Monday, October 08, 2007

What the Longview Hills part of the Newport CERT Team will be doing for the coming Wind storm

Here at Longview hills we are proactive when we can be. The windstorm predicted by NOAA weather has the potential of not only causing damage to our resident's homes but it could cause a prolonged power outage.

Here then is our plan:

First we have warned the community visa vie our community website of the coming storm. Our team have all signed up for NOAA weather alerts via our email so we can stay up to date.

The concern for us over power outages is generated by the fragile nature of a community composed entirely of Senior Citizens. We certainly don't want our residents (265 people) stumbling around in the dark trying to find a flashlight. We have made our community aware by broadcasts over our Neighborhood Watch FRS radio network and the website that it is time to prepare now. Why? Broken hips and other breaks can often lead to death or long and expensive recovery. No power here also means no heat.. Keeping warm for seniors is a critical problem.

Prolonged power outage also creates problems for those that use oxygen full time to breathe and last but not least many of our seniors are single families and have expressed fear of these storms.. So we have for them our radio network which keeps all informed and we will send someone to help.

If the storm makes a power outage of over two hours the team will go into Incident Command mode and start handling the problems of an outage as if it is a limited disaster.

One thing we really wish that would happen is that those that have the authority to call out CERT teams and thereby make their actions legally supported by the city would become more proactive and do just that at some point during a storm.

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