About this site
What is Disaster Post for?
Disaster Post is an comprehensive online real-time disaster communication platform. It is a platform for responding agencies, civilians, businesses, non-profits, and volunteers to post and communicate during and after a disaster. Disaster Post is faster, cheaper, scalable, and more comprehensive than all current incident communications combined. It has been tested on a real wildfire and it works.
Advantages (Not everything is operational yet - still in prototype stage.):
- Combine local knowledge, landmarks, and info with official information from all sources for a complete picture of the incident on your Google Earth map.
- Your map displays official information about rescue plans, food drops, escape routes, evacuations, etc. in real time from official and civilian sources.
- If you need help, map your location and problem for officials or volunteers to find you faster. Our process beats calling an overwhelmed 911 in a disaster.
- If you know the location of a problem such as an approaching line of wildfire then map it with an online form. This will update hundreds of not thousands of maps in real time. Officials and locals can see your valuable information. (This feature not yet developed.)
- Plan and deploy neighborhood self-help and security efforts. Merge Web-based information with cell phone notifications. Any home or business can become a local dispatch center.
- Monitor forum and blog activity from a computer or cell phone to stay informed and report local conditions.
- This Web site is a prototype concept and development is in progress. We'll improve it with time.
- An incident can be a wildfire, flood, earthquake, hurricane, terrorist attack, or any such disaster.
What you can do here:
- Build your own incident map now! Disaster Post accumulates information from various sources that you can use to build your own Google Earth map full of information that you need.
- Join an Incident Network (to be developed) - Network with others affected by the disaster and responding agencies, organizations, and volunteers. Get information and assistance faster.
- Structure profiles - give firefighters the info they need to save your home - before they arrive! Critical!
- Incident Networks (groups) - the forums, blogs and other communication tools needed for victims and responders to communicate information to large audiences.
- Communicate with officials and those in a disaster area in real time - managed mass communication! (Prototype available now.)
- Civilians post their disaster situation, local information, videos, and photos for all responders to see the situation on the ground in real-time on their disaster maps. Chose an icon marker to let others know if you are experiencing fire, flood, need rescue, not in trouble but supplying local knowledge, or some other situation. When 911 is overloaded this feature could save your life or someone else's. Only officials have access to this information.
- Officials with responding agencies and organizations post their strategies, maps, escape routes, road closures, and other critical data in real-time to the maps for the public to see.
- Your desktop Google Earth map becomes a real time communication and collaboration center. It can be a dispatch center for local volunteer efforts and track resources that your community needs to survive.
- Post from a cell phone when the Web isn't available. Victims can call friends or relatives outside the disaster zone to post for them. (Not yet developed.)
So what is wrong with the current information system?
- During a major incident the 911 system is not scaleable.
- The local police, fire, and other agencies are not scaleable for large incidents and need out-of-area assistance. Out-of-area assistance is often ignorant of local terrain, roads, expertise, volunteers, and the immediate conditions.
- Official responders have no comprehensive method of communicating with the public or for the public to inform them or each other of immediate threats or needs on a large scale.
- Desperate for current information, people go online and land in various social networks and local Web site forums and blogs. Few of these were developed well for a major incident and they activity is difficult to locate on the Web. Many are quickly set up to meet local information needs but finding them requires archaic word-of-mouth methods (including e-mail) and often take days or weeks to locate.
- Government Web sites such as GeoMAC have nice maps but you can only overlay information that they provide. They are inflexible, not responsive to local needs, slow to update, and can not be used by all parties to communicate. They are obsolete.
- The main government information Web site, InciWeb.org, is frequently off-line and has limited information. They explain about Operations Map sectors without providing an Operations Map. Their RSS feed works and their Google Earth feed directly to G/E maps would work if the site wasn't off-line so often. The large map download requires that you override your browser's security in a technically complex way. Depend on this site for emergency information? Never.
- The news media provide only general information for a larger public. They are not designed to deliver information by the minute if necessary and their two-way communication ability is of little value when time is critical. They have a different purpose.
- Community meetings have a small scope. Most people with an interest in the incident can not attend. The meetings are infrequent and do not have real-time information capability.
- Except for community meetings, the communication paths available now are authorities to the public or public to public on forums. There is a huge and critical gap in communications in existing incident processes / procedures.
