APRIL - MAY - JUNE 2014

ELMA / WEST SENECAELMA / WEST SENECA

ELMAEdward R. Sauer Emergency Manager(716) 652-7635oem@elmanewyork.com

MEETINGS - 7:00 PM2nd Wednesday of the Month• April 9th

• May 7th

• June 11th*

Training and meetings are held at the Elma Senior Center unless noted. Elma Senior Center * Town Hall 3007 Bowen Rd. 1600 Bowen Rd.Elma, NY 14059 Elma, NY 14059

Check here for updatesWeb: www.elmanewyork.com/oem/ECert.htmFacebook: Elma Community Emergency Response Team, Inc.

WEST SENECAJohn GulloEmergency Manager(716) 558-3238jgullo@twsny.org

MEETINGS - 7:00 PM3rd Monday of the month• April 21st - Search & Rescue

Refresher• May 19th

• June 16th

First Aid RefresherPlease watch the website and Facebook for training and meeting locations.

Check here for updatesWeb: www.wscert.netFacebook: West Seneca Cert

SERVING THE COMMUNITY SINCE 2006 APRIL - MAY - JUNE 2014

When I was a new fi refi ghter I vividly re-member my training instructor telling me to pay attention on the fi reground. It is crucial and would improve my safety and chances of survival in a hostile environment. He nev-er taught me about situational awareness. It’s that situational awareness didn’t exist as a term used in emergency services at the time. The earlier lessons on situational awareness included instructions like “pay attention” and “don’t get tunnel vision”. Thankfully, we are coming a long way since our early years in the fi re service. Or have we? I recently gave a presentation to a group of fi refi ghter recruits. The topic was fi refi ghter safety. As part of that talk I had to ask them about situational awareness. Have they taught you about situational awareness yet? The answer was in the affi rmative. I was relieved. What did they teach you about situational awareness? Knowing how the topic has been a subject of much research in the past twenty years, I waited enthusiastically for the response that would contain some indication that science has made its way into recruit training. Unfortunately the response was “They taught us to pay attention”. All of the fi re-fi ghters had a basic fi refi ghter training man-ual prominently displayed in front of them. I asked one of them to open book and read the defi nition of situational awareness. I had not pre scripted this exercise so I had no idea what to expect. Here’s what he said:

situational awareness is the awareness of immediate surroundings. I asked him to continue. He said that’s it. That’s it? I had a fl ashback to my fi fth grade English class where we were practicing word defi nitions. If we EVER used the same word we were defi ning as part of its defi ni-tion, it was an automatic failure. Yet, here it was. I sighed in anguish. I asked so what does that mean? The response I was so hoping for was not to get was exactly what I got. It means we need to pay more atten-tion. Indeed you do, young recruit. Flawed situa-tional awareness is the leading contributing factor to fi refi ghter near miss and casualty events at emergency scenes. Yet young re-sponders struggle to even articulate what it means.Situation awareness (SA) involves being aware of what is happening in your vicin-ity, in order to understand how information, events, and one’s own actions will impact goals and objectives, both immediately and in the near future. Simplifi ed Situational Awareness or SA is knowing the who, what, where, why and the how of your environ-ment. Who is in your immediate vicinity? What are they doing? As previously noted, Situational Awareness training is taught to emergency personnel such as fi re fi ghters, police, and the military.

SITUATIONAL AWARENESS: MORE THAN JUST PAYING ATTENTION

PAST PRESENT FUTURE

WHO - WHAT - WHY - WHERE - WHEN - HOW

Where Was I?What Happened?

Who was there?

Where am I?What is happening?

Why?

Where am I going?What could happen?

What are the options?

APRIL - MAY - JUNE 2014

We all practice SA without even being aware. We have done it since birth. We read and interpret gestures or expres-sions and react to those stimuli. People can usually sense when something is not right, a feeling known as “gut instinct”. Unfortunately many dismiss it attributing it to some internal issue like stress or lack of sleep. The impulse to silence our gut instinct can be dangerous. An important lesson is to always listen to your instinct.Lacking or inadequate situation aware-ness has been identifi ed as one of the primary factors in accidents attributed to human error. Thus, situation awareness is especially important where the informa-tion fl ow can be quite high and poor deci-sions may lead to serious consequences (e.g., car accident, walking blindly into un-safe situations, functioning as a soldier, or treating critically ill or injured patients).Increasing your situational awareness isn’t complicated. It can be done in a couple of ways. The fi rst and easiest way is to simply take an extra few minutes and do an awareness check. Look around and an-swer the who, what, where, why and how questions. The second is to observe people around you and analyze their behavior. When walking out of a store or the mall look around you. Is there someone following or near my car? What are they doing? Do I feel safe? Walking to your car with your nose stuck in your cell phone could be dangerous.Firefi ghters, police and others must be aware because of the jobs. This train-ing helps them make the right choices in emergency situations. There are many articles and topics about Situational Awareness on the Internet. Self Defense and Martial Arts classes also SA it as part of their training.

IS NBC’S ‘REVOLUTION’S’ ELECTRICITY BLACKOUT POSSIBLE?The darkened skyline of a major metropo-lis may be an eerily peaceful sight, but it is never a comforting one. Consider when lower Manhattan went dark after Super storm Sandy slammed into the seaboard in 2012. While many dealt with minor in-conveniences like missing “Homeland” or their Twitter feed, larger problems emerged as hospitals ran out of backup generators and the city’s infrastructure became compromised. That’s the prem-ise of the NBC show “Revolution” that portrays a post apocalyptic America dur-ing an inexplicable worldwide blackout. The show, scarily enough, is not that far removed from reality. The 2003 blackout that spread from Canada into the U.S. and last year’s Silicon Valley outage, pur-portedly orchestrated by still-on-the-run domestic terrorists, indeed may make us wonder if someday we’ll all be yelling that “It’s never going to come back on!” just like the main character on the show. Consider-ing we’re an increasingly wired society, is a total blackout even possible?The thought of losing every watt of our electricity is certainly an alarming one, considering how dependent on energy we have become in nearly all facets of life -- from traditional uses such as streetlights to the more modern conveniences like cell phones, tablets and laptops.In fact, 84 percent of Americans said they could not go more than a day without their mobile device, according to a 2012 poll by Time Magazine. What would we do with all the missed status updates? All these de-vices need to get their juice somewhere, and they are adding on to our country’s ever-increasing thirst for power. Electricity is often measured in kilowatt-hours, or kwh. It means what you might imagine. If you were to take a standard 60-watt light bulb and let it run for 1,000 hours, it would consume 60 kilowatt-hours of energy. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA, Ameri-cans’ total electricity consumption in 2011 was a enormous 3.86 trillion kilowatt-hours, a 13-fold increase from the pre-iPad days of 1950 when just 8 million U.S. homes had TVs. To be fair, only about 1.43 trillion of those hours in 2011 came from residential con-sumption with powered air conditioning,

refrigerators and the cumulative 250 billion hours of TV we now watch annually.For most Americans, the thought of a mas-sive blackout makes for prime-time TV and not much else. Then a freak storm hits, leaving millions of New Jersey, New York and Connecticut residents without power for weeks. “The most likely disaster is al-ways the one we’re not expecting,” Konrad says. “I can’t say what will happen, but I know we’ll be surprised.” At least not to the point of complete national failure, thanks to our national electrical grid being divided into three independent sections -- eastern, western and Texas -- that can disconnect from one another at the fi rst sign of signifi -cant trouble. “In the U.S., we have built-in protections,” says Saifur Rahman, profes-sor at Virginia Tech’s Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “It’s almost theoretically impossible to have all three grids go down, unless one goes down for technical reasons and an-other that when tragedies such as Super storm Sandy present a bit of a Catch-22 with our current system. Power lines above ground are susceptible to wind and falling branches, while underground lines can fl ood

APRIL - MAY - JUNE 2014

John Gullo, Disaster CoordinatorSome people take family survival kits for granted. They assume that either they will never really be in a disaster or that the stock they already have in the house is suffi cient enough for the survival of the family even without a proper disaster pre-paredness kit. There are many reasons why professionally packed family survival kits are important. Read on to learn more about how critical disaster preparedness kits are.Emergency preparedness is an activity that every family and businesses should engage in. A disaster can happen in any area and they always strike suddenly. Of-ten the survival gear a person has makes all the difference between life and death for them and those around them. A disaster can leave your family without food, water, clothing, or shelter. Emergen-cy rescue teams have a hard time getting to every single victim when a disaster is wide spread. That means a family could be left for many days without life’s neces-sities. For some people living many days without food and water is simply not an option. Some people have recognized the importance to have emergency essentials such as freeze-dried foods in stock, but they cannot predict every item that might

be needed and something very important could possibly be left out.When a disaster or emergency hits your area, make sure that your family is well prepared to survive by having the right kind of family survival kits. There is no reason to go without the survival gear that your family needs. It would be a shame to survive a disaster only to suffer and par-ish from dehydration, starvation, a lack of dry clothes, warm shelter, or basic fi rst aid supplies.Small businesses play an important role in the nation’s economic growth. These small companies are also vulnerable to major fi nancial losses due to disasters to the point of being forced to shut down for good as a result of a severe weather event. Thus it will impact the supplies they may produce and the employees that work there, such as being out of work due to the disaster. The increase in the extreme weather events means that it is critical for small businesses to engage in disaster preparedness planning. Disaster planning does not stop there, consider making sure all your important documents are in a safe place and up to date. Both families and businesses that have computers should have them backed up with all that important data.

FLOODINGFlood effects can be local, impacting a neighborhood or community, or very large, affecting en-tire river basins and multiple states. While some fl oods de-velop slowly, over a period of days, some may de-velop quickly, and cause fl ash fl oods. Floods are the most frequent and costly natural disasters in terms of human hardship and economic loss.If fl ooding occurs, be aware that even shallow-depth, fast-moving waters of 24 inches can produce enough force to carry away a vehicle, and six inches of moving water can knock a person off their feet.There are two types of fl ood warnings:• A fl ood warning is issued when

fl ooding is expected to occur more than 6 hours after heavy precipita-tion, snowmelt, ice jams, or dam failures, or when a river is ex-pected to exceed fl ood stage in the next 48 hours.

• A fl ash-fl ood warning is issued when the potential exists for heavy precipitation to create fl ash fl ood-ing in the next 6 – 24 hours.

Here are some Flood Preparedness Tips• Check portable radio for current

information and emergency mes-sages

• Stay out of fl ooded areas• Prepare a fl ood evacuation plan

and obtain fl ood insurance if you live or work in a fl ood plain.

• Keep important documents in a water-proof box

• Do not walk, swim, or drive through fl ood waters

• Stay off bridges over fast-moving water

• Avoid waterways, storm drains and irrigation ditches

IS YOUR FAMILY OR BUSINESS READY ?

Wall being constructed at Lexington Green to help control fl ooding in the West Seneca area. Wall construction by Edbauer Construction & Union Concrete.

APRIL - MAY - JUNE 2014

ELMACODE RED NOTIFICATIONIn Elma sign-up for Code Red to be no-tifi ed by your local emergency response team in the event of emergency situa-tions or critical community alerts. Sign-up for Code Red by visiting the town website at: www.elmanewyork.com

WEST SENECANIXLE NOTIFICATIONSign up for emergency and non-emer-gency alerts for up-to-date information during an incident or anytime from the offi ce of Disaster Preparedness. Nixle will provide the same EAS message to every one who signs up. To register visit www.nixle.com

UPCOMING TRAINING & EVENTS CALENDAR

April7 Sky Warn 2014 - Cheektowaga

Erie Co.Fire Training Center 9 SMART - Etiquette for Assisting the

Visually Impared12 SMART - Etiquette for Assisting the

Visually Impared21 WS CERT Search & Rescue Training

and Tips Refresher29 Sky Warn 2014- Buffalo State College

May14 Elma CERT14 SMART - Psychological First Aid

Review17 SMART - Psychological First Aid

Review17 Empowering Volunteers - Niagara

University19 WS CERT Search & Rescue Drill21 Sky Warn 2014 - Tonawanda

June11 Elma CERT - Town Hall18 SMART - Safety Reiview21 SMART - Safety Review

Check the West Seneca CERT and Elma CERT, Inc. websites for updates and up-coming events.Anone interested in training provided by SMART must pre-register at: www2.erie.gov/smart. Some trainings may have pre-requisites.For more information on HAM Radio class-es visit South Towns Amateur Radio Soci-ety online at: http://stars.thefruths.comTo attend Sky Warn Training visit:www.erh.noaa.gov/buf/skywarnt.htm

SKYWARNSKYWARNTM is a nationwide program of spotters that report severe weather to the National Weather Service. People can become a SKYWARNTM spotter for the NWS, all you have to do is attend one of our Spotter Training Sessions. There is no charge for the training.SKYWARNTM training sessions are held throughout our area of responsibility based on demand. The basic training ses-sion provides a brief overview to the Na-tional Weather Service (the organization and our responsibilities), the equipment we use (including capabilities and limita-tions), and basic severe weather meteo-rologyAttendees are instructed what types of se-vere weather the National Weather Ser-vice is interested in hearing about.For more information, please contact:Jon Hitchcock -- Jon.Hitchcock@noaa.gov -- SKYWARN Focal Point, WFO Buf-falo or Judith Levan -- Judith.Levan@noaa.gov -- WFO Buffalo, Warning Coor-dination Meteorologist

LEXINGTON GREENThe West Seneca CERT helped at Lex-ington Green by hosting a warming and food center. McDonald’s donated over 200 adult meals to workers volunteering at the Community Caring Day in January.

RED CROSS TRAINING Cheektowaga CERT hosted a Red Cross Shelter Training on March 22nd at the Erie County Fire Training Center. The course ran from 9:00 AM - 2:00 PM.

ELMA HOSTS SEMINARApproximately 15 people attended a “How to Start your Garden from Seed” Seminar hosted by the Elma CERT group. They covered basic topics such as type of seeds, seed selection and supplies.

WELLNESS FAIRWest Seneca CERT educated the pub-lic by having a table at the West Seneca Schools Wellness Fair

3RD ANNUAL ZOMBIETh ere will be a 3rd Annual Zombie Preparedness and Safety Fair this year. Watch for updates on www.PrepareHub.org or on the Elma Com-munity Emergency Response Team facebook page.