Its such a simple title “Disaster Preparedness Pays Off in North Dakota”
This is not about people being prepared. This is about people benifitting from hospitals and business being prepared.
The paragraph is simple “The successful transfer of patients from MeritCare and other local facilities stands in sharp contrast with the chaotic hospital evacuations that took place after the flooding of New Orleans following hurricane Katrina in 2005.” Source: http://www.propublica.org/article/disaster-preparedness-pays-off-in-North-Dakota-20090331
If you are reading this then you have a computer. There are USB external hard drives under $100. These are great for making back up copies of your hard drive. Important papers can also be scanned in and saved on computer and hard drive.
While files can be saved to the internet but as Katrina showed it may be a while before internet connections are restored.
Happy World Autism Day
It was incredible to see even for the short term at the Joint Field Offices ( processing the work was all back to paper basics) until a network and computer stations could be established. What a feat! I could so elaborate on this a bit from first hand experience. Obtaining a secure USB drive ( consider Iron Key) is one of my new years resolutions with critical documents backed up making them portable and not just paper based, for individuals, businesses, homes, schools, organizations and churches of all sorts should consider this.
Get topic Allen!
Alice,
Hi and thank you. I was suprised at how long it took to back up 32 and 125Gig. What is nice is the drive has a “Sync” feature so you can plug it in and it will copy any changed files.
One drive even reads your finger print. Another drive has encryption built in.
I’m sorry they had to wait for a computer system to be set up. They have little portable racks where server and UPS sit. They look funny sitting in a computer room but when the EOC opens the people and a part of the network leave their offices and goes with them. Everyon comes up on that system.
BTW I found a great article on the fluwiki from India, Hat tip to them. Disasters, not just pandemics, will kill 9-10% of their GDP and may limit the country’s growth. Their a huge, over 1 billion people. Title: Business continuity: how well are Indian businesses prepared? Source:http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20090406/technology02.shtml
Allen
Fluwiki – around the world – around the clock.
Thanks Allen for this. To some extent, it’s also not about just running drills in preparation for an emergency, but about incorporating into one’s daily routine “dual-use” behavior that not only will help in an emergency, but is beneficial throughout the year. You mention USB drives. You’re right that they are great if something should happen to your main drive, but also their portability makes them for carrying data. Or posting information to a off-site maintained system (which many of us now do whenever we post to flickr or googledocs or any of the myriad ‘cloud’ systems out there). Because moving is such a big part of my job, I’ve scanned thousands of photos and documents, as well as copied my entire video and music collection to hard disk — in fact to a range of disks, so that I can listen and see my material whenever and wherever I want. Not only is it emergency preparedness, but it’s also convenient.
When I was in London, we used to hold bi-monthly webchats with the public, not only in order to communicate regularly with the public, but also as an internal task force management exercise using a virtual network. Getting people together for an intense hour of responding to questions online was to incorporate into our routine work processes an exercise that would test how well we could respond as a group, using a virtual network, to the range of anticipated and unanticipated issues that might arise during an emergency.
You mention the fluwiki, and the use of wikis to share information routinely is another example of something that is becoming increasingly routine. Yet, understanding how to quickly set up an issue based network would be essential during a crisis, and would be very difficult to do if people weren’t already familiar with how it works.