One Thing Wednesday: Ensure You Can Receive Emergency Information

DEM Blogger

September 23, 2015

The Do 1 Thing site won the Awareness to Action category of FEMA’s 2014 Individual and Community Preparedness Awards. It’s a 12-month program of small steps that you can take to increase your personal and household preparedness. Throughout 2015, DEM will feature Do 1 Thing items during our weekly blog post series of One Thing Wednesdays. Check back here every week for a new preparedness activity or tip!

Knowing what to do in an emergency – where to go, what actions to take, when to activate your household emergency plan – relies on having correct, timely information. In a disaster, how will you get that information and make sure everyone in your family has it? Throughout September, we’ll be looking at various issues in disaster information and communications.

We and our emergency response partners work closely with the Department of Social Services to make our emergency information accessible to as many people as possible, but we may not be able to reach everyone as well as we’d like. If someone in your household doesn’t speak English well, or if they use an assistive device to speak or hear, make a plan now to ensure they can get and give information in a disaster. Identify one or more people who that individual can contact for help in an emergency, and have multiple ways to get in touch with each of those helpers.

Bear in mind that emergency news or weather broadcasts on television may not be closed-captioned, and information shown on the screen may not be spoken aloud. Artificial voices, like those used by many public address systems and automated telephone calls, may be hard to understand.