Posts tagged cert
Depiction sponsors community exercise series
Oct 7th
Depiction is excited to be helping out with a series of online community exercises, to help groups like Citizen Corps groups, neighborhood associations and others prepare themselves for disaster. The first of these “Formidable Footprint” exercises will be on October 30, and focus on a hurricane scenario. More details from Ric Skinner, a Depiction Preferred Consultant who helped connect us with the event:
Disaster Resistant Communities Group (DRCG) will develop, facilitate and evaluate a series of disaster exercises for neighborhoods entitled “Formidable Footprint – A Neighborhood Tabletop Exercise”. The “Formidable Footprint” series of exercises will serve as an opportunity for community and neighborhood organizations, including Citizen Corps, Community Emergency Response Teams, Map Your Neighborhood Teams, and Neighborhood Associations to assess the ability of neighborhood residents to work together to prepare for, respond to and recover from a variety of natural disasters which can affect the lives of neighborhood residents.
According to Skinner, DRCG recognizes that GIS is an important tool for Situational Awareness and a Common Operational Picture. “Formidable Footprint” scenarios – hurricane, earthquake, flood, wildfire, tornado, influenza pandemic — will incorporate Depiction mapping, simulation and collaboration software (Depiction, Inc.; http://www.depiction.com) to provide players with exercise-relevant maps with which they can interact, making the exercise more real and meaningful.
We are looking forward to these events, and think they hold a great deal of promise to help prepare communities around the country.
Depiction in Virginia
Feb 13th
The past week, I’ve been in Virginia and Washington, D.C., meeting with a wide variety of folks about Depiction. I got back home to the west coast about 3:00 AM on Wednesday morning. I was chased out of DC a day early by last weeks storm, then out of Richmond and Norfolk, with the fear of the “snowpocalypse” nipping at my heels each time, forcing Greyhound, Amtrak and United Airlines to shut down and cancel service the day before anything hit, “just in case”.
Despite all the snow, I was able to meet with many remarkable people—Senate staffers, Army officers, folks at DARPA and VMASC, amateur radio operators, civil engineers, CERT volunteers, emergency managers and more.
Too much happened to fit into a single blog post, but I wanted to highlight a few people I had a chance to spend time with.
Joe I. is a Depiction user and the person who invited us out to Virginia in the first place. Joe is a leader in the regional ARES districts (Amateur Radio Emergency Services) and involved in a ton of other emergency preparedness and response related efforts. I greatly appreciate his enthusiasm for Depiction and his generosity in connecting us with people all across the state. Thank you, Joe!
Keith V. is the chair of the Portsmouth CERT group, and has a lot of energy and passion for growing the CERT team and increasing their training. Thanks to an introduction by amateur radio operator and new Depiction customer Terry L., I was able to show the power of Depiction at their monthly CERT meeting. Keith unrolled a laminated 3’x4’ map of the city with its color-coded neighborhoods, along with dots scattered about representing locations of CERT volunteers. The problem is that the map is rather outdated, and Keith is having trouble getting the busy city staff to provide him with an updated hardcopy map with all the new CERT member locations. He was excited about Depiction being able to visualize his teams and neighborhood resources on a map that he could easily manage. We’re looking forward to working with Keith and his group.
There were many, many other wonderful people I had the chance to meet – it was exciting to see their reaction to the software and hear their many ideas for how it could be used. We look forward to working with folks in Virginia and across the world to help them meet and overcome the challenges they face every day.
