Arkansas, North Dakota & Washington all received perfect 10 out of 10 scores in the most recent “Ready or Not? Protecting the Public from Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism” study, conducted by the Trust for America's Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Key findings:

Seven states cannot currently share data electronically with health care providers; 10 states do not have an electronic syndromic...

The Partners in Emergency Preparedness Conference is an annual meeting held in Tacoma that is an excellent way to network with others in the disaster preparedness field – and get an excellent overview of the state of the art. Though a good deal, it doesn’t always fit folks schedules and may be too big a time and financial commitment for others. Fortunately, they make many of the presentations available after the conference. Here they are:

Visit www.cm.wsu.edu/ehome/piepc/68406 for live links to the following presentations:

Keynote: Dr. Grady Bray Changes in the National Incident Management System and how it will affect Federal, State and Local...

The local ARES team worked on the antenna candelabra at VIFR Station 55 last spring as noted in this post:

http://vashonbeprepared.org/News/Blogs/tabid/146/EntryId/77/Antenna-Remount-at-VIFR-Station-55.aspx

Then maybe 6 months back, the dedicated 2 meter antenna was replaced with a tri-band antenna covering 6 & 2 meter and...

An April 23rd Air Force intelligence brief allows unmanned drone surveillance of Americans to be used for up to 90 days if obtained in scenarios like natural disasters or environmental cases.

- www.infowars.com/air-force-document-drones-can-be-used-to-spy-on-americans

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The Seattle Times published an interesting look yesterday at a new hobby (as they call it) – Emergency Preparedness. Less than 1 in 1,000 might be members of this new group of “Preppers”. At times the similarities to survivalist mentality sound some personal warning bells – though much of what they do is working in communities – not isolating themselves. They...

As part of the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) program, the Wireless Emergency WEA) service is starting up this month. Consumers do not sign up for the free, location-based 90 character text messaging service - but if they wish can opt out of weather and AMBER alerts – but not presidential alerts. Alerts will be issued for tsunamis, extreme winds, ice storms,...

National Public Radio’s Lucy Craft has a number of interesting posts about life in Japan post last year’s tsunami and earthquake. Today’s post, “After The Quake, Japanese Shop For Survival”, notes that local stores are selling lots of all-in-one emergency flashlights-radios-etc. – but concludes with the observation from one survivor of the 1995 Kobe earthquake, “city dwellers should focus on how to keep their furniture from crushing them alive” – not storing food as that will quickly arrive.

While less true for isolated Vashon, it still makes me wonder if we’re doing enough to...

Today, FEMA and its partners released the National Preparedness Report (NPR). The Report identifies significant progress the nation has made in areas of prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery.  Overall the Report found that the nation has increased its collective preparedness, not only from external threats, but also for natural and technological hazards that face its communities.

The Report was developed to meet the requirements of Presidential...