Seattle’s Community Preparedness Summit

Curious how Seattle handles citizen preparedness education and communication flows, I’m at the most recent Community Preparedness Summit, hosted by Seattle OEM’s Mark Howard and Barb Graff this morning. In addition to making lots of contacts from VashonBePrepared’s sister organizations on this side of the ocean, I was especially interested to learn more about how Seattle encourages and teaches their citizens to prepare for whatever events lie ahead.

As shown on the diagram to the right, there are multiple levels of involvement including the program. From family preparedness, to block level Block Watch, on up to the larger neighborhood level new Emergency Communication Hub program and finally the limited professional support they have a number of active programs.

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Seattle Neighborhoods Actively Prepare (SNAP)

VashonBePrepared has done significant educational outreach in the past at community events, in the Vashon Beachcomber and The Loop newsletters, and through our website, but we do not have a regular curriculum for homeowners or NERO captions. The closest we’ve come are the excellent CERT training classes taught through the years by Michael and Catherine Cochrane.

I’m specifically interested to look at what can be offered to homeowners in terms of building a family communications plan and go kit, ensuring their next re-model takes cost effective steps to insulate and reduce seismic damage, and learning more about how to join to form their own local NERO, and how those neighborhood groups work with the rest of the VashonBePrepared infrastructure that has been built up over the years.

Last Thursday, KUOW’s Weekday show Host Steve Scher had frequent guest Roger Faris on to discuss classes offered by the The Phinney Neighborhood Association and Project Impact’s Home Retrofit Classes. How can we get these on Vashon for our homeowners?!

Over the years I’ve been aware of Seattle’s Seattle Neighborhoods Actively Prepare (SNAP) program and learned what I could, but today got a great overview of SNAP from Seattle OEM’s Debbie Goetz, one of three SNAP instructors. Going forward we might be able to send a few locals to one of their future train-the-trainer Leadership Academy programs – who could then come and present local classes. Ms. Goetz also suggested we consider having a ‘Disaster Day’ oriented at homeowners with a variety of experts and sessions they could attend through the morning or day. Nice idea!

Emergency Communication Hubs

The other new idea is a fairly recent program (apparently instigated after boy scouts questioned how the city could effectively communicate with all the block level organizations around the city) for central gathering places for neighborhood information sharing. Any that were able would be established after a major event where phone, roads, and other services were compromised.

These hubs are NOT places to get first aid, food or shelter, but rather generally open areas (often large parking lots) where citizens know in advance they can go to find out the latest news and communicate their needs up to the city. Bulletin boards with paper notes and GRMS radios (3 GRMS radio repeaters and a hub-to-hub repeater are already in place, with additions planned) are the fundamental technology to be employed.

Each hub has a bin or kit stored nearby and a fairly extensive team of volunteers that can take and log messages and communicate those up to the city. The chart to the right shows the essential communication flow as currently envisioned.

The map to the left shows the 9 hubs planned for West Seattle. (Click it to learn more about their program.) Capital Hill is planning for 3 hubs, Wallingford for 7, Green Lake for 4 (2 of Green lakes and Wallingford’s are co-located). View Ridge, Phinney, Broadview and other communities are exploring how many they should set up based on geography and anticipated volunteers.

Seattle’s new hub plans correlate closely with Vashon’s plans for 5 fixed (plus one mobile) ARES Local Area Communication Centers (LACCs), which are collocated at each VIFR fire station with CERT run Command Posts and Public Information centers where citizens and our Neighborhood Emergency Response Organizations (NEROs) can come to report their needs and likewise learn about shelter, medical and food resources available. Because of the greater distances involved, ours rely on ARES radio operators for communications and Message Center Messengers for material and physical package delivery with the central Vashon EOC.

[Update: Also see Karen Berge’s excellent write-up of the morning’s activities!]