FREE FOG > National Interoperability Field Operations Guide

New content:

• VTAC Repeater Channels
• U.S. Department of Justice 25 Cities Project
• Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Regions - States and Territories
• U.S. Coast Guard Rescue Coordination Centers
• Cellular Telephone Emergency Response
• Text Messaging
• Line-of-sight Formulas

Updated content:

• VHF low-band interoperability repeaters and channel names
• All channel tables list frequencies in the same order as ICS-205 and ICS-217 forms
• An improved map showing where channel VTAC17 may be used, with county names
• 700 MHz Interoperability Channels – frequencies have been added to the table
• UHF MED channels – 12.5 and 6.25 channels added
• RJ-45 wiring – crossover wiring added
• VHF Marine Channel and Frequency tables
• Revised answer to the question "Don't I need a license for these channels before programming them into radios?"
• Revised "Ground to Air working channel" in the table "Federal/Non-Federal VHF SAR Operations Interoperability Plan"

FREE > More than 4,000 National Academies Press PDFS now available to download for free

[What a great deal this is! A must read!]

June 2, 2011 · by Barb Murphy

The National Academies—National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council—are committed to distributing their reports to as wide an audience as possible. Since 1994 we have offered “Read for Free” options for almost all our titles. In addition, we have been offering free downloads of most of our titles to everyone and of all titles to readers in the developing world. We are now going one step further. Effective June 2nd, PDFs of reports that are currently for sale on the National Academies Press (NAP) Website and PDFs associated with future reports* will be offered free of charge to all Web visitors.

For more than 140 years, the NAS, NAE, IOM, and NRC have been advising the nation on issues of science, technology, and medicine. Like no other collection of organizations, the Academies enlist the nation’s foremost scientists, engineers, health professionals, and other experts to address the scientific and technical aspects of society’s most pressing problems. The results of their work are authoritative and independent studies published by the National Academies Press.

NAP produces more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and health, capturing the best-informed views on important issues.

Preparedness Exercises 2.0: Alternative Approaches to Exercise Design That Could Make Them More Useful for Evaluating — and Strengthening — Preparedness

Another great article written for NPS.  This document is 19 pages long and took about 40 mins to read.  Great charts/graphs and statistics.  If you are a planner of exercises...read this article.  It discusses what type of exercises produces what types of results...for inquiring minds..

As one component of a preparedness program, exercises of these varied types are seen as a versatile tool that can help contribute to achieving a variety of different goals. Though taxonomies of exercise objectives vary in the literature, most include the following:³

• Planning — Exercises provide a structure to advance planning for a particular incident scenario, identifying problems and explore their solutions in focused way.
• Interagency Coordination — Exercises can act as a venue for members of different agencies to meet and interact, to build relationships that are important to effective coordination in a real event, to identify issues potentially falling in gaps of authority, jurisdiction, etc., to test mechanisms and technologies for interagency information sharing that might seldom be used in routine events, and to identify if there are agencies “missing” from plans that would be needed at a large scale disaster, accident, or terrorist attack.
• Public Education — Exercises can act as an “event” that, by being covered by the media and discussed publically, makes it possible to teach the public about the capabilities of response systems, creates the opportunity to educate them about preparedness actions they could take, and informs them about preparedness efforts of their local, state, or the federal government.
• Training — Exercises can make it possible to expose response staff to rare incidents and their unique demands — rather than their encountering them for the first time at a real emergency. Such simulations make it possible to teach responders or volunteers specific tasks, practice equipment use, and to learn or refresh other knowledge specific to an unusual incident.
• Evaluation — Exercises have been used to evaluate emergency preparedness activities in a variety of ways. Such evaluations range from very broad, qualitative assessments (e.g., ensuring all significant issues were considered in planning) to very detailed, quantitative studies (e.g., directly measuring the patient throughput of a medical facility). More elab

Great resource > OSHA's etool for ICS

[This is way better than sitting on a hard metal, folding chair for 3 days, watching 258 power point slides...]

ICS/UC implementation:  http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/ics/prepare_implement.html#Organizational

Main OSHA ICS website for etools:  http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/ics/index.html 

[please leave comments at bottom of page, thank you!]