Vashon Maury Island Radio Club and VashonBePrepared invites the public to visit Vashon’s amateur radio volunteers at this Saturday’s 2017 Field Day event!

Vashon Hams gather at our new Field Day location atop the Swallow’s Nest Bluff on June 24th & 25th to compete in the largest single amateur radio and emergency preparedness exercise.

Field Day has been an annual event since 1933, and remains the most popular event in ham radio. Families and the...

SEATTLE – A year following one of the nation’s largest domestic drills, lessons-learned continue to guide strategies that improve the Pacific Northwest’s ability to survive and recover from a catastrophic Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) earthquake and tsunami.

On June 7, 2016, more than 20,000 emergency managers in Idaho, Oregon and Washington kicked off Cascadia Rising 2016, a four-day, large scale exercise to test response and recovery capabilities in the wake of a 9.0 magnitude CSZ earthquake and tsunami. The exercise involved local, state, tribal and federal partners,...

Although this is still evolving, the initial blueprint of the federal budget has the following language:

DHS starts on page 23 of the 62 page document.  FEMA preparedness grant language is on page 24.

Eliminates or reduces State and local grant funding by $667 million for programs administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that are either unauthorized by the Congress, such as FEMA’s Pre-Disaster Mitigation Grant Program, or that must provide more measurable results and ensure the Federal Government is not supplanting other stakeholders’ responsibilities, such as the Homeland Security Grant Program. For that reason, the Budget also proposes establishing a 25 percent non-Federal cost match for FEMA preparedness grant awards that currently require no cost match. This is the same cost-sharing approach as FEMA’s disaster recovery grants. The activities and acquisitions funded through these grant programs are primarily State and local functions. •

Link to the Trump budget blueprint...

Your Bookmarks Will Need To Change Too!

The National Weather Service’s primary web site www.weather.gov plans to implement an upgrade. The improvement will involve the point ‘n click site specific forecasts and zone forecasts.

Once these changes occur on March 7, all your current forecast.weather.gov bookmarks will change. Links to a specific forecast page will display an error message that includes a URL to the new web site location. That is your opportunity to update your bookmarks to provide access to NWS forecasts quickly after the upgrade.

The primary focus of the upgrade is to make the forecast pages more reliable during weather events, but there are some benefits of new forecast pages as well that include:

· Addition of 7-day hourly forecast information to the point forecast page

· A new mobile-friendly landing and graphical/tabular forecast page

· Low-bandwidth optimization for all pages, on a partial roll-out at launch

...