NYT article about starting disaster preparedness in a community

How to Prepare Your Community for a Disaster

Quotes from the article:

 

“Instead of going door-to-door to rally neighbors, you’ll find more success if you piggyback on existing institutions to organize people in times of need, Mr. Stripling said.”  — Alan Henry, [Hubcaps] How to Prepare Your Community for a Disaster, New York Times, Feb 15, 2018 

 

“The most important thing to understand is that planning for these sorts of things is about the process, not any final document,”  — Mitch Stripling, the assistant commissioner of Agency Preparedness and Response for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the co-host of “Dukes of Hazards: The Emergency Management Podcas

 

“So, it’s important to get your group ready to improvise. Building your group into a team that can react to different types of events is more important than being ready to run any one evacuation plan.” — Mitch Stripling

 

“Neighbors don’t panic and run (that’s a movie myth), they adapt to the situation, take the injured to hospitals and do anything they can to be helpful,” he said. “People are hard-wired to come together as a community after disasters. Rebecca Solnit writes about it movingly in her book, ‘A Paradise Built in Hell’; helping others is one thing that makes us human.”  

— Mitch Stripling

 

 “Your local coffee shop could host a Godzilla Awareness Party. Your small group can help bring people in using an ‘each one reach one’ approach around the neighborhood — and most localities have emergency management teams that would be thrilled to speak at an event like that.”  — Mitch Stripling