Dayton Area DMAT News

A Holiday Video Message from the Secretary

911, Ten Years After
Sept. 13, 2011
This past weekend marked the tenth anniversary of the World Trade Center, Flight 93 and Pentagon events. These events changed our country. The team had three members that were deployed to assist the response for those events. Mark was deployed to Pennsylvania for the Flight 93 crash while Bill and Dan deployed to Manhattan in response to the World Trade Center attacks.
This past weekend found Mark traveling back to Shanksville, PA to join in the dedication of the new memorial there. The new national park has completed phase 1 of construction with a winding memorial wall, parking lot and facilities. Meanwhile, Dan and Bill manned a 911 Memorial booth at the Fraze Pavilion in Kettering that was part of Kettering Hospital's Fall Festival. Dan and Bill had many visitors drop by to visit and ask questions and they were also interview by the WHIO and WKEF television stations.

Emergency Air Medical Transport Training
The National Center for Medical Readiness Wright State University and the University of Memphis School of Nursing will be presenting training on "how to effectively address patient evacuation issues and concerns during a large scale community disaster". The training will be offered free at Wright State Universities, National Center for Medical Readiness at Calamityville, 506 East Xenia Drive, Fairborn, OH 45324. Upcoming dates for the training are:

Jan.13, 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. Jan. 14, 8 a.m. - noon
Jan. 20, 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. Jan. 21, 8 a.m. - noon

To register, go to the Calamityville Registrations site at: Registration Link

FEMA Disaster Android App
In the new FEMA App, you can:

Check off the items you have in your family’s emergency kit,
Enter your family emergency meeting locations,
Review safety tips on what to do before, during and after a disaster,
View a map of shelters and disaster recovery centers across the U.S., and
Read our latest blog posts.

When FEMA built the app, they kept the disaster survivor in mind, making sure much of the information would be available even if cell phone service isn’t, so you’ll be able to access the important information on how to safe after a disaster, as well as your family emergency meeting locations.

You can download the app today in the Android market, and look for FEMA App for Blackberry version 6 devices and iPhones in the coming weeks.

NDMS has new Acting Director

"Peter Brewster has accepted the position of Acting Director of the National Disaster Medical System, within the Division of Mass Care, OPEO, ASPR, effective September 12, 2011.Brewster replaces Jack Beall, long time NDMS Director, who retired in August. A nationwide search will be conducted to find a permanent director. Brewster brings a wealth of experience and a broad management skill set to this new role as the Acting Director of NDMS.

He is currently the Director of Education, Training, and Exercises for the Office of Emergency Management, Veterans Health Administration (VHA), the largest integrated health care system in the United States. VHA operates 140 VA Medical Centers and over 1,400 outpatient clinics in all fifty states and U.S. territories. In his current position, Pete is responsible for providing policy and guidance for emergency management education, training, evaluation, and performance improvement for VHA. He is involved with Federal and NFPA technical committees that provide research, standards, guidance, education, training, evaluation, and performance improvement for the health system and emergency management communities.

Brewster joined VHA in 1990 at the start of Operation Desert Shield from his previous position as an Emergency Management Coordinator with the Consolidated City of Indianapois~Marion County. During his time with the City, Pete handled the medical, utilities, and communications functional areas, and was instrumental in helping develop Indiana’s FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Task Force. He worked with the National Park Service and United States Forest Service while in Wyoming and was active in technical climbing, wild land search, and emergency medical services.

Brewster has a Bachelors of Science from the University of Wyoming, and a Certificate in Public Management from the Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis."

Full Story

OH-5 on Deploy Rotation

The OH-5 Dayton Region DMAT was placed on the "level one" team rotation for the first time in 2003. The team will respond again this year as one of the primary teams placed on rotation during each of our assigned rotation months in 2011.

Full Story

OH-1 and KY-1 Deploy for Irene
Sept. 3, 2011
Our sister teams, Ohio 1 and Kentucky 1, have deployed to Connecticut on August 26 in response to hurricane Irene. The Arkansas 1 team was also deployed to Charlotte, North Carolina but was demobilized on August 31. However, the DHHS stated on August 31, "To date there have been no requests for public health emergency declarations from any of the states impacted by the storm for response efforts." This would mean the teams had been held in reserve without medical assignment.

In addition the Dayton based, Ohio Task Force One, was also deployed on August 6. The team staged at Fort Dix, New Jersey to wait the storm out and then went on to Schoharie County in upper New York. The team worked a few days there doing searches in six towns that had seen a lot of flooding. The team found two people who were trapped in their home.

All DMAT teams were demobilized by September 2 and had returned home as was Task Force One.

2012 Training Summit
The upcoming 2012 Integrated Training Summit will be held May 21-25 in Nashville, Tennessee. Registration for the Summit will start December 2011. For more information see: http://www.integratedtrainingsummit.org/

Report Says Disaster Readiness is Falling
The Trust for America's Health organization has issued its yearly report on the nations readiness to respond to disasters of all types. The bottom line is that after 911, readiness had been improving, that is until the last couple of years. With budgets under attack both at the state and federal levels, our ability to respond is eroding. "We're seeing a decade's worth of progress eroding in front of our eyes," said Jeff Levi, PhD, Executive Director of TFAH. In 40 states public health funding has decreased this last year. 29 of those have cut their funding for two years in a row and 15 of those for three years in a row. Federal funding for state and local preparedness has dropped around 38 percent since 2005. No end in funding cuts for preparedness is expected for some time to come.

FEMA Messaging
FEMA text message updates will allow cell phone users to receive text message updates from FEMA as well as find shelters and disaster recovery centers.

Text PREPARE to 43362 (4FEMA) to sign up to receive monthly disaster safety tips
Text SHELTER + your ZIP code to 43362 (4FEMA) to find the nearest shelter in your area (example: shelter 12345)
Text DRC + your ZIP code to 43362 (4FEMA) to find the nearest disaster recovery center in your area (for example, if you lived in Annandale, Virginia with a Zip Code of 22003, you’d text DRC 22003).

Earthquake Notification Service
The USGS has established an email notification service for earthquakes happen in a custom defined area. You can, as example, define a watch area of only the continental US or you can include surounding countries. The trigger level can also be changed from the default of 6.0 magnitude.

A typical email can be just plain text or it can be formatted in a HTML output like the picture below:

Some of the customizable features are:

Functional in English and Spanish
Specify your local time zone
Specify affiliation
Aftershock exclusion option
Update Notifications option
Defer Notifications option
Add, remove, or change multiple email addresses (up to 15)
Define multiple notification profiles
Activate/Deactivate each profile individually
Set notification magnitude thresholds for night and day hours
Receive emails in 4 formats: HTML, long, short (for pagers and cell phones), and raw CUBE format messages.
Create a notification profile region from a list of predefined regions
Create a rectangular profile region by drawing it on a map, or by specifying opposite corners
Create a circular profile region by drawing it on a map, or by specifying center and radius
Make a custom polygon profile region by picking points on a map, or uploading XML

To sign up go to: https://sslearthquake.usgs.gov/ens/

Medical Card Updates

Be sure to turn in your medical information to the team administrator as soon as you can! In addition, remember to have the information added to your yellow medical information card.