Your Survival Blog
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
I now pronounce you … a disaster
As an American, I grew up hearing various public officials declaring that things were officially disasters. A few months ago, after a perusal of the news, I started wondering.
What does it mean, exactly, to “declare a disaster”? Why is it done, and to benefit whom? Do any officials outside the United States engage in this sort of announcement? And what do you do if your area is declared?
I decided to sit down and find out.
Let’s cover the third question first. Yes, non-Americans do this from time to time. Australians do; in 2000, the premier of New South Wales declared a natural disaster after the state was overwhelmed by widespread flooding. In France, a national disaster insurance program requires the government to issue an “Arrêté de reconnaissance” (government declaration of disaster) in order to settle a claim — an arrangement under which, according to the US Government Accountability Office, the French government declared 110,000 natural disasters between 1982 and 2005! Canada seems to have different models depending on the province; in Ontario, the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing must declare a town a disaster area (after a tornado, for example) before it can be eligible for the Ontario Disaster Relief Assistance Program. Yet many approaches to disaster relief differ from the American model.
In several countries, the government provides national coverage for (at least some) disasters. France has a Catastrophes Naturelles program for uninsurable disasters, from avalanche to earthquake to drought. Japan provides reinsurance for earthquake coverage by private companies. New Zealand covers uninsurable risks from earthquake, windstorm, and flood — providing a homeowner has purchased fire coverage. Spain provides government insurance and reinsurance for such disasters as volcanoes, tsunami, and meteorites. Switzerland makes catastrophe insurance mandatory, and prohibits or restricts building in flood and avalanche zones. Taiwan has an earthquake approach similar to Japan’s, though it also includes explosions, landslides, and fire. Turkey established compulsory earthquake insurance in 1999, but later declared all its citizens eligible for government funds whether they had insurance or not.
Other countries emphasize the private market and have no national reimbursement for disaster victims. Germany and Italy rely on optional natural-disaster coverage added on to insurance policies. In the United Kingdom, flood coverage is standard for property policies.
In the United States, though, there are two forms of federal involvement. One is the National Flood Insurance Program (earthquake coverage is handled optionally by private insurers). The other is those formal disaster declarations, which permit assistance from the federal government to disaster victims.
Here’s how a national disaster is “declared” in the United States, and what that means to you:
In order for the President to declare a disaster at the Federal level (something done, on average, 33 times a year), the Governor of the affected state or territory makes a request through the regional office of FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency). Both state and federal officials assess the damage and its impact; to qualify for Federal relief, the disaster must be “beyond the capabilities of the State and local governments.”
(In many U.S. states, local governments may declare disasters in order to qualify for state aid. The governor may then respond with a disaster declaration, activating state-level emergency management protocols.)
Depending on the disaster, FEMA may then activate disaster programs to bring relief to victims. These include aid to individuals and households; aid to public and nonprofit agencies for emergency services and repair of public facilities; and hazard mitigation measures to prevent future recurrences.
Individual assistance in the US can include temporary housing, grants to repair damaged homes (or in rare cases, replace or construct them), and grants for medical, dental, funeral, moving, legal, and other expenses. It also might include unemployment assistance to people whose jobs are lost due to disaster and who are not covered by other unemployment programs. Crisis counseling programs are sometimes established for people in affected areas — both immediate outreach, and services lasting up to nine months thereafter. Tax breaks are offered to people who’ve lost property exceeding 10% of their gross incomes, and refunds can be expedited to taxpayers in disaster areas.
Public assistance is available for a variety of projects: removing debris, providing emergency protection, repairing roads and bridges, providing clean water and other utilities, and repairing public buildings and parks.
The federal Hazard Mitigation Grant Program allows communities to buy or relocate property in hazardous areas; elevate buildings prone to flood; reinforce buildings against earthquakes, wildfire, or flood; and develop mitigation plans. The primary emphasis of the program is on floodplains and floodproofing.
If your corner of the United States is declared a federal disaster area, listen to the news for information on where to go and what to do, and visit FEMA’s Web site at http://www.fema.gov.
If you’re reading from another country and have knowledge about your country’s disaster-relief programs, let us know and we’ll cover them in a future column!
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Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Auto-da-pay?: keeping your finances in shape for emergencies
We have a friend I’ll call Elaine — because that’s not her name — who is, to put it kindly, somewhat disorganized. While she sometimes gets as far as making neat piles of bills on her kitchen table, actually getting them paid on time can be something of a challenge. From what we’ve heard, she has managed, at varying times, to have her cable modem, telephone (landline) service, and electricity disconnected. That’s in the past six months.
Are you like Elaine?
Under normal circumstances, losing normal utility services is not a huge deal: a major hassle, no doubt, but something not likely to cost more than an afternoon off work while you go drive somewhere to pay a bill. But what if circumstances aren’t normal and you need those services?
- The biggest heat wave in decades comes to your town — and you have no electricity to run an air conditioner or even a cooling fan so you can sleep at night.
- An ice storm just took out your electricity, but you can’t call anyone about it because you forgot to pay the phone bill.
- You’re housebound after a major snowfall — and you discover you have no heat because you let the oil tank run dry.
- You’re trying to keep an eye on the latest hurricane track — except that your Internet and cable TV service were just turned off.
- Your town announces a quarantine — but you’re stuck at home with no incoming water because of unpaid bills. (Some towns simply issue liens, but others will actually cut off service.)
Please don’t find yourself in this position. If you have a pile of bills somewhere in your house, now’s a good time to pull them out, make a list, and try to get up to date on your obligations.
“But I can’t!”
- If it’s simple forgetfulness, consider setting up auto-pay on some or all of the bills you fall behind on. Many banks offer automatic payment options; so do some utilities. You can set up one-time or recurring payments, and even arrange for wildly varying charges (like electric or natural-gas bills) to be smoothed out by paying a prearranged amount each month.
- If it’s an organizational issue, find a buddy who’s willing to sit down with you and help you sort out your paperwork, possibly in exchange for your doing the same or a similar favor for them. (Or, if you can afford it, consider a professional organizer.)
- If it’s a financial issue, call your creditors and work out a payment plan — they’ve heard it all before, really, and would much rather have you offer to pay a bit at a time than to simply disconnect or otherwise stop serving you.
And when push comes to shove, you’ll be glad you paid up.
Posted by eks on 01/19 at 06:11 PM(2) Comments • Permalink
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Don’t call us, we’ll call you: emergency notification systems
I was paging through a local newspaper when I spotted a story on something called “Reverse 911”. (Though it’s “000” in Australia, “999” in the UK, and “112” in the European Union, “911” is usually the number dialed to reach emergency services in the US and Canada. Now ... reverse that.) In my years obsessing about preparedness and consuming articles on emergency services and disaster recovery, I hadn’t yet encountered the term.
I mentioned it to a group of friends online. “What is it?” asked one. “In an emergency,” I said, trying to summarize the article as concisely as possible, ”they call you.” “Neat,” she said.
Out of twenty-five in the group, only two had encountered “reverse 911” services in their communities. One, in suburban New York, had been called about a minor water issue. Another, in Massachusetts, joked: “The recorded voice of the chief of police has called us a couple times about irreievant road closures. What are they going to do? Call about a real emergency? It’d cause mass panic.”
“REVERSE 911”, it turns out, is a name trademarked (by Sigma Communications , now part of PlantCML) for what is more properly called an “emergency notification system.” In the same way people say “Kleenex” when they mean facial tissues and “Xerox” when they mean “photocopy”, reporters in towns all over North America have taken to referring to any community notification system as “Reverse 911”. Such systems use recorded calls or other modalities to alert citizens in a geographic area (to blizzards, wildfires, tornadoes, floods, nuclear plant crises, whatever potential disaster looms. Some communities use it to tell citizens of sexual predators in their area, or children who’ve gone missing. Others use it to inform people of contamination in water supplies, or, as my Massachusetts friend learned, road closures.
And so through the night went his cry of alarm / To every Middlesex village and farm ...
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Paul Revere’s Ride”
Here are a few answers for questions you might have:
Q: If “Reverse 911” is a trademark, what are some of the other systems called?
A: In one browsing session I ran across systems made by firms including Everbridge, Amerilert, Enera (RapidReach), Emergency Communications Network (CodeRED), Siemens (Sygnal), Cooper Notification (RSAN), TechRadium (IRIS), Database Systems Corp., and Amtelco (Red Alert), among others. There are probably dozens of firms and packages altogether.
Q: Who can use them?
A: Public-safety officials in any jurisdiction, including police departments, fire departments and other authorities.
Q: How many cities/towns are they deployed in?
A: Now this is an excellent question! The officially trademarked “Reverse 911” system alone claims to be used in “thousands of communities, counties, commercial businesses, schools and non-profit organizations.” So there are probably tens of thousands using all packages on the market, though it’s not clear how many users are towns and counties rather than companies or organizations. Soon Connecticut will roll out the first statewide emergency notification system in the United States.
Q: How do they notify people?
A: Most systems seem to begin with all listed landlines (both residential and business) in a given area. Some (which draw on 911 databases) have unpublished/unlisted numbers as well; others, like Tampa (Florida)’s, apparently do not. The system in Osceola, Arkansas, has both landlines and cell phones in its database. Other systems can use text messages, email, and fax. However, many systems seem to require registration of cell numbers, VoIP (voice over IP) numbers and email addresses.
Q: How much do they cost?
A: A chief of police told The Morning News of Northwest Arkansas that six providers he spoke with all quoted a range of $15K to $25K (US) a year; his community, Bella Vista, has about twenty thousand people. Darien, Connecticut, with about the same population, pays $10K a year to maintain its system. San Diego County (California) paid $200K for its newest system in 2007, and $19K/year to maintain it thereafter. Connecticut’s statewide system should cost $1.4 million/year during its first year, $650K thereafter.
Some towns in the US appear to be defraying costs with grants from the Department of Homeland Security.
Q: Are they used outside the US?
A: Definitely! Systems are in use in Lancashire in the UK, British Columbia in Canada, and Canadian towns and counties in Ontario and New Brunswick, among others.
The state of Victoria, Australia, tested a warning system (both phone- and text-based) in fire-prone areas back in 2005, but it was never rolled out thanks to debate about who would pay the cost, estimated to be $20 million (Australian). In the wake of the devastating fires in Victoria in February of 2009, politicians are now pushing for a national notification system to go live within the next year or so.
Q: Is anyone attempting to standardize these systems?
A: Yes. The "http://www.incident.com/cookbook/index.php/CAP_Fact_Sheet">Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) was adopted as a standard by the International Telecommunications Union in 2007, but it’s not clear how many emergency notification systems are actually using CAP in their software yet.
Notification systems are a still fledgling tool for emergency preparedness, but look amazingly useful. We’ll cover them again as further developments arise.
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Tuesday, January 05, 2010
What to know before the power goes out
This fall I was sitting around the house of a pleasant Wednesday morning, happily pounding away on my laptop, conversing with friends in one window, Accomplishing Stuff. Then ... buzz, crackle, the lights all flashed and went out. And came back. And with a final sigh, went out again.
There was something in the finality of that sequence that made me suspect the power would be out for a while. When I stuck my head out and called to a neighbor a couple of doors down, only to discover her power was out too, I figured we were in for the long haul — and me still unshowered. (My water usually works during outages, but my water heater doesn’t. And I like long showers.)
So I was back to the dance I’d done in another town many a time: first try to guess how long the power would be out, and then figure out what to do during the outage. As I tried to reach neighbors to see how far the blackout extended (several have VoIP so their house phones no longer worked), one stuck her head in and told me the school, two miles away, was also out. I called the electric company and wandered through a voicemail maze, reaching a human. A substation by the nearest shopping mall had gone down, he told me, and their best estimate was two hours hence.
Just as I hung up, preparing to go door-to-door spreading the news, I noticed a light had come back on — the power smoothly returned as though it had never left. And though I hadn’t unplugged them yet in preparation for the power coming back, none of the electronics in the house had been fried.
The previous outage wasn’t so smooth. We were watching a DVD late at night, when lightning struck overhead (the single loudest sound I have heard in my lifetime!). The power wasn’t out for very long, but when it returned, we’d sacrificed several items to the lightning gods: an Internet router and cable modem (which took four days to replace — an eternity for a work-at-home household); one landline phone; and the contents of our basement freezer. The freezer itself actually survived, but the surge tripped the GFCI circuit it was plugged into, and by the time we tracked down the problem we had to discard hundreds of dollars’ worth of food.
As for the phone ... the phone company informed me their network was just fine, and suggested I check the “Network Interface Device” (NID) which, they said, could be anywhere in our basement or outside. (I eventually found it in our bike shed.) I borrowed a working phone, plugged it in, and got a dial tone from the NID, proving the problem was in my house. After much trial and error inside, I unplugged our answering machine, plugged in a borrowed working phone, and got a dial tone: the phone line was fine but the answering machine was fried, and while it was plugged in to a phone jack, no other handsets would function. Removing it solved the problem.
So let’s review some lessons learned:
1. Know your circuit breakers. Know where the breaker panel is. Know which outlets and devices each breaker controls. Know how to reset a breaker. Make sure they’re correctly labeled.
If an appliance won’t come on, don’t just check the circuit breaker. Check to see if it’s plugged into a GFCI outlet, and if the circuit breaker in the outlet has been tripped. If it’s a large appliance, check the manual to see if it has a built-in fuse that might have blown.
2. Protect yourself from surges. Don’t hesitate to splurge on a high-quality surge protector for your most critical devices. Do unplug voltage-sensitive equipment (especially computers) during an outage, to avoid surges from the return of power damaging your electronics.
3. Learn about your phone service. If you have Plain Old Telephone Service, have a basic idea how to debug it. Have a spare working phone on hand, and know where the Network Interface Device to your home is.
4. Be prepared to swap a lot of devices around to track down a problem.
In another column, we’ll cover “now what?”: what to do, and have on hand, during the actual outage.
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