Still Remember 17 years ago Today?
I'm sure many of my generation have vivid memories of the morning of September 11, 2001. Working as an emergency manager on the west coast I received a call at [...]
Recommendations to enhance your organization’s emergency preparedness in 2018.
It's a challenge to know where to devote planning, training and exercise time with so many competing demands, agendas and requirements. Consider this - people will fall back on two [...]
In an emergency or disaster, how important is your phone?
With the current smart devices most of us carry there is rarely a task we can't do on our phone that used to be reserved for our laptops. Agreed, I [...]
History Can Better Prepare us for the Future – Week of November 27- December 3rd
In my last post I also looked back at history and was quite surprised during the week watching the news. The consequences of the killer smog event of 50 years [...]
History Can Better Prepare us for the Future
It seems stories are written about events occurring around the globe like it's the first time such a thing has happened. Unless multiple like-events happen over a short period of [...]
Organizational Couch Potatoes – A False Sense of Preparedness
I was rummaging through some old files the other day and I came across my copy of the After Action Report (AAR) for Quakex97. This was a joint local, state [...]
What’s Preparedness Worth? Is $3.5 Million Enough?
My experience has always been that preparedness is a tough sell. The value seems to go up after there has been an event and a bad outcome was a result. [...]
Medical Rapid Response Team – Ideal for Catastrophic Events
I've been involved in planning for a Cascadia earthquake/tsunami event and a New Madrid earthquake event so I know what a catastrophe will look like. I have not been involved [...]
Hospital Decontamination Operations – Documentation
My recommendation is to take the time to put together an operations manual that covers your entire Hospital Emergency Response Team (HERT) program. This will keep all the important [...]
Hospital Decontamination Operations – Staffing
In my experience staffing is one of the biggest challenges hospitals face when trying to sustain a Hospital Emergency Response Team (HERT) program. Staff members get selected based upon their [...]