One of the (many) cool things about my job at Red Cross
National Headquarters is that they gave me my own website to play around in.
Technically, the National Mass Care Strategy website is not mine but I’m going
to take ownership of it anyway.
When I was the State Mass Care Coordinator in Florida I
considered the State ESF #6, Mass Care website to be mine. I wrote or helped to
write most of the documents posted there. I got to decide what documents were posted,
how they were grouped and I even got to decide the names of the groups under
which they were posted. Whenever anyone asked me a technical question I would
tell them to go to my website and pull down a particular document in which they
would find the answer.
When my friend Beth Boyd was managing the NMCS site at
National Headquarters we had a friendly rivalry as to which web site was the
BEST mass care web site in the country. Of course, I thought the Florida site
was the best and Beth thought the NMCS website was the best. I still think that
the Florida site has better content.
But now that I have the National Mass Care Strategy power I’m
going to fix that.
When I left the State of Florida I copied all of my working
files (6 GB) to the iCloud and this is now a reference library for me and I can
share some of that data with the rest of the country. For example, I have all
the shelter and meal count data that the state (me) collected from the
voluntary agencies during the 2004-05 hurricanes. I did a lot of subsequent
analysis of this data and I should be able to make this information available
in documents on the NMCS website.
This may take some time because the Red Cross has me working
on other projects than the website, but I’ll poke along at it. My first step
will be to move all the good content on the Florida site over to the NMCS web.
If a lot of this content is Florida specific, well, hey, I’ll work on fixing
that, too. I’ll solicit good documents from my friends in the mass care
community nationwide.
What kind of documents am I looking for? I believe that
people want to see jurisdiction (not agency) feeding plans and shelter plans.
The Feeding Template and the Shelter Template are good documents but if you
have the task to write a feeding plan for your state (like Colorado just did)
you want to look at examples of how other states did it. The same would hold
with a shelter plan. And instead of having to dig through state websites
looking to see if they even have a shelter plan, it would be better to know
that everything available is collected at one central location.
Another thing I will be looking for are good examples of
mass care plans at the local or municipal level. A big problem in particular is
information geared to local emergency managers focused on the process of
transitioning survivors from shelters to appropriate housing. Does anyone have
anything written on that? Procedures, plans, after-action, reports? Let me know
and we’ll put them up.
