Marathon CEG

Well, the CEG met on the 23rd for its first formal meeting/workshop on the CDEM Group Plan review. Up for discussion was the strategic direction of the Group and Chapter 8: Management and Governance.

The material from the strategic direction workshop will be worked into the Foreword and Background in the Plan. Chapter 8 was provided in draft form and apart from a few minor additions was adopted by the CEG. That all sounds pretty straight forward but this is the longest CEG meeting we've ever had. 4 1/2 hours of good robust discussion is a long meeting by any CDEM standard! What is really pleasing to me is that the shape of the Plan, the planning pathway in relation to other documents, and the desire to be consistent across the Group are all taking shape in the eyes of CEG members.

The decision to drop memoranda of understanding between Groups and go for a standard commitment was well received. It is pleasing that MCDEM has seen the benefit of this approach and has introduced it into the draft Director's Guide.

The next mini workshop is on the 16 October and will address the first parts of the Response Chapter to the Plan.

Central Plateau Volcanic Advisory Group

The CPVAG is having its second meeting on the 14th of October and the agenda material has been prepared ready for distribution to members. I have e-mailed many members and advised that material would be posted via the blog. Here is a link to the documents for the meeting. The presentations from the previous workshop have not been posted in the Google Group but have been provided to members on CD.

Volcano Alert Bulletin for Ruapehu

Just as a fresh dump of snow is being received on the mountain GNS staff have issued an update on the Volcano Alert for Ruapehu. While things are warming up a little but this is not outside the normal cycle of activity observed at the volcano.

The Volcano Alert Level remains at 1 - departure from typical background surface activity, signs of unrest. The full Volcano Alert Bulletin is here on the GeoNet web site.

Microsoft Innovation Centre funding application

As you may be aware, we had a funding application in with Microsoft Innovation Centre to integrate our SMART Board with MS Groove. While this project made it to the final round and was well scoped out by Unlimited Realities and the Regional Council team, we were unsuccessful with the application this time round.

Ways of utilising Groove with a number of software packages currently in use by Group members will continue to be investigated by the Group but this particular initiative (worth about $65k) will be on hold in the meantime.

PRFOs in the pipeline

For the first time in 3 years the National Rural Fire Authority are running a course for training Principal Rural Fire Officers. I am fortunate to be on this course and have survived the first day-and-a-half of presentations. I must admit that it's quite a steep learning curve but so far so good.

The course is not unit standard based and is not intended to provide improved skills for use on the fire ground. The course is intended for managers who are responsible for the management functions associated with rural fire authorities including budgets and claims, risk monitoring, legislation and all that really exciting stuff. The collective experience of the participants is fantastic and I am learning as much from them as from the structured lessons. In some respects I have an advantage not having been in the business for very long... I'm not having to unlearn misconceptions and misunderstandings.

I am really glad we have Ross Fothergill and Tony Groome on board for our emergency response... their technical expertise will make sure we can provide professional services and advice on the fire ground where the rubber really hits the road!

Virtual volcanology - exploring volcanoes in Google Earth

From time to time when I find something cool I'll let you know. Here is what I've found tonight... John Bailey is a volcanologist with the Alaska Volcano Observatory and is recorded here giving a presentation on AVO's use of Google Earth as an output tool for observing data from the remote sensing networks.

I know at this point you're concerned about me and wondering if I'm taking my medication but come on, this stuff is cool. For those of us that can't afford a trip to Iceland for the volcanogy conference, here is the poor man's conference participation. John's presentation is about 55 minutes long but is well worth a watch.

Make sure you have a good broadband connection before watching this!

Risk profile

I am aware that some of our members have trouble with large attachments to e-mail. I recently sent out a 3Mb file for the risk profile mini workshop and had a few of you contact me to say it had disappeared into cyberspace. To overcome this I've uploaded two documents to the Google Group. The Draft Risk Profile Section and Risk Profile Support Document can be picked up from here. The Strategic part of our current Group Plan can be picked up from here.

The meeting is at Horizons on Thursday 11th at 13:00 and is being facilitated by Brendan Morris from Hamilton.

New monitors in EOC

The CDEM Group Emergency Coordination Centre (ECC) and Horizons Emergency Operation Centre (EOC) are co-located and staffed within Horizons Regional House. Much of what we do is intelligence gathering, collating, assessing and disseminating information. In today's normal business and emergency management environments so much of the intelligence is received in electronic form. The need has emerged to be able to view this intelligence in electronic form too. It would be very difficult for example to re-draw the weather radar on a whiteboard. Other uses include monitoring of hydrographs, electronic log, web cameras, display of photos, media releases, Google Earth and Skype free video calling.

We managed to get a good deal on a couple of medium sized monitors (28") and a couple of 19" monitors with built-in winterms. So, we've bitten the bullet and popped them up in the EOC and also put Freeview decoders on the two larger monitors. This means we can monitor the news during events too. Yesterday we pulled the EOC to bits and put it all in place. I'm pretty happy with how things went and we had a bit of a tidy up of cables etc too.

ICE - new UN standard introduced

Many of you will be aware of the practice of including one or two ICE (in case of emergency) contacts in your mobile phone... here is an article I recently picked up via the Virtual On Site Operations Co-ordination Centre.

UN News
23 July 2008

23 July 2008 -- Next-of-kin information for injured people will now be easier to find thanks to a new telephone code from the United Nations telecommunications agency.

By adding prefixes such as "01," "02" and "03" before contacts - for example, "01husband" - in a person's mobile telephone directory, rescuers will be able to notify relatives or friends worldwide.

"This simple addition to a person's next-of-kin or nominated contact details has the potential to greatly reduce stress for overworked emergency workers around the world," said Malcolm Johnson, Director of ITU's Telecommunication Standardization Bureau. "Anything that can be done to reduce the workload of these remarkably brave people and assist in getting injured people the right care and attention is commendable."

The code "ICE" - short for "In Case of Emergency" - has appeared in some mobile phones in English-speaking nations, but ITU members stressed the need for a global unified standard that would be effective regardless of language or script.