Disaster Exercises of Greater New York

finishing the FEMA & NY State Planning Course at OEM

on Monday is chairing the NY State ARC Disaster Exercise Planning Meeting in Utica, NY; Tue-Thr attending the Computer Aided Management of Emergency Operations Suite (CAMEO) Course which also includes CAMEO Chemicals - Chemical Response Datasheets and Reactivity Prediction Tool; MARPLOT - Mapping Applications for Response, Planning, and Local Operational Tasks; and ALOHA - Areal Locations of Hazardous Atmospheres trainings at the Griffiss Institute in Rome, NY.

is teaching ICS-100 Introduction to Incident Command System on Sunday at ARC/GNY

is teaching ICS-700 Intro to NIMS (National Incident Management System) on Saturday at ARC/GNY

Santiago Stands Firm

I was awoken from a heavy sleep by the characteristic sly shaking of a tremor. I leapt from my bed in the dark and ran to hold up the glass cabinet in the dining room, as I usually do during quakes.......

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/opinion/02sgray.html?emc=eta1

Earthquakes in NYC

The city can expect a magnitude 5 quake, which is strong enough to cause damage, once every 100 years, according to the report. (Magnitude is a measure of the energy released at the source of an earthquake.) The scientists also calculate that a magnitude 6, which is 10 times larger, has a 7 percent chance of happening once every 50 years and a magnitude 7 quake, 100 times larger, a 1.5 percent chance. Nobody knows the last time New York experienced quakes as large as a 6 or 7, although if once occurred it must have taken place before 1677, since geologists have reviewed data as far back as that year.

The last magnitude 5 earthquake in New York City hit in 1884, and it occurred off the coast of Rockaway Beach. Similar earthquakes occurred in 1737 and 1783.

Manhattan Island is crisscrossed by earthquake faults, and twice in its history — 1737 and 1884 the nation's biggest city has been jolted by relatively mild quakes in the 5.0 range. Whenever the next one strikes, scientists worry that it could be far bigger. Much of Manhattan sits on a deep layer of soft, post-Ice Age sediment over extremely hard rock, a juxtaposition of geological extremes that bodes ominously. A 6.0 quake could shake the city's buildings with nearly the intensity of the 6.8 quake in Kobe. Inexplicably, the city dragged its feet about adding earthquake-mitigating requirements to its building codes until the mid-1990s. The generally well-designed towers in the Manhattan's skyline most likely would survive a 6.0, but the unreinforced masonry townhouses where most residents live might not fare so well. A 1989 study estimated that a quake would cause more than 130 simultaneous blazes, which could put the fire department under severe strain.

Titanic vs. Lusitania: How People Behave in a Disaster

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It's hard to remember your manners when you think you're about to die. The human species may have developed an elaborate social and behavioral code, but we drop it fast when we're scared enough — as any stampeding mob reveals.

That primal push-pull is at work during wars, natural disasters and any other time our hides are on the line. It was perhaps never more poignantly played out than during the two greatest maritime disasters in history: the sinking of the Titanic and the Lusitania. A team of behavioral economists from Switzerland and Australia have published a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that takes an imaginative new look at who survived and who perished aboard the two ships, and what the demographics of death say about how well social norms hold up in a crisis.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1969142,00.html?xid=rss-topst#ixzz0h7mHHbsF