Disaster Tip of the Week: Teach Your Kids How and When to Call 911

This weeks tip is not so much related to large scale disasters but more about home safety. Being a former 9-1-1 worker I know how important it is to teach your kids about calling 9-1-1.

We've all heard the stories in the news about a young boy or girl who dials 9-1-1 and saves the life of their parent. Unfortunately most of us think something like this will never happen to us, until it does.

The most important part of this is teaching your kids to call nine-one-one rather than nine-eleven, and teach them when they should call.

Here are some important tips when calling nine-one-one:

• Teach them to call from a house phone (land-line) not a cell phone, unless there is no house phone available.
• Teach them that once they call not to hang up
• Make sure the child knows how to give their name, address, and if possible their phone number.
• Teach them when they might need to call nine-one-one (especially if someone has health issues)
• Teach them they can get police, fire and or an ambulance when they call

If possible have your child practice by unplugging the phone and having the child dial the numbers and the parent acting as the 9-1-1 call operator.

You can also visit this kidshealth.org on How to Use 911

Disaster Tip of the Week: Keep Digital Backups of Important Documents on A USB in Your Disaster Kit

Last week I gave you the tip about keeping important documents in ziplock bags. This week I am recommending that you keep digital copies of these documents on a USB key in your disaster kit.

If you have to evacuate quickly due to a disaster or other event you may have a limited amount of time to gather important documents before you have to leave. In addition to limited time, it is also easy to forget something while you are preparing to leave.

While you are fleeing there is a good chance that items may become lost, damaged etc. Having the items stored digitally gives you an advantage of having the information at your finger tips to read off to someone, and in some cases you may have an easier time replacing the documents.

If possible store a digital copy of the document in pdf format and use notepad to enter important information about the documents such as ID numbers, and other important information for each document.

The reason for this is you may not have access to a computer that can easily open the digital document, but you should at least be able to find a computer that will allow you to read the text based documents.

The main idea here is to speed up your ability to replace the documents should you need to do so, and proving it is you will speed the process up a bit.

If you can also include recent and updated photos of each family member in case you become separated.

Plane Crash in Palo Alto Causes Many Businesses and Community to Activate Disaster Plans

As I often say, business disruptions come in many forms, not just from earthquakes, tornadoes and hurricanes.

This point made clear again from the events yesterday morning when a small plane struck a tower that was a single point of failure which carried electricity to the Palo Alto power grid.

The loss of power disrupted roughly 28,000 customers which included, 240 startups and high tech companies such as Facebook headquarters (the Facebook site was unaffected), VMware, and HP. At least Two medical facilities were on back-up generators and had to cancel elective surgeries and re-route emergency patients to other area hospitals.

At least two cell towers were not working, and some land-line services were disrupted, and the areas banks had to activate their contingency plans.

Authorities were asking people not to call 911 regarding the outage, and to reduce water usage.

You can see more on the City of Palo Alto site.

Tesla Motors suffered the worst loss. The three people who died in the plane were employees of the company, and my thoughts and prayers go out to them, their business, and family members who are affected by the loss.

If any good might come from such a tragedy I hope that it makes people aware how vulnerable we are to events such as this, both in our personal lives and from the point of view of business.

AP News Video

Plane Crashes Into Office Complex in Austin, Texas

A plane crashed into an office complex that housed FBI and IRS offices. An FBI spokesperson has stated that their office was not hit.

The incident is believed to be intentional and the pilot may have set his own home on fire before heading to the airport and taking off in the plane.

The building is seven stories and completely engulfed in flames, power was shut down in the area for safety reasons.

Unknown number of injuries at this time.

Local News Coverage below from KXAN

Biden Says Large Scale 9/11 Like Attack in the U.S. "Unlikely"

Vice President Biden says large scale terror attack against the United States unlikely while on CNN's Larry King Live.

recently I wrote a two part series on why I think the current administrations does not get the current situation when it comes to the Islamic terrorist threat you can view Part I here.

Additionally the day after the State of the Union Address the President gave a statement about traveling on trains since he is now backing future creation of a high-speed rail systems in the U.S. In that statement he said "besides, you don't have to take off your shoes" alluding to the fact that unlike traveling by planes we do not have to remove our shoes while traveling on trains.

There are several things wrong with this statement, the most important of which again shows the lack of understanding of the threat we face. Though it is true you do not have to remove your shoes while traveling by train, it is not impossible for a terror attack to occur on a train inside the U.S.

I would like to see more security on our trains, and at all major transprotation hubs that includes rail, bus, plane and ships.

Quite frankly these two statements scare me.