In an emergency, consumers may not realize some obvious solutions. Check this report:…

I have this booklet because a while back Seattle sent a letter to every amateur radio licensee in the city encouraging us all to get involved in the ham emergency-response organizations (RACES, ARES, etc) and describing how the city’s emergency response relates to those. I do intend to get involved with that, right after I get, you know, a radio.

Anyway, one thing about the city’s plans is that it assumes a reasonable amount of capability and competence on the part of the residents. The ham radio aspect is an example: the theory is that if something knocks out communications, then there’s a good chance that a few radio operators will be within runner range of any given point. So the city has detailed plans and procedures and designated meeting points for assembling an emergency radio net, getting the ham net talking to the right people in the city, and (perhaps most important) getting the radio net operators talking to the other people in the affected neighborhood. I assume that there are other groups being prepped to handle other ad-hoc services.

This is all very good. Make use of every resource available. The self-reliant city and citizen. Etc.

However, if something like Katrina were coming for Seattle, a disaster with warning, I’d be out of here. Lots of people would: in fact, probably exactly the same people who are resourceful enough to have made plans to cope with a disaster and help their neighbors in a disaster are the people who got out of New Orleans while the getting was good. The everyone-for-themselves evacuation of the city kind of guaranteed this. And you can’t return to help people later, because the army will shoot you if you try.

So I wonder if things would, paradoxically, have been better if there hadn’t been any warnign of Katrina’s arrival. (Disband NOAA and NWS! Down with the weather satellites! okay, maybe not.)

Ideally – and again, this notion is only sort of half-formed in my head, and I doubt I have the webskillz to implement it properly – I’d like to have a page where anyone could come and log that type of information – best of all would be if they could say something like ‘hey mom, if there is trouble all my contact information is at blahblahblah.org and you can leave me a message there too.’ Sort of like the adhoc LJ groups and message boards a lot of places have been offering only prepared ahead of time and persistant. Of course then you get into privacy issues to, if I’ve suddenly got this giant database of emergency contact information or something…

But, back to current reality, yes. A list of friends, where they are, how to get in touch, an emergency contact, pertinant medical information – that one is a biggie that I haven’t entierly dealt with.