Rangitikei Exercise

The Rangitikei gang took part in a small exercise last Friday to test facilities at the Emergency Operations Centre - yes despite some rumours, the EOC is still fully functional at the back of the Marton library.

The exercise was intended to be a tabletop exercise and just enough to test systems such as CDERS and re-familiarise key District Council staff with CDEM arrangements. The exercise has also provided me with a baseline for future improvements (and there are a few up my sleeve). We'll be working through the system improvements over the next several months and the staff will be called on to participate in some training courses.

Its certainly not all doom and gloom though (as evidenced by the photo), the level of participation was good and the experience in the room reassures me that if the balloon went up tomorrow we have a response capability. At the conclusion of the exercise, Paul ran through an abbreviated version of CIMS training for some of the staff who were unfamiliar with some of these processes. Thanks to the team for their participation.

Flu trends

Whilst browsing the internet tonight, I've stumbled across Google Flu trends. This is a graph that allows us to compare previous years with current Google flu trends. It's important to note that the graph shows the number of searches, not the number of cases! There is a strong correlation between the number of Google searches for 'flu' and the relative number of cases. Here's a link to the NZ page. Google trends is a pretty powerful tool - I wonder if there are other things we could track and learn from?

Trembly Turangi

The Turangi-Tokaanu area seems to be going through a bit of a shaky time at the moment. A swarm of small earthquakes has been recorded over the past few weeks with events today ramping up slightly. The largest of these was this morning and measured M4.4. All the quakes seem to be quite shallow. The area is known for its geothermal activity and when we were up there a few weeks ago, steam was evident around this location.

Details of recent earthquakes can be found on the GeoNet website. I dumped a few of the locations of today's events into Google Earth just to see where things plot up. Note that some of the locations represent more than one event - one of the locations is where three of the events come back to (give or take a bit for rounding errors I guess).

Here is a link to the Get Ready Get Thru information for earthquakes.

Pandemic update

Novel Influenza A (H1N1) 09 is the very catchy name that swine flu now goes by. I've been tracking developments with the current outbreak and believe our level of response at this time is appropriate. It's important to keep in mind that we've only had one confirmed case in the region. What this means is that we are still in the phase where health officials are still trying to stop the spread of the virus in our community. This is different to the main centres where community transmission is happening.

The Welfare Advisory Group met last week and have also just received national guidance on welfare assistance for this pandemic. We're not expecting things to be overwhelming on the welfare front if the virus continues to behave as it is. We've also been circulating NHCC and other updates via Groove to Group members and the occasional e-mail to our distribution list. I've also started attending the MidCentral DHB briefings on a more regular basis.

We did have a little bit of a flurry in the office this week as a contact of a possible case was sent home showing flu like symptoms. We've cracked open the pandemic kits and have further promoted good practice to minimise the risks for our staff and visitors.

So, we'll keep monitoring the situation and if necessary ramp up our response either in support of the health efforts or for co-ordinating welfare assistance.

Blog report

It's hard to believe that the blog has been running for just over a year now. My first post was on the 5th June 2008. The whole idea was to make life a little easier for me in getting some of the messages out to anyone who is interested. Ged Shirley (my boss and chair of our CEG) suggested doing a regular newsletter to keep punters informed on Group Plan review progress. To be honest, this sounded like more work. So the question was: how do I do this without creating a rod for my own back? It took a few days, but then I figured out that we should try a blog!

While there was a little hesitation, the Group has trusted me enough to publish the blog without moderation. I'm careful to make it clear if the views being expressed are mine or have been agreed by the Group. So big thumbs up to the Group for this!!

I've been tracking the blog using Google Analytics since it started and have reported to the CEG from time-to-time on how things are going. Here's a summary of the first year and a bit...

• 1,011 unique visitors
• 3,958 page views
• Most searched = Wanganui camera bar
• Visits by country (46 in all) = NZ (1,852), US (87), UK (40), Aus (19), Canada (14)... right down to Jamaica (1)
• 48% of visitors are one-time visits, 25% though have visited between 9 and 200 times
• Apart from one-timers, most visitors are on site between 3-10 minutes per visit.

So - hopefully you have found the blog useful. If you have any suggestions for items you would like to see - just let me know. Finally, a big thankyou to those who have supported the site and provided feedback (either on the site or to me directly)... CHEERS!

Akitio alive and well!

Well, it might have been a while in the making, but the latest webcam is now up and running. The Akitio camera is working from the boat club at the southern end of the beach. This view is one of the early shots from the camera. The transmission speeds are excellent and the site provides us with a good view of the road. The idea is that we will start getting a better handle on the effects of waves on the local community. Factors such as wave height, swell direction and tidal conditions all influence the end result. There have been instances when logs were thrown up on the road.

Here is the link to the camera on the Horizons Regional Council website. We may have a few issues with lens flare due to the beach running basically north/south - but we'll see how we go.

Social media - what's in it for us?

I've been thinking about how to get the most out of some of the social media sites, especially Twitter. I think this will become more relevant as time moves on with the Tehran riots, San Diego fires and Sichuan earthquake being examples of Twitter coming to the fore. There are a couple of quite a good videos on Ted about this… check out Evan Williams and Clay Shirky.

I'm still figuring this out myself... but Twitter is a social networking tool that allows you to share what is important to you with friends and family. Recently developments in Twitter mean that it is easy to find out what people are saying on Twitter. Twitter uses a thing called a hash tag to make searching, RSS feeds and such like more useful. A hash tag might look something like #NZCD that preceeds the message. If you subscribed tothe tag #NZCD on Twitter or your RSS feed you would be notified of all the messages that include that tag. You can also imagine that a #NICD or #SICD (North and South Island) hash tag would make it a little easier during widespread events for EM people to keep tabs on what's going on. If we could couple this with a geo-reference then we might be able to aggregate tweets (messages sent via Twitter) to specific localities.

The reason I'm putting this on the blog, rather than just doing it, is that ideally CDEM Groups would have a consistent approach to Twitter. It could be something we include in our promotions or messages during an emergency (follow us on Twitter with the hash tag…). I'm not suggesting additional work in the EOC/ECC but a means of intelligence sharing that can either come from the community or from the CDEM authorities. I'm interested in your feedback on this one.

New stuff coming

The team has started looking at the new CDEM Group web site. Glen Young is Horizons' new Webmaster and is bringing a number of exciting ideas to the camp. Once we've got a concept developed, we'll be taking it out to the EMOs and CEG members for refinement.

We know that the site needs to be informative, current, and quickly updated (especially during events), but it also needs to look good, be easy to navigate and be modern. As well as the usual preparedeness information there are a number of cool things we're looking to include. Things like RSS feeds, inter-operability with Facebook, Bebo and other social networking sites, Twitter functionality, GIS map interface, web-cams, blogs and vlogs, tech-wikis and all sorts of other cool tools.

One of the global developments that is still just over the horizon is Google Wave. Although the developer tools are now available, Wave is not being launched by Google until later this year. We will look to take advantage of Google Wave as soon as we can. In my view this advancement is going to be one of the most significant advancements we've seen in recent years. Although the video is quite long (1 hr 20min), it is certainly mind-expanding.

Group Plan CEG workshop

The Coordinating Executive Group held what I feel was a very successful workshop yesterday to review the first draft of the revised CDEM Group Plan. Roughly half the Plan had been seen by the CEG at previous meetings and workshops however there was still quite a chunk of work to get through.

Brendan Morris facilitated the workshop to give us all an opportunity to focus on the discussions rather than running the workshop. Evan Lloyd also participated in the workshop to provide the background to the hazard and risk analysis prepared by him to support the Plan.

Several hours of good healthy discussion later and there was general agreement that we are making good progress and that the Plan is still on track for approval at the December meeting of the Joint Standing Committee. Before that can happen, there is still quite a bit of work to do and consultation to be undertaken. We'll be working to make the adjustments recommended by the CEG over the next few weeks before it comes back for endorsement as the draft CDEM Group Plan for public consultation.

Anyway... so far, so good.