Social Media Preparedness Kit - Getting News and Weather in a Power Outage

Today, Dec. 26, marked the 1-year anniversary of the Nor'Easter that and devastated many . Less than a month later, a plea to the Town of Southold to use social media to help our community cope with all stages of severe storms was met with positive enthusiasm by the town board. Where are we now a year later?

Unfortunately, "I love the idea" doesn't mean "I'm going to implement it," and if the same Nor'Easter had revisited us today, nothing would have been different. We would have been just as blind and unaware of the impact beyond the end of our own driveways, and would have had no more information about how we might help meet the unmet needs in our community than we did a year ago.  

What I have learned in the intervening 12 months is that the most resilient communities are those that are taking a "whole community approach", involving every citizen in a unified effort to share information between themselves, not only with emergency responders to enhance their situational awareness, but also to help neighbor to neighbor meet each others needs in the immediate vicinity. Using social networks to remain in contact and share information with extended family and friends located outside the immediate area is also critical. After all, using the internet, they often have a better view of the impacted area than we do on the ground. It's all about engagement, with authorities and with each other, and setting yourself up to be mobile to help yourself and those around you who don't have the technology and skillset you do.

Get your Social Media Preparedness Kit started by adding a few quick tasks to your list. Get the spare batteries, bottled water and canned food by all means, but don't forget to do this as well.

You can check out  I posted last week if you missed it, and today, I'm focused on the need to download and set up local News & Weather Apps. There's the  featured yesterday. If you haven't already seen a reason to add it to your mobile device, now you have one.

Apps that can text severe weather alerts to your cell phone are useful, so set those up now. These will keep you updated in a power outage and unlike buying canned food and batteries, this stuff is FREE and has no sell by date.

There's much more to be added and suggestions always welcome, but here's the list so far:

Social Media Preparedness Kit:

1. Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) http://www.lipower.org/myLIPA/
2. Local News & Weather Mobile Apps:

• North Fork Patch (Southold & Riverhead):  
• Weatherbug: http://weather.weatherbug.com/about-weatherbug/support-faq/mobile-products.html
• http://www.accuweather.com/en/downloads

#BeSafe

Joanna