well as emergency preparedness and response efforts during future exercises and emergencies.

The USGS report builds upon tsunami inundation maps that were previously developed by Cal EMA, CGS and the University of Southern California depicting the maximum extent of tsunami inundation for all 20 coastal counties.

“Even though California has the most communities designated by NOAA as ‘TsunamiReady,’ we are not resting on our laurels,” said Cal EMA Secretary Mark Ghilarducci. ”This new study by the USGS will help make California’s coastal communities even better prepared by providing emergency planners, first responders and elected officials with data they can use to build on the information already provided by the tsunami inundation maps.”

“Having a better sense of the number and type of people that are in tsunami-prone areas of each coastal community allows emergency managers to develop tsunami outreach and preparedness strategies that are tailored to address local conditions and needs,” said USGS geographer Nathan Wood, lead author of the new report. “Tsunami outreach and preparedness opportunities will vary if the at-risk population is a tight-knit community of retired residents, seasonal workers in a bustling port and harbor complex, or tourists on the beach. Although the tsunami hazards are similar, the vulnerability of each community to these hazards will vary depending on how they use tsunami-prone areas.”

“CGS values this study and its partnership with the USGS,” said Dr. John Parrish, the State Geologist of California and head of CGS. “This product will greatly improve the generation of tsunami hazard products and the ability of state agencies to assist local communities prepare for future tsunamis events.”

“Even though all levels of government continue to enhance our preparedness and response capabilities, individual preparedness remains the biggest weakness we face,” said Ghilarducci.

Ghilarducci noted that a 2008 study conducted by UCLA School of Public Health and Survey Research Center for the State of California indicated that only 40 percent of Californians had developed family disaster plan.

Emergency officials and urged everyone who lives in, works in or visits California’s coastal communities to observe Tsunami Preparedness Week by:

Learning the natural warning signs that a tsunami is about to occur;
Learning from the state inundation maps where higher, safe ground is located;
Learning the proper safety actions to take if an earthquake, tsunami or other emergency occurs while at or near coastal areas, including ‘Drop, Cover and Hold On,’ moving to higher, safer ground and remaining there until it’s safe to return;
Making plans to reunite with loved ones;
Assembling an emergency kit; and
Visiting www.tsunami.ca.gov and myhazards.calema.ca.gov as well as contacting their local offices of emergency services for more information.

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http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=3535