I have many interests within the disaster genre. My area of expertise is disaster planning and preparedness, with an extra-strange speciality of earthquake securing of art/objects, but since moving to Astoria, Oregon I’ve gotten involved in all phases of disaster work, and each new phase of the cycle I’ve learned informs the others.

I learned about disaster response through CERT and Astoria Fire & Rescue, and learned the hard way the importance of ham radio when all communications fail in a disaster. I then learned long-term recovery the hard way through my work as a disaster caseworker/project manager with my county LTRG (Long-Term Recovery Group), which I helped create. And now Social Media.

It’s the Social Media piece that has inspired me to start writing here. It’s great to be involved in the development of something that is truly changing the way disasters are dealt with by everyone. And each part of the disaster cycle will have to learn how social media will affect them, how it can help them, and what tools they will need to use so that they can help their community.

I think that I bring a unique perspective to the “Crisis Data” (#crisisdata) or “Social Media in Emergency Management” (#SMEM) discussion. I’ll be posting here on the aforementioned topics, especially as related to Social Media, and I hope that some of this discussion will be of interest, perhaps even be useful to others. Thanks for looking. I look forward to exchanging ideas, and hopefully they will be used to help people.

The earthquake securing is such a specialized topic that I may have to move it to its own page, but for now I’ll lump it all here together. -sr