Report on Cross-Island Community Resilience Meeting

Cross-Island Community Resilience Meeting at Kualoa Ranch on 4/25/14 brought emergency preparedness leaders together from all over Oahu to share what our communities are doing to become more resilient.

Many communities are holding Emergency Preparedness Fairs in September. Several have set up 501(C)3 non-profit organizations to enable them to accept grants and are actively setting up emergency storage facilities. Hau'ula and Ka'a'awa have containers already in place. Many communities expressed concern that they have only one road for access and expect to be cut off from help for several days to even weeks.

Waimanalo has implemented the Hawaii Hazard Awarness and Resilience Program (HARP) and are holding monthly meetings at the Hawaii National Guard Regional Training Cemter at Bellows, 6:30pm. Their training schedule is:
May 14 Tropical Cyclone/Hurricane readiness. Our state depends on regular shipments of supplies from the mainland. Be ready to take care of yourself until supply lines can be re-established.
June 18 Flood Danger
July 9 Our alert and warning systems
August 13 Emergency Sheltering in Hawaii.
There focus is on Waimanalo, but everyone is welcome.

Kaneohe Report:
We are close to submitting our application for Tsunami/Storm Readiness Certification.
We are using Nextdoor.com to help organize our neighborhoods. It is a community based social network where neighbors share everything from lost cats to home breakins and suspicious activites. The Mikiola neighborhood was first and currently has about 70 neighbors participating.
To improve communications during a disaster, we encourage everyone to obtain and learn to use walkie-talkies and need to establish a network of hams who can communicate community needs to central communications hubs.
We are organizing neighborhood CERT Teams. The CERT training schedule is available at http://bit.ly/1eYNp3G
We plan to implement HHARP training in Kanohe.
We are participating in the CERT training being offered at Castle Hospital monthly on the 3rd Teusday at 6pm.

For more information contact Bill Sager, 808-375-1114, bsager42@gmail.com
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