Communication

CENTER FOR INFECTIOUS DISEASE AND POLICY                                                                   Dec. 9, 2014          
By  Peter M. Sandman, PhD, and Jody Lanard, MD  

In contrast to the Ebola crisis in West Africa, which started in late 2013 and will last well into 2015 or longer, the US "Ebola crisis" was encapsulated in a single month, October 2014. But there may well be US Ebola cases to come, brought here by travelers or returning volunteers. And other emerging infectious diseases will surely reach the United States in the months and years ahead.

So now is a propitious time to harvest some crisis communication lessons from the brief US Ebola "crisis."

We're putting "crisis" in quotation marks because there was never an Ebola public health crisis in the United States, nor was there a significant threat of one. But there was a crisis of confidence, a period of several weeks during which many Americans came to see the official response to domestic Ebola as insufficiently cautious, competent, and candid—and therefore felt compelled to implement or demand additional responses of their own devising....

It appears that there are food, water and energy shortages in Hoboken and Morristown.  The problem right now is that commercial companies and thir vehicles are having difficulties operating in the flooding areas like Hoboken.  In those areas, emotions are getting stretched, where facilities and residences have no electricty or supplies.  

http://weather.aol.com/2012/10/31/tempers-flare-as-food-runs-short-in-hoboken-n-j/?ncid=webmail1

The National Guard has several vehicles that can deliver food and water neighborhood by neighborhood.  Citizen groups are also forming to assist with food and water distribution.  

Burger King has an emergency food and water distribution group.  They have been contacted.  Wegmans is fully operational in New Jersey.  Contacts have been made with New Jersey Emergency Services and with the New Jersey Food Council.  

Efforts are now underway to establish channels for using crowd-sourcing, intelligent social networks, social network analysis, and media analysis on the New Jersey food and water assessments.  Linkages are being made between DHS and the National Center for Food Protection and Defense to identify and resolve gaps in assessment processes.

http://google.org/crisismap/2012-sandy

Sandy is a major storm, previously a hurricane, that has caused extensive flooding, power and transportation outages, and physical damage to the US East Coast and Caribbean. More than 100 deaths have been linked to the storm.