John's Vashon Preparedness Blog

The Vashon Beachcomber has just published a nice story about CERT’s new equestrian team which has been organized by Beth Kellner with help from Penni Symonds, Wanda Moore,...

After some 7 years in a conference room in VIFR’s main Station 55, the Vashon Emergency Operations Center (EOC) may be relocated next year to the VIFR Association Building across the street. Slightly larger, the room would be shared with King County...

Western North America experienced the strongest drought in 800 years from 2000 to 2004 – but that may be the new normal for the next century. Reduction in carbon uptake during turn of the century drought in western North America – pg 551 – 556,...

U.S. Geological Survey’s Brian Atwater has found evidence of a powerful tsunami near Bremerton recently – due to an earthquake which was “much more dangerous than previously thought”. Their conclusion: climb to safety after an earthquake.

Watch or read the full story at: www.q13fox.com/news/kcpq-scientist-massive-quake-struck-area-1000-years-ago-could-happen-again-20120716,0,6181048.story

Barb Graff, Director of Seattle’s Office of Emergency Management has just announced the hire of Tracy Connelly as Seattle Office of Emergency Management’s new Community Planning Coordinator. Tracy starts August 1st.

Tracy Connelly has been a Public Outreach Specialist at OEM working with access and functional needs, immigrant and refugee, homeless, and multi-cultural populations.

In...

Funny that DHS is getting criticism for NOT using drones, when my take is that drones further compromise our civil freedoms, but apparently their use helps some key corporations' bottom lines – and their use can be more palatable by using them for Disaster Response.

According to Homeland Security Department Secretary Janet Napolitano, they are considering drone use to gather situational awareness for forest fires or “large public safety” matters.

Anyways, here’s one story:

www.nextgov.com/defense/2012/07/homeland-security-experiment-rescue-drones-inside-united-states/57023/

another citing the value of drones:

www.stripes.com/news/spies-in-the-north-dakota-sky-signal-a-new-age-of-surveillance-1.184116...

As they indicate below, this appears to be a pretty basic course, but by clicking on one of the initial pages you can see much of the complete course outline and quickly skim it to see how much of it is applicable to your family or business.

This outline serves as a great reminder of all the steps we should be taking – and a reminder for us to complete those missing action items that we’d not completed (or refreshed) recently!

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is pleased to announce a new web-based, independent study training course, IS-325—Earthquake Basics: Science, Risk, and Mitigation.

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According...

The University of Washington Seismology Lab, has released a new map of major semi-recent quakes and fault lines around Puget Sound.

Read more about this at: www.heraldnet.com/article/20120722/BLOG48/707229962#Major-modern-quakes-of-Puget-Sound

I still...

Cancel another innovative idea. According to a commentary published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, storing harmful carbon dioxide gas underground is not practical. Why? Because it would cause earthquakes!

There is a long history of materials pumped underground causing earthquakes, and this report apparently finds this also likely in this situation. Although the quakes would likely be relatively small – they would be large enough to destroy the equipment used to pump the greenhouse gases down.

Read more in the LA Times article, which ends up quoting experts encouraging putting development funds into renewable energy instead. That makes sense to me!

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The Vashon Beachcomber has done a nice article on a key aspect of last week’s 2012 Evergreen Quake exercise. Entitled, “Emergency drill shows a marine lifeline could be established for Vashon”, Editor and author Leslie Brown included a number of great quotes from islanders and county officials...

Chief Hank Lipe has announced the hiring of Ms. Nicole Trent of Gig Harbor, WA to serve as an Administrative Assistant at Vashon Island Fire & Rescue – King County Fire District 13. A nine year veteran with Pierce County Fire District #16 (Key Peninsula), Nicole brings  a solid background in Fire District administrative services and is excited to become part of VIFR’s team.

Mark your...

Drill includes delivering critical supplies to Vashon Island by boat

King County joined with federal, state, and local agencies this week to test its capacity to respond to and recover from a major earthquake. The exercise, dubbed “Evergreen Quake 2012,” gave participants a chance to assess their disaster response plans and emergency communication strategies. Six counties, including King County, participated in the drill, along with the state of...

 

Nearly a hundred islanders took part in the regional Evergreen Quake on June 5th & 6th at the Vashon Emergency Operations Center.

It was fairly historic for a number of reasons:

- Initial test of Operation Lifeline (King County’s redirecting their passenger ferry or hiring a barge – to support emergency needs on Vashon) - The Planning Section has adopted the standard ICS Planning Clock - and had the 1st real run-though of this during a major exercise - The Public Information Team...

If you like maps and haven’t checked out the Washington State Geologic Information Portal, it is a wealth of useful information! More than just interactive maps, they also have geoscience data and collections and links to other earth science information sites.

Of especial interest to Vashon residents might be the geologic map (showing faults on the surface, liquefaction, of geologic structures), the landslide map, and the subsurface geology map.

Every 500-1000 years the slopes of Mount Rainier produce liquefied mud flows called lahars that can flow like rivers but have a density similar to liquid concrete. Based on the last Electron Mudflow ~550 years ago, and using HAZUS software, the DNR...

Washington Emergency Management Division is working with FEMA and a slew of local partners in the Puget Sound region to conduct the state's largest (i.e., most coordinated) earthquake exercise ever: Evergreen Quake 2012™.

The exercise’s goal is to “improve the collective joint-operational readiness of emergency management and other...

A few months back I notices an exciting new source of disaster preparedness info: Sesame Street! Yep, FEMA apparently hired them to start educating tots early – in a variety of languages too. Fun! (I wish I had received that contract.)

Today I noticed that Washington State has developed some tsunami and earthquake games too. Educating kids is certainly an exciting new genre...

The ShakeOut™ moniker started a couple years back in California I believe – which perhaps accounts for it’s subsequent adoption thought the galaxy, and soon in Washington too! I’m a bit jaded about such marketing obviously, but it has generated LOTS of publicity and made many aware that otherwise wouldn’t have a clue.

So it is a good thing that Washington State will mount up to conduct our own version of this on October 18, 2012. Details and much more entertaining graphics should arrive soon, but you too can be in the know on this by going to our very own subsite at: www.shakeout.org/washington/ Register Now!

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Quite a bit apparently! They don’t crow about it much, but they are fairly consistently busy apparently with some 4372 state-wide incidents to track last year! They only activated 14 times, but obviously spent a lot of time tracking activities throughout the state, but especially olde King County – with 865 of those 4372 incidents: 670 of our county’s incidents were Hazmat, 121 Search & Rescue, 73 Other & 1 Fire incident.

The EMD also organizes training program state-wide, exercises & drills, business & citizen education and probably a bit of accounting/administration too. For more information go to their: April 2012 Report...

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...

As mentioned at last night’s annual meeting, preparedness efforts on Vashon made strong strides over the past year. These successes are only partially due to VashonBePrepared’s efforts, and mainly by our various partners, including some independent accomplishments by others in our community. Here’s the listing presented:

Business Neighborhood Emergency Response Organization created, numerous meetings led by Vashon Chamber of Commerce Enhanced relations with King County Office of Emergency Management: Operation Lifeline - Plan & contract for hiring a barge or dedicated ferry to shuttle supplies if normal ferry operations are down MOU with Vashon Island School District to serve as a Disaster Campus MOU with Camp Burton to house disaster workers from off island Vashon integration w/ county computer alerting/management systems Enhanced integration of CERT & MRC & EOC Team with VIFR ops Disaster Emergency Response Trailer...

A new board was seated last night at VashonBePrepared’s Annual Meeting.

As set out in our bylaws, we have two classes of directors – ex-officio directors as set out by our bylaws – primarily the chief representatives of our partners – and those elected by the membership at our annual meeting: our at-large directors.

VashonBePrepared 2012 Board of Directors John Cornelison (past Prez) Donna Donnelly (at-large) Synthia Downs (at-large) Jill Janow (EOC Team) Tim Johnson (at-large) Hank Lipe (VIFR) Daniel Luechtefeld (ARES) John “Oz” Osborne (at-large) Scott Rice (CERT) Debi Richards (NERO) Catherine Rogers (VEPC) Bob Smueles (at-large) Ed Steyh (EOC Team) Rex Stratton (VIEMA) Rick Wallace (EOC Team)

The new board then unanimously elected the following directors to the Executive Committee, that subset of the board that meets monthly and tends to the daily business of our corporation:

VashonBePrepared...