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An Earthquake and a Tsunami by Ari Bussel Children, not realizing the dangers, are more excited to ski, go to high ground due to a possible flooding or experience an earthquake. I was a student at Stanford when I experienced my first earthquake. For some odd reason, it seems to me they always happen in early morning. After a few shakers, though, the sense of “excitement” was replaced with apprehension. I used to say, “When Mother Earth’s clock rings, you wake up without delay.” I remember my first earthquake in Japan and the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake. My father...

Release Date: June 29, 2010 Release Number: HQ-10-128 » More Information on Texas Tropical Storm Alex WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) today announced that an emergency exists in the state of Texas and that federal aid is available to supplement state and local response efforts due to the emergency conditions resulting from Tropical Storm Alex beginning on June 27, 2010, and continuing. Federal funding is available to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and...

Our community has a unified disaster system. We have several organizations, local government, county government, city government, hospitals, school district and businesses involved in Disaster Planning and Response. Because we are in the northwest corner of the state of Iowa with border neighbors in Nebraska and South Dakota we often have regional exercises. Several times a year we have Disaster Exercises where all of our teams "play together". Today was one of those days. At 8AM this morning the team started to gather at the local event center to prepare for the arrival of the exercise "victims". The victims were...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=52311 Emergency Response Units Won’t Perform Law Enforcement, Official Says By Gerry J. Gilmore American Forces Press Service WASHINGTON, Dec. 12, 2008 – The Pentagon’s three new rapid-response task forces will assist civil authorities during possible terrorist attacks or natural disasters, but they won’t perform law-enforcement missions, a senior Defense Department official said here yesterday. Some people have surfaced concerns that active-duty soldiers, who make up the core of the first 4,700-member joint task force established in early October, could be used to perform police functions, which would be in violation of the...

Voter fraud and rumors of voter fraud... No matter who gets elected, we're looking at post-election violence. I'm not talking a few fistfights, I'm talking nationwide Detroit wins the World Series rioting. Rampaging partisans torching buildings and turning over cars, either in anger or in celebration...Charges of election stealing will fill the air like clouds of angry hornets. Yes, whoever is elected will be immediately and permanently delegitimized by half the population. And that's a shame because a few simple changes in voter registration laws and voting procedures could have prevented it all, but partisan bickering and billion dollar solutions...

Heading Home The Yats are driving home. We couldn’t keep up with the big forearmed Midwestern women on the sandbag line. But we held our own. Our levee, the Sny, the world’s largest, is in tact at this point. The biggest threats to it in the days ahead will be rain and muskrats. It was muskrats that took out the levee in Missouri on Wednesday night. Let me conclude our first relief trip to America’s heartland with a final round of dissimilar and similar. Dissimilar first. The level of organisation and communication between state and local goverment, along with charitable...

D.C. Council members yesterday complained to the head of the city's 911 communications center about operators who are rude or dismissive with callers. Council member David A. Catania, at-large independent, said he placed a 911 call at about 1:15 a.m. yesterday after he was awakened by screams from a woman being robbed outside of his home. Mr. Catania said the experience was "entirely dissatisfying" and that at one point during the call, the call-taker asked if he was drunk. He said he was "so off-put, it made it more difficult for me to gather my thoughts." Janice Quintana, director of...

WASHINGTON -- In the wake of haunting images of pets left behind in flooded New Orleans, the U.S. Senate passed a bill Friday requiring local and state disaster agencies to take pets and service animals into account in their emergency planning. The Senate approved the bill by unanimous consent in the early hours before recessing for its summer break. The House of Representatives passed a similar bill in May and differences must be worked out before the legislation is sent to President Bush. Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States, called the measure "an important step...

Scout `angel' recalls fiery horrorhttp://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1153173011551 http://tinyurl.com/jfma3 JIM COYLE Jul. 18, 2006. 06:01 AM Long before there were Guardian Angels, pressing their largely unasked-for services upon a largely unreceptive city, Toronto had guardian angels of a more popular and fetching sort. And, happily, I had reader Glen Bonham to remind me. Recently, after the death of a retired harbour police officer who played a role in the long-ago drama, I wrote about the burning of the cruise ship Noronic at the foot of Yonge St. in 1949, and the death of 119 passengers in an inferno that gave downtown Toronto the...

Mary Sundborg was a spirited woman of 100 ½ who had long endured advanced colon cancer and two strokes. And she knew how she wanted to die: at home, peacefully, with dignity. So with the help of her eldest son, she signed an official order specifically directing emergency responders not to attempt CPR. Then came Jan. 3, the day Sundborg stopped breathing. Her nurse, who wasn't sure at first what was happening, called 911. When emergency medical technicians (EMTs) from the Fire Department arrived at her Magnolia home, they pulled her out of bed, attached their equipment and began pushing...

Instapundit points to a Wired article about fixing the 911 system: HERE'S AN INTERESTING ARTICLE FROM WIRED on efforts to reinvent the 911 emergency-call system to take advantage of more modern technologies. The conclusion seems right: If national safety - the ability to respond to hurricanes, terrorist attacks, earthquakes - depends on the execution of explicit plans, on soldierly obedience, and on showy security drills, then a decentralized security scheme is useless. But if it depends on improvised reactions to unknown threats, that's a different story. A deeply textured, unmapped system is hard to bring down. A system that encourages...

Amateur radio operators will take part in a scavenger hunt this weekend, seeking information rather than hub caps or cowboy hats, in an exercise designed to get them acquainted with Southeastern Connecticut before a major emergency drill next month. Wayne Gronlund, who is coordinating the event, said he is trying to put together at least 50 amateur radio enthusiasts for TOPFF, a weeklong exercise that will include simulated terrorist attacks on ports in New London, New Jersey, Canada and the United Kingdom. “We know we're not going to have enough amateur radio resources in New London County to provide all...