Preparathon Report and Feedback

In September we participated in the National Preparedness Month sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.  Our reply to a request for information on activities conducted posted in the National Preparedness Community is pasted in below:

The Legion of Frontiersmen in the United States is a small, all-volunteer disaster response organization that provides information management services to voluntary organizations through our online facility, The Virtual Emergency Operations Center.  The National Preparathon Month was an excellent opportunity for us to test our readiness with two exercises.  On 5-7 September we ran a combined United States and Canada alerting exercise with a 3 day major earthquake scenario long the US-Canada border for our members and for our Canadian counterparts.  This gave us good baseline data on availability of people (66% of the membership) and on electronic alerting (over 50% alerted in 8 hours from the east to west coasts).  On the Day of Action on 30 September we ran a winter storm scenario to test a new micro-volunteering portal we have installed to allow short term volunteers to provide us warning data on developing events.  We identified some minor technical fixes to our system, took our alert status from Released through Communications Watch in under one hour, and established a format for recognizing and providing feedback to volunteers who provide us early warning data.  We are using the lessons from these  two exercises to prepare for our exercises in October on the 18th as part of the Great ShakeOut and the 25th for USA Weekend's Make a Difference Day.

The feedback from the National Preparedness Community Manager who requested the information on Preparathon activities was:

You guys got a lot of really great experience last month! Glad to hear that you were able to activate your volunteer base and take the lessons learned and apply them to the Great Shakeout. Wow! Great work. Thanks for sharing.