Ho'omakaukau (Get Ready)!

Debbie Jackson
Planner

If you are a homeowner or anyone hoping to learn how to harden your home in the event of a hurricane or natural disaster or prepare for an emergency, there will be a workshop on Kauai to assist you. This is a free workshop on June 16, 2011 from 6:00-9:00 p.m. at the Kauai War Memorial Convention Hall. The workshop is sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Sea Grant Coastal Program, the Kauai Civil Defense Agency, and the University of Hawaii (UH) Sea Grant College Program.

Topics to be discussed include emergency preparedness guidelines, evacuation planning, tsunami and severe weather warnings, homeowner guidance and retrofit measures, and flood and coastal inundation mapping. Speakers will be from the National Weather Service, Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, and the UH Sea Grant Program will present and be available to answer questions. There will also be educational booths to offer information to homeowners regarding natural hazard mitigation and preparation.

Information will be provided from the soon to be released second edition of the Homeowner's Handbook to Prepare for Natural Hazards which is a publication co-authored by Dennis Hwang and Darren Okimoto from the UH Sea Grant Program. The current edition of the handbook is online at http://seagrant.soest.hawaii.edu.

For more information about the workshop, call the Kauai Civil Defense Agency at 241-1800.

Source: The Garden Island, Tuesday, June 7, 2011.

Trainers (Left to right): Francine Kenyon, Tammy Evrard, Johnelle Santos, Shavana Mahoe, Kathleen Tabata, Bathey Fong, Timothy Renken, Michelle Muralt, and Sarah Ahina

Interested in becoming a certified trainer for the Feeling Safe, Being Safe program? If you are, there is a workshop scheduled on Wednesday, July 13, 2011 from 9:30 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. at Opportunities and Resources, Inc., Helemano Plantation. The purpose of the workshop is to teach people how to become a trainer, to share information about emergency planning, and to make your own disaster kit. It is sponsored by the University of Hawaii's Center on Disability Studies. There is no cost for the workshop, but you need to reserve a space with Lisa Maetani by calling 956-5096. The deadline for reserving a space is July 6, 2011.

The training will teach you new skills and you will meet new people, and learn how to conduct workshops and be paid as a trainer. Call if you are interested in participating in the program! 

Modeling Behavior: What Motivates People to Prepare, or Not Prepare, for Natural Disasters?

Preparing for a natural disaster like a hurricane is critical in minimizing damage, but what motivates individuals to listen to warnings and act is largely unexplored territory.

The question intrigued Wharton marketing professor Robert Meyer, co-director of the Risk Management and Decision Processes Center. Over the past five years, Meyer has worked to develop an interactive simulation to study how such factors as news media reports, storm warnings and the level of concern expressed by friends and neighbors prompt people to take steps such as installing shutters to protect windows ahead of a hurricane. That model is described in a working paper titled, "Development and Pilot Testing of a Dynamic Hurricane Simulator for the Laboratory Study of Hurricane Preparedness and Mitigation Decisions."

By surveying residents impacted by Hurricane Earl in 2010, Meyer was able to validate that the lab simulation accurately reproduced many of the key aspects of real storm responses. "Those surveys produced the same information we got from the simulation. The two were mirror images of each other," Meyer says. "You can really study how people behave in these extreme events in the virtual world."

His hurricane laboratory is based on a methodology known as information acceleration (IA). Instead of using surveys to get a sense of consumer behavior, IA uses computers to simulate the learning that individuals go through before making a choice on a product -- whether it is reading newspaper stories or talking to friends. First developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid-1990s, IA was useful in figuring out how consumers would adopt new technologies. Meyer saw an opportunity to use a similar approach to learn how external sources of information drove people to prepare -- or not prepare -- for a hurricane.

To review the entire article, go to:

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/printer_friendly.cfm?articleid=2772

Mahalo to Teri Spinola-Campbell for sharing the information with DCAB. 

Ready When the Time Comes

The May 30, 2011, Star Advertiser ran an article by Rosemarie Bernardo that describes the new American Red Cross program to recruit volunteers. Local companies have become interested in participating in this effort.

The program is called Ready When the Time Comes, and is sponsored by the Hawaii Chapter of the American Red Cross. Companies can join the Red Cross to assist the community during a natural disaster. To date, more than 50 companies are interested in providing volunteers. Various areas of responsibilities and duties include food and supply distribution, and assisting in evacuation shelters are two areas in which volunteers are needed and trained.

Currently, there are approximately 600 volunteers statewide. This program creates one point of contact for each business to provide volunteers. The program was started on the Mainland in 2001, and more than 450 organizations were involved in recruiting over 11,000 volunteers. Companies interested in this program may contact Mr. Tony Kato at (808) 739-8111 or by e-mail at katot@hawaiiredcross.org.

Source: Star Advertiser, May 30, 2011, Isle Firms Participate in Disaster Readiness

Personal Localized Alerting Plan Network (PLAN)

While on a visit to New York on May 10, 2011, FCC Chairman, Julius Genachowski announced the launching of the Personal Localized Alerting Plan Network (PLAN). PLAN is a new public safety system that allows customers who have mobile devices, such as cellular phones, to receive text-like messages alerting them to danger or imminent threats in their specific areas. The new technology ensures that emergency alerts will not get stuck in highly congested user areas, that can occur with regular mobile voice and text services. PLAN will roll out in New York by the end of the year, then by next April it will be deployed to cities across the country by various wireless carriers.

The PLAN cellular alert system will have specific requirements for an alert signal to be a special type of vibration for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing in order for the person to recognize it as a cellular alert message, and have a special audible alert so that individuals who are blind will recognize it as a CMAS alert message. Government officials will be able to use PLAN to target emergency alerts to a specific geographic area through the use of cell towers (e.g., lower Manhattan) which would provide the message to dedicated receivers in the PLAN-enabled mobile devices. Congress passed the Warning, Alert and Response Network (WARN) Act in 2006, requiring carriers that choose to participate to activate PLAN technology by April 2012. Carriers who will offer PLAN in New York City are AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Ninety percent of New York subscribers who have a PLAN-capable mobile device will be able to receive PLAN alerts by the end of 2011. For more information about PLAN, click on the following link:

http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/personal-localized-alerting-network-plan

To read FCC Chairman Genachowski's remarks in New York on the PLAN announcement click on the following link:

http://beta.fcc.gov/document/chairman-personal-localized-alerting-network-launch-event-remarks 

Mahalo to Rod Macdonald who provided an e-mail with the above information.