“It is a huge challenge measuring preparedness or prevention efforts in just about any area, because you’re trying to prove the negative,” said Ron Carlee, chief operating officer of the International City/County Management Association (ICMA), in a phone call with the media on Sept. 20 to discuss emergency management and preparedness at the local government level.
A project is under way to identify in checklist form the areas in a community that would need to be assessed in order to gauge preparedness. Earlier this month the Community Resilience System Initiative selected seven communities to participate in a pilot of a Web-based tool that helps communities assess their ability to withstand a major disaster. The participants include: Anaheim, Calif.; Anne Arundel County and Annapolis, Md.; Charleston and the Tri-County Area, S.C.; Gadsden, Ala.; Greenwich, Conn.; the Mississippi Gulf Coast; and Mount Juliet, Tenn.
Expanding Mutual Aid
There are also ongoing efforts to expand the kinds of resources available to local officials under mutual-aid agreements. While the ICMA sees the Emergency Management Assistance Compact as enabling some teams to cross state lines, city managers reported that they need a number of different services, not just search and rescue. “That’s an area that still needs significant improvement, because when major disaster strikes and you talk to a local government manager and you ask them what they need, they say, ‘We need everything,’” said Elizabeth Kellar, ICMA staff representative to the National Homeland Security Consortium, during the call.
The new model, sometimes called “city hall in a box,” includes public works, social services, IT and management so that a city could continue to function following a disaster on the scale of Hurricane Katrina. The idea, Kellar said, is to have regional teams of credentialed personnel who train together and can provide ongoing support to a hard-hit community. So far it has been talked about at the National Homeland Security Consortium and discussed with professional associations.
Social Media’s Role
Officials on the call stressed the importance of communications — both between emergency responders and to the public — and the role social media could play in the event of an emergency. Carlee was evacuating from North Carolina’s Outer Banks as Hurricane Irene was approaching and was surprised to find that he turned to Twitter for information. “I was probably one of those guys who thought Twitter is mostly meaningless drivel,” he said. “But there are some opportunities with that new capability to communicate with people when they need it.”
As Irene approached, Montpelier saw a rapid increase in the number of subscribers to its social media channels. “What we found was that people have to choose to go to your website,” Fraser said. “But they look at Facebook and they look at Twitter passively — ‘What’s going on with my friends; what’s going on around town.’”
In addition to posting to the city’s social media pages, Fraser reposted the information to his personal pages and his friends also reposted the information.
The key to personal preparedness is responsibility, government officials said. Agencies can provide information through traditional and social media channels, but residents need to pay attention and use common sense. “It’s really about lowering anxiety in the community,” Carlee said. “The less anxious people in the community can be, the better prepared everyone is going to be.”
