The City of La Quinta has now announced the release of the New La Quinta PREP Emergency Preparedness Kits:

The City of La Quinta is making it easier than ever to get prepared for an earthquake or other community emergency! Now, the new

La Quinta PREP Emergency Preparedness Kits are available to the public from our City web site:

http://www.la-quinta.org/Index.aspx?page=80

http://www.la-quinta.org/Index.aspx?page=670

We have worked hard with the great staff at More Prepared to create this family, vehicle, and Workplace

Emergency Preparedness starter kit that follows our PREP Neighborhood Preparedness guidelines including:

1. Emergency Water Supplies (To be added by the purchaser according to PREP handout instructions)
2. Bandaging Supplies for more than a dozen people
3. Tools including Flashlight, Lantern, & AM/FM radio, pry bar, and hand tools
4. La Quinta PREP booklets and handouts

We are very excited to have this La Quinta PREP Emergency Preparedness Kit available to the public commercially. You can add anything else you want to customize the La Quinta PREP Kit for your family, neighborhood, HOA, vehicle or work location. We believe it is reasonably priced and is a great convenience to all of our responders, volunteers, and residents. Just add water, and you are ready for any emergency! Remember to have a starter kit at home, in your vehicles, and at your work or day location. For more information on the La Quinta PREP Program and Kit please contact Paul Hess, our Emergency Services Coordinator at 760-777-7061 or at phess@la-quinta.org.

(Note: the City of La Quinta does not profit from the sale of these kits. They are provided as a public service to increase family and neighborhood preparedness)

A Tabletop Exercise (TTX) is an excellent way to go through the motions of an event that is not part of your typical routine or just difficult or expensive to replicate.  I have personally participated in many TTX.  Some very good, some not so much; in my opinion the relative success of a TTX is how absorbed I get in the scenario.  If I can picture myself in the moment, making those decisions, then afterward I feel better prepared for the real thing.  However, in many of the TTX I’ve participated in, I find myself just reading verbatim or regurgitating the Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) of the organization.  This, in turn, leaves me feeling like in the heat of the moment I’ll be in pretty bad shape if I don’t have time to open up the manual, leaving me discouraged or thinking how unrealistic that exercise was.

There are lots of factors to why a TTX is successful or not, or how much the participants will take away from the exercise.  In my experience one common thing that is lacking in the not so successful exercises is a good visual component.  As humans, we can gather and process more information from a picture than the same scene described in text.  During this webinar I will demonstrate some of the things Depiction can do to add a good visual component (and more) to your next Tabletop Exercise.

This new Depiction comparison chart may help you navigate your options.

There are a few other differences that someone familiar with both products will recognize, but that’s a good summary. DepictionPrep has been scaled back and streamlined to make it a powerful tool for a couple tasks. The full version of Depiction, meanwhile, is a very powerful, flexible platform that can provide a wide range of solutions to folks who need situational awareness, asset management, event planning, table-top exercises or any number of other tools, particularly in (though not limited to) emergency management.

DepictionPrep is also a great place to start if you’re new to mapping and don’t find it easy to learn new software. The basic tools and tutorials will give you a great grounding that will serve you well if you decide to upgrade to the full version later.

Of course, if you want something right now, the full version is your only option–but DepictionPrep is on its way soon!

This webinar is free to attend! Alan Woodward, EOC Planning Sections Chief at LANL, will highlight several tabletop exercises, scenario simulations and take questions from attendees. This webinar is great for individuals, organizations and companies interested in preparedness planning and consequence assessment. Alan comments that LANL uses Depiction for its “ease of use, flat learning curve, professionalism and fast in-field collaboration capability”.

Attendees will learn how Depiction can be used to create simulations and facilitate ‘in the moment’ cooperation whether for a national laboratory, your neighborhood, fire department, police department, local government organizations or emergency field teams.

Alan Woodward joins us as our guest presenter September 22nd at 10:30am PST. He has worked in the Emergency Operations Division for 10 years as an analyst, emergency planner, and Section chief with over thirteen years experience developing geographic information systems (GIS) and GIS products. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Washington State University (in Physics) and a Master of Science degree from Oklahoma State University (in Plant and Soil Sciences). Currently, he is focused on developing GIS applications for emergency responders that can be used in an EOC or at the site of an emergency.

Also joining in to field questions and provide additional information are Rachel Hixson, Dave McClard and Bill Purtymun.

Rachel Hixson is a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) specialist with a Master of Arts degree in Geography from Arizona State University.  She is helping to develop the GIS capabilities of LANL’s Emergency Operations Center.  She has also been working on reverse plume modeling for a national bio-surveillance program at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) for three years.

Dave McClard works in the EO-EM Group as an Emergency Manager. Current responsibilities: Focus on response management, Emergency Operations Center (EOC) operability, planning and preparedness activities, communication operations, aviation operations, and wildland fire operations. Dave began emergency management work in 1986 as a search and rescue (SAR) pilot and search and rescue trainer. His last five years were spent as the State Emergency Services Director and squadron commander for an auxiliary of the United States Air Force.

Bill Purtymun originally became involved in emergency management as a Firefighter III/ EMT Paramedic.   He graduated from New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology with a BS in Geology. He has been employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory since 1989, initially as a Site Safety Officer for a non-reactor nuclear facility.  In the mid 1990’s he became a LANL Emergency Manager and Incident Commander for the Emergency Operations Division.  For the past several years he has worked in Hazard and Consequence Assessment at the LANL Emergency Operations Center.  In his spare time he volunteers with the local ski and mountain bike patrol and is a Nationally Registered Paramedic.   He is currently working on his masters in Emergency Management through Arizona State University.

Join us on September 22nd at 10:30am PST to learn more about how your organization can be better prepared, cross collaborate more efficiently and benefit from the Depiction software platform.

I needed a simple way to do a damage estimate of a tornado path through a town for the Formidable Footprint Tornado tabletop exercise which will be staged on Saturday April 30. After placing a User-defined Shape on my depiction I noticed it looked a lot like a flood map. Knowing that the flood interaction rule interacts with specified elements to disable them if they occur in the flood zone area. So I created a “tornado path” interaction rule as follows:

1.    I created a tornado path from the explosion element, deleting all the points not needed.
2.    I saved the new shape to my element library, naming it “tornado path.”
3.    I copied the flood interaction rule, renamed it “tornado path”, indicating the cause as “tornado path”, and checked the elements I wanted it to interact with – for this simple example just buildings.
4.    Because I don’t like the clutter that the red “X” causes for disabled buildings, I created a separate layer of disabled (=destroyed, in my example) by exporting the buildings as a CSV.
5.    I added a new field (attribute) named “Status”
6.    I saved the file a “all building” to keep for backup.
7.    I saved it again as “buildings OK” and deleted all records with “Active = False”. I added the value “No Damage” to the “Status” field. These are the buildings outside the tornado path.
8.    I saved “all buildings” again and deleted all records with “Active = True”. I added the value “Destroyed” to the “Status” field. These are the building inside the tornado path.
9.    Then I “turned off” the tornado path” interaction rule by un-checking the box indicating to use the rule “in this depiction”. This is so the interaction rule doesn’t run again when new building files are added.
10.     I deleted the buildings layer (i.e., all the original buildings) in my depiction and re-imported the two new buildings files, using two different symbols indicating their status. Additional levels of damage were indicated in the Status attribute by manually editing each element.
11.    Then using the new status value to filter certain buildings, the symbol outline color was specified to indicate “destroyed”, “major damage” or “minor damage”.

With the tornado path interaction disabled it is easy to see (without the red “X”) which buildings were spared and which were damaged, along with any additional hover text information desired.

Click here to download the depiction.

Depiction of the Week - Tracking Tornado Damage

Congratulations to Gordon on the well-deserved attention! We’re proud to be helping him and many others like him make their communities safer.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is a powerful use of our software, I must say. Please comment or contact us if you have any questions.

• Is There an App For That? Technology for Fire and Emergency Service Personnel: Peter Lamb is the fire chief for the town of North Attleboro, Massachusetts and a good friend of Depiction. Last month at the Firehouse World exposition, he gave a presentation about different technology tools he uses, from Depiction to the Livescribe smartpen and more. It was very well received, and we’re happy to be hosting his second edition on Tuesday, March 29.
• Situational Awareness with Depiction and PEMSTAR: Michael Craig and his emergency management consulting & training company PEMSTAR has been a good friend of Depiction for a while. We’re happy to name Michael a Depiction Preferred Consultant this week, and to host a webinar where he will go over some of the many ways he has used Depiction to help his clients achieve better situational awareness–from local events like the “Snowpocalypse” and recent flooding, to international ones, like the earthquakes in Japan and Haiti. Join us on Wednesday, March 30, to learn more about how Depiction and PEMSTAR enhance situational awareness.

We hope you can make it!