Emergencity :: April 2008

The local bloggers are doing a really good job of covering a small fire that is threatening hundreds of homes in Sierra Madre, CA.  The City of Sierra Madre has some info, but last updated at 6:30am, over eight hours ago - not the most highly actionable intelligence residents are looking for.

Some key local community news and blog sources that are updating frequently with good information...

Sierra Madre News Net - updated 2:52pm
The Foothill Cities Blog - updated 2:00pm
Sierra Madre 91024 - updated 1:00pm
in Sierra Madre - update 1:00pm
Flickr: The Foothill Cities Pool

The AP reports that Reno was hit by a 4.7 earthquake Friday night, with over 100 aftershocks since. 

Scientists urged residents of northern Nevada's largest city to prepare for a bigger event as the area continued rumbling Saturday after the largest earthquake in a two-month-long series of temblors... "A magnitude 6 quake wouldn't be a scientific surprise," John Anderson, director of the [UNR] seismological lab, said Saturday. "We certainly hope residents are taking the threat seriously after last night."

The Reno Gazette-Journal has a number of reactive stories, comments on the articles and a message board set up asking "Did your home experience any damage? Are you far away, but still felt the quake?"

The RGJ message board only has about 15 posts, with very little geospecific data and no geospatial organization of that data.  For instance, the data could be used to create a user-generated map showing where the most damage, or most significant shaking was located relative to the epicenter.

The Earthquake Hazards Program in Pasadena (linked to by an RGJ reader) has an event-specific questionnaire up, and then compiled data for everyone to look at.  They've also created a Zip Code Map and a Geo Code Map that give some perspective on the incident.

There is no coordinated Agency View, with web links and contact information for the local and regional agencies, along with the latest news from each via RSS or manually compiled.  In fact, there is no mention of the earthquakes at all on the City of Reno site, the Fire Department, the Police Department or County Sheriff.

From a web infrastructure standpoint, it appears Reno is ill-equipped to properly aggregate and distribute information in the case of a major disaster.  A 6.0 quake could collapse buildings, rupture gas mains, fracture highways and more.  Web traffic will spike from Reno residents and extended friends and family beyond Reno looking for more information.  911 will be overwhelmed with traffic.  Cell phone networks will be overwhelmed, with text messages and Twitter standing the best chance of getting in and out of the region.

Reno would be well-served exploring a technology solution that anticipates a regional emergency, and is prepared to aggregate agency information, allowing residents to interact at neighborhood or even street level online while posting blogs, photos, videos and contributing to map mashups, effectively notifying existing volunteers, and help manage "spontaneous unaffiliated volunteers," or volunteer convergence.

The better informed the citizenry is, the less stress that will be placed on the deployed agencies, and the more resilient the community will be in response and recovery.

I missed this one a couple months back... this is a great step forward for building resilient communities, where volunteerism is weaved into the fabric of our towns, counties and state.  It has tremendous potential to impact the preparedness of individual citizens and communities, making it more likely a region will respond and recover more quickly and effectively.

The Governor also announced the appointment of CaliforniaVolunteers Executive Director Karen Baker as the secretary of service and volunteering.  She has a long history working in the volunteer and non-profit sector, including Share Our Strength in Washington, D.C., the Corporation for National Service and AmeriCorps VISTA.  She's also a UCLA Bruin, which scores points in my book.

The executive order, signed today by the Governor, will raise the profile of service in the Golden State to a national level; improve coordination of vital volunteer activities statewide and support local service efforts; encourage more Californians to become involved with service and volunteerism; help California respond to natural disasters and emergencies; and give California’s volunteers a voice at the highest levels of state government. This is all without adding any new net costs to the state budget.

California’s volunteers have a positive multi-billion dollar impact on the state’s economy every year. In 2006, volunteers contributed approximately 858 million hours of service to the California economy—a value of more than $17.4 billion. A one percent increase in the number of Californians who volunteer would equal approximately 365,000 new volunteers contributing 48 million hours—equal to nearly $1 billion in service to the state.

The Governor’s action gives volunteerism a stronger voice and greater visibility and will encourage millions of Californians to make their valuable skills available. As demonstrated by the thousands of concerned Californians who stepped forward to volunteer during last year’s wildfires and the San Francisco Bay oil spill, a stronger, more coordinated volunteer force will make California even better equipped to respond to resident’s everyday needs, as well as wildfires, floods, heat waves, winter freezes, mudslides, earthquakes, disasters and emergencies.

I'm pleased to announce we are officially launching Emergencity today with a talented group of individuals who are dedicated to making this company a success, while honoring our commitment to social responsibility and community service.  It's shaping up to be a busy week with a string of meetings in Southern California and Seattle.  We're looking forward to bringing you more good news in the coming weeks. - Tyler

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Emergencity, Inc. Announces Company Launch - Innovative Approaches to Online Communities and Emergency Management

Emergencity provides local communities with a proven and sophisticated web communications infrastructure and enables next-generation emergency and crisis management through effective aggregation and distribution of actionable intelligence.

Ventura, CA – April 14, 2008 – A group of Ventura County entrepreneurs announces the establishment of Emergencity, Inc., a Web solution to the need for community-based information in the time of natural disasters and other crises.

Google Earth has a new feature: the ability to follow refugee camps and humanitarian aid operations, which works on two levels - situational awareness and education.  In a domestic emergency, such as Katrina, this evolving technology will be beneficial for emergency response and recovery.

In the Djabal refugee camp in eastern Chad, which is home to refugees from the conflict in neighboring Darfur, Google Earth users can see individual tents clustered together amid a sparse landscape, and learn about the difficulty of providing water to some 15,000 people.

David Stephenson is a very knowledgeable consultant on disaster management, homeland security, and Web 2.0.  A few notes from his keynote at the "Decisions 2.0: Distributed Decision-making" seminar at the Santa Fe Institute last week...

...because disasters require innovation and ability to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances, disaster response is perhaps the best example to date in human society of the "emergent behavior" phenomenon. Based on observation of social insects, scientists have found that groups — including human ones — can generate collective behavior far more sophisticated and advanced than could have been predicted from the individual participants’ abilities and experience. The phenomenon is sometimes referred to as "the wisdom of crowds."

He concentrated on a more recent disaster, last Fall’s San Diego wildfires, saying it was one of the first in which a wide range of Web 2.0 applications, such as the Twitter social networking application (which limits users to terse 140-character instant messages), camera phone pictures posted to Flickr, and Google mash-ups tracking the fire’s spread, instantly transformed individuals into vital sources of "situational awareness" that meshed seamlessly with official information.

Last week, the Northern Command’s Joint Task Force Civil Support hosted FEMA and other agencies to demonstrate and test the interoperability of the communications systems that FEMA has determined are critical to disaster response.

“It doesn’t do us any good to have the capability to talk to one another if we don’t speak the same language and we don’t understand what we are saying when we do,” said Bob Moseley, technical adviser at the Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice. “We’ve got to get together and talk among each other and share ideas and concepts and only then will we be able to play together when it becomes real.”