The number of electrical outages affecting 50,000 or more people for at least an hour doubled during the decade up to 2012. Most of the blackouts were caused by damage to large transmission lines and substations during extreme weather events, a new analysis from nonprofit Climate Central says. Michigan has the most outages, followed by Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
A NIST report about its investigation into the 2011 Joplin tornado calls for nationally accepted standards for building design and construction, and public shelters and emergency communications to reduce deaths caused by tornadoes.
According to power management company Eaton, for the fifth year running, California topped the list of states with the most power outages, followed by Texas and Michigan.
Three-quarters of business continuity managers fear the possibility of an unplanned IT and telecoms outage, and 73 percent worry about the possibility of a cyber attack or data breach, according to the annual Business Continuity Institute (BCI) Horizon Scan.
Hospital Incident Command Systems (HICS) are a component of security and emergency management that is often overlooked in many of the disaster plans in the United States.
Counterterrorist operatives perform drills on securing and neutralizing threats at major target areas. Although this is an extremely important concept to master, often ignored is one of the most important components in community disaster preparedness: the local area hospital.
Washington state has flunked its disaster preparedness test. According to the American College of Emergency Physicians’ State-by-State Report Card, Washington state received an overall grade of “D+” and an “F” in disaster preparedness.
Failing to prepare for extreme weather events has cost the United States $1.15 trillion in economic losses from 1980 to 2010 and could cost another trillion in coming years.
The reality of living without computers, mobile phones and entertainment systems, and managing a transport system thrown into chaos by an absence of traffic lights, trains and subways, may become increasingly common, according to a new academic study.