You are here

Home

Rockaways Response Coordination

Primary tabs

Tue, 2012-11-06 07:26 — mdmcdonald
- Show quoted text -
Groups this Group Post belongs to: 
Rockaways Resilience Network Working Group

Comments

Tue, 2012-11-06 07:43 — mdmcdonald

Cat and Chris, 

Great work!  I am assuming that your geospatial focus here is the Rockaways.  Is that correct?  What time horizon are you working under?  Do we have a similar ground team and citizen's EOC working Staten Island, and other inundation areas with broken infrastructure as well, that the Rockaway coordination team is connected to?
We will put your note into the Rockaways Resilience Network working group.  All of the positions you have structured are crucially important.  The New York Resilience System executive committee is interested in working closely with the following positions you have noted:
Communications Technology 
Public Communications
First Aid and Emergency 
Logistics
Sanitation
In addition, we will be vetting a few positions within the Rockaways, which we would like to work closely with the core team you are setting up:
Assessments and Surveillance
Crowd-sourcing and Intelligent Social Networks
Health and Human Security 
Community Mobilization and Resilience
Knowledge Management Systems 
Visual Analytics (including geospatial intelligence)
Management and Governance
These roles will be looking at the Rockaways Disaster Area from a more strategic and planning perspective with longer space/time horizons, that will start with and complement the response and relief phase activities.  They will also ensure that there aren't the cliff effects between response and relief, relief to recovery, recovery to resilience that so often happen in high severity events.  These positions would go deeper in their look at the Rockaways, Staten Island, and other neighborhoods on the Bay and along the South Shore of Long Island with extensive water intrusion.  
They would not look at the response in the more typical low severity crisis response framework of dependency aid.  They will look at scenarios of resilience from a systems perspective under Severity Level 3, 4, and 5 levels.  They will put special attention on the resilience and sustainability of sub-populations that are most vulnerable, as well as mapping of green, yellow, and red zones.  
It is our current assessment that the Rockaways have several populations with low resilience that are now entering Severity level 4, meaning that they are losing trust in government and other institutions.  This issue has to be addressed quickly.  There are other longer term issues regarding the sustainability of some neighborhoods in the Rockaways under scenarios of other global changes (including but not limited to climate change -- larger storms and sea level rise).
Our ESRI Arc 10 team met on Monday.  I will be meeting Bill Davenhall of ESRI at the One Health Academy on Thursday.  Perhaps, we could meet over the phone or Skype with Willow on the ARC 10 dynamic mapping team issues today or tomorrow.  
In addition, we would like to suggest a model of crowd-sourcing and intelligent social networks for surveillance and rapid response that we have been building over the past several years in different disaster areas, that might help with data collection, verification, situational awareness, and the building of an anticipatory science base.  It enables a process of building quickly from ground intelligence into visual analytics to inform policy, as well as rapid response.
The big focus today and tomorrow for us is to make sure no one in the Rockaways freezes to death or dies of dehydration over the next few days.  Do you have anyone coordinating these issues?  I would like to connect with all volunteers that have health and environmental engineering (including sanitation) training today.  We will hold a Resilience, Health and Human Security call at 9 AM and at 6 PM on the following conference line.  
Conference Dial-in Number: (712) 432-0180 
Participant Access Code: 205372#
Thank you for all the great work you are doing to coordinate the response efforts in the Rockaways, and potentially beyond.
Mike
Michael D. McDonald, Dr.P.H. 
President
Global Health Initiatives, Inc.
Coordinator
U.S. Resilience System
Cell: 202-468-7899
howdy folks
Page loaded in 0.405 seconds.