Meeting Memo: Moving from talk to action
Download Meeting memo Mar 2012
Social media and court of public opinion
In my last blog, I spoke about the court of public opinion and how your constitutional rights tend to vanish when you're in the limelight. We're seeing another case study being played out in the recent shooting incident in Florida. The public concern here is that the shooting was racially motivated and that the local […]
Crisis management: guilty until proven innocent?
"Your lawyers may be giving you sensible advice, to stay quiet and not make a move. That will work in court. But it will kill you with the public." This quote is from a recent article by my former boss, Willie L. Brown, Jr., who is, among his many other talents, a weekly columnist for the […]
Emergency Planning: The impact is relative
We spend a lot of time trying to define the differences between emergencies, disasters and catastrophes and with good reason. We know that there are qualitative differences between events that influence how we respond. But that's the big picture – the strategic level. It's easy to forget that at the victim level, disasters are relative. […]
Tsunami warning budget cuts a false economy
The San Jose Mercury News reports that the White House is proposing to hit the National National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with a $4.6 million cut to tsunami programs put in place after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. The cuts include a $1 million reduction to the system of buoys that provide early warning […]
Drought, climate change, and slow-onset disasters
We spend a lot of our time planning for the sudden, unexpected event. These are the events that leave you in little doubt that they are significant – major floods, earthquakes, fires, etc. But what about the slow-onset events that sneak up on you? These are less easy to identify. It's hard to recognize the […]
Earthquake Risk: A blueprint for disaster housing
The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) has just issued a new report, Safe Enough to Stay, that examines housing needs in San Francisco following a major earthquake. SPUR estimates that a loss of just 5% of housing stock could result in a major outmigration that could significantly slow recovery. SPUR's analysis suggests that 25% of our […]
Public warning takes a step forward
The folks on the Google Crisis Response Team have come up with an interesting concept. By making use of the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), they are able to post warnings from credible sources to Google maps to create a public alerting system. Currently the system is only providing warnings from the National Oceanic and Atmosphere […]
Social media is not a substitute fax machine
For the past few years I've been blogging and writing on why government agencies are having problems adapting to social media. In a recent article on his blog, homeland security expert Chris Battle sums up the issues very eloquently. In speaking to his law enforcement colleagues, Battle reminds them in very direct language that social […]