Viewing Preparedness through a Small Lens

Susan Riedy is being honored as an Individual and Community Preparedness Champion of Change.

A quick web search on personal preparedness bodes over 18,000,000 results. Information is readily available to Americans who want to get prepared for any emergency. Yet, three years ago, when surveyed, only 17% of Albany County residents said they were prepared. So why aren’t more of us prepared? 

Navigating through all of that information can be daunting. Finding out what is most relevant to each of us is challenging. Also, many just don’t believe a large-scale emergency will ever happen to them, but I’ve always believed that it’s better to be safe than sorry. With this in mind, Albany County Citizen’s Corp (ACCC) embarked upon a multidimensional approach to increasing individual and community preparedness. Recognizing the importance of input from the various communities that make up Albany County, ACCC reached out to service providers and communal leaders for help in developing strategies to improve preparedness. With the assistance of these dedicated individuals, ACCC increased preparedness among vulnerable populations and ensured meaningful and culturally appropriate information not only existed but was also readily available. I found that, while looking at the big picture is almost always valuable, viewing things from a smaller lens allows us to focus on the individual and unique needs of the many populations that make up our community. 

I believe that successful preparedness rests on drawing upon the expertise of partners who know their communities better than we do. This was seen in the work we did with the Burmese community.  A team from Albany County Department of Health and Sheriff’s Office created a preparedness presentation incorporating images and concepts that were identifiable to the Burmese population. University of Albany School of Public Health staff reviewed the presentation to ensure cultural sensitivity and to coordinate its English-Karen translation. The American Red Cross added resiliency materials. And at last, the presentation was well-received. Working together, we provided a specialized training to a vulnerable population while strengthening relationships not only with Burmese community but also with our partner organizations.

ACCC also strives to develop innovative and fun programs that call attention to National Preparedness Month (NPM). In 2013, ACCC collaborated with ShopRite to host a NPM cook-off between Albany County Executive Daniel P. McCoy and Albany County Sheriff Craig D. Apple, Sr. These celebrity chefs were each challenged to create a main dish and dessert using only non-perishable items found in their go-kits. Shoppers received family preparedness educational resources and completed a preparedness quiz for a chance to win a go-kit. Partnering with community leaders and a major grocery chain caught the attention of local media, which helped us further promote our message of preparedness to residents.

The task of preparing our communities often seems monumental.  But our small lens approach has yielded a 10% increase in preparedness among our residents in the last 3 years. We hope our initiatives help foster creativity and confidence in emergency preparedness partners across the country, and help prepare our country for emergencies one person at a time.

Susan Riedy is the Senior Public Health Planner at the Albany County Department of Health. She directs the planning, implementation, and evaluation of activities associated with the Albany County Citizen Corps.

Watersheds and Wildfires

Jonathan Bruno is being honored as a Individual and Community Preparedness Champion of Change.

I grew up in a home overlooking the North Branch of the Winooski River in central Vermont. Each spring, as the winter snow melted and the temperatures climbed, my brother and I would wait anxiously for our father to announce that it was time to “move some rocks,” which to me meant swimming. As we’d splash in the clear waters, my father would spend hours clearing the boulders that had filled his swimming hole during the spring floods. As a kid, “moving rocks” was part of summer. As I grew older, I came to see dad’s underwater rock wrestling matches as a reminder that the river I loved as a boy is part of the global system that we interact with every day.

For more than a decade, I have worked in natural resource protection through the Coalition for the Upper South Platte (CUSP). With 27 staff and 6,500 annual volunteers, we work to balance the diverse needs and interests of Coloradans, serving more than 75% of our state’s residents by protecting our 2,600-square-mile watershed located in Colorado’s central Front Range. With mounting research demonstrating the global impacts of local wildfires, watershed protection demands a multimodal action approach, including fire prevention. Proper land management saves lives, money, and resources.

Two recent fires alone – Waldo Canyon in 2012 and Black Forest in 2013 – resulted in over $750 million dollars in insurance claims and greatly harmed the surrounding natural environment. These and other devastating Colorado wildfires spurred the creation of the Wildfire Insurance and Forest Health Task Force, which was designed to make recommendations aimed at lessening the impacts from fire, especially in wildland-urban interfaces (WUI), the zones of transition between unoccupied land and human development. The recommendations included an assessment of where to build and how to build so that our communities won’t be put in harm’s way. We must ensure that homeowners understand that living and building in the WUI, or deep in the forest, means that their homes could become tinderboxes when fire encroaches. While I still believe that the burden for action and property protection ultimately falls on the homeowner, the responsibility to take action falls upon everyone, and we must all be willing to take accountability and ownership over our communities.

Everyone is impacted by the way our natural resources are used, as well as how they are protected. From the river I swam in as a young boy in Vermont to the watershed I now work to enhance, protection of these resources starts with the local community. That includes property owners, local officials, land managers, and people like me who want to ensure safe and healthy communities. Wildfire issues, as well as many other environmental and societal challenges, are far too large to be solved by a single individual, office, or agency. We must be willing to accept that global problems are problems for all of us, and that solutions are possible when – and only when – we address these issues together.

Jonathan Bruno is the Chief Operating Officer for the Coalition for the Upper South Platte, a non-profit whose mission is to protect the water quality and ecologic health of the Upper South Platte Watershed.

Changing the Culture through Education and Understanding

Lt. Brian K. Rand is being honored as a Individual and Community Preparedness Champion of Change.

As an emergency responder, I’ve been taught that all events have a “life cycle.” They consist of a beginning, a middle, and an end. But emergency management and community preparedness do not have a life cycle. They have a beginning, but the task of managing emergencies and preparing our communities is unending.

That’s what I find so exciting about emergency preparedness. Preparedness means getting ready for an event before it happens, even if such an event has never occurred in a given community. I am happy to say that this approach is now guiding emergency services preparedness and training across the country.

Preparing emergency action plans for an event that may or may not occur can be a daunting task; it always requires a great amount of time, effort, research, and training. I have found that it is important to remember two things throughout this difficult process. First, always ask “what if.” And second, never place yourself in the position of having to answer the question of “what do we do now.” Changing the culture of emergency response to be proactive is a major goal we should all strive to achieve.

My work at the Watertown Fire Department has given me a chance to enact my vision of proactive community preparedness. As an example, we have worked with stakeholders to enact policies to deal with opioid overdoses and the pre-hospital treatment of these events. The Department went to great lengths to meet with community activists, hospital officials, and medical directors, as well as to enhance our pre-hospital treatment of overdoses on scene during the event.

Because we saw great success with this program, we are now working with local partners to help change the legislation to have the same medication we provide also available on scene (Naloxone). By educating and changing the culture of how communities perceive an individual who becomes addicted, we gain greater support for important programs that help treat individuals with addictions. The Department offers training to families to help better understand addiction and to save the life of a family member in an emergency. At a minimum, we hope that our education and training will allow an individual who cares for a person afflicted with addiction to have the proper tools to save his or her life.

A piece of advice that I received as a U.S. Marine from my Gunnery Sergeant, Kenneth Crutcher, still guides my thinking today: “If you find yourself with nothing more to do, you are wrong.”  This is the mindset you must maintain while creating and implementing emergency preparedness plans of all shapes and sizes. You are never done. You can always go back and make things better.

This is the attitude that ensures emergency preparedness workers build relationships with community members who are needed to create community-centered solutions to emergencies. Engaging these local partner is vital because they will be the ones there in the event of an emergency. Preparing all aspects of a community is the key to success in an ever-changing emergency management landscape here in the United States.

Lt. Brian K. Rand serves as the Emergency Medical Services Coordinator and Training Officer for the Watertown, Massachusetts Fire Department.