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A year after Oso, Arts WA is hosting a way for poets to memorialize that tragic event. Here’s one great entry:

One March morning the landscape shrugged—

fields dammed the river, hillsides fattened and rolled

—a hungry black bear feasting on every fallen thing.

When there is no one to blame but the rainfall,

no trial, no jury, no jail—our cry for justice is empty.

We have only the hope of no one suffering,

that bodies succumbed the way an infant...

If you appreciated my 14 March post that mentioned the ABC site showing before & after images of some tsunami scenes, you’ll likely also appreciate this somewhat similar set of photos from the Sacramento Bee that show 3 sequential images shot from the same perspective – of maybe a dozen different scenes. Thanks to Cathy Rogers & Jill Watson for alerting us to these.

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I heard that “our” very own Don Price recently served as the head of ESF-6 for FEMA’s recovery efforts in Mississippi! He and other locals who have been serving afield will present their debrief on Tuesday, June 21st, from 1 – 3 PM. The location is the King County Office of Emergency Management Room 114 – Main Coordination Center.

There have been ground breaking developments in Children’s issues, FNSS, ADA, ESF 6 multi-agency coordination and more. Lessons learned, best practices and how to apply them to our local operations will all be discussed.

Speakers:

Don Price, Emergency Management Program Manager, King County...

Yet another post on the value of cash – versus unsolicited donations of (often inappropriate) goods and supplies comes from the UPS Foundation’s Humanitarian Relief Program Manager. Just back from the annual meeting of NVOAD, held in Kansas City – hours from Joplin, he had the following take-homes:

Donate Money If Donating Goods, Verify Items Will be Accepted and Used For Volunteers, Take Advantage of Disaster Assistance Training He recommends helpful web tools: Aidmatrix Network and HandsOnNetwork.org....

About 42 million people were forced to flee their homes because of natural disasters around the world in 2010, more than double the number during the previous year, experts said Monday.

One reason for the increase in the figure could be climate change, and the international community should be doing more to contain it, the experts said.

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre said the increase from 17 million displaced people in 2009 was mainly due to the impact of "mega-disasters" such as the massive floods in China and Pakistan and the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti.

- Read full story: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/06/501364/main20069401.shtml

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AT&T has started selling portable cellular antennas so customers can provide their own wireless coverage in disaster-struck or remote areas. Typically cell phone companies deploy mobile trucks with larger mobile cell towers, but this gives responders control over their own deployments – albeit with fairly limited service:

The Remote Mobility Zone can handle 14 simultaneous calls, and data at less-than-broadband speeds. Coverage extends up to half a mile from the unit. The "portable cell tower" can also be mounted in a car or truck.

The...