The university’s disaster response, involving squads of people and high-tech communications, is pretty impressive to see in action. But all Berkeleyans, whether we’re part of the Cal community or live, work, or study elsewhere, must expect a lag of five to seven days between the onset of a major disaster and receiving official assistance. Everyone needs to have a plan and supplies to support their households for that long.

Hurricane Katrina taught disaster-response experts that they may not be able to reach people within a week; officials used to advocate keeping enough supplies on hand for three days, but now they know that’s not long enough, according to Khin Chin of Berkeley’s Office of Emergency Services. Chin also said citizens should take to heart what all government and disaster-response personnel know: You must have your own household prepared before you can help anyone else—so household disaster plans are key to the wellbeing of the whole community. The city offers quite a bit of planning help to individuals, from basic disaster preparedness information to planning for your pets and hunting down hazards in your home. When planning for the next disaster, once you know your own household can manage on its own for a week, the next step is connecting with your neighbors and laying the groundwork for mutual assistance, Chin said.

Disaster response starter kits

San Francisco Neighborhood Emergency Response Team kit, courtesy of Flickr user luxomedia

Last month the city’s Office of Emergency Services awarded caches of emergency supplies to 10 neighborhood groups. The caches include supplies such as a 50-person medical kit, radios, fire extinguishers, and a large container to store it all in. These caches are one-time grants to the recipient groups, which had to apply and qualify by demonstrating a minimum level of organization and disaster training. The groups can keep the supplies as long as they are organized and maintain them, and groups may choose to supplement the city caches with additional gear at their own expense. In an emergency, city emergency personnel can use supplies they need from the neighborhood caches (and then replace them). Berkeley’s program is seven years old and has distributed four rounds of caches (placing them with about 40 groups), Chin said. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 prompted an influx of applications, he said.

The city hopes to continue offering the emergency caches next year, but the scope and structure of the program is dependent on funding levels. Check the OES web page for information on next year’s program as it becomes available.

Although the emergency supply program and application period for 2011 have not been firmed up yet, the city has scheduled ongoing Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) classes, which anyone who lives or works in Berkeley is eligible to attend. These classes, which include fire suppression, light search and rescue, disaster first aid, and more, are a primary requirement for receiving an emergency supply cache from the city. Information about signing up for these free classes is available at the Office of Emergency Services web page.

One neighborhood group that received an emergency cache this year is known as the Del-Cal-McGee group (residents of Delaware Street near Ohlone Park). The group formed about 1990 and at first was focused mainly on neighborhood watch and issues related to the park, not necessarily on disaster preparation, according to Kristin Leimkuhler, who moderates the Del-Cal-McGee e-mail list. About five years ago the group started organizing for disaster response by filling out “census forms” provided by the city, she said. (There is an example of a neighbors list in the Disaster Preparedness Handbook available from the city.) The Del-Cal-McGee group has its member information in a database that contains much more than simple contact information. It allows the group to cooperate and look after each other, with data such as medical information, which household has which emergency supplies, and who has specialized skills, as well as elements of the group’s disaster plan, such as where to gather and where to set up the medical clinic.

The Del-Cal-McGee group covers 70 households, 60 of which actively participate in the group. The group stepped up its efforts about three years ago, with more neighbors taking the city’s CERT classes and committing to more complex tasks, according to Sandy Miarecki, a neighbor who has been instrumental in expanding the group’s emergency response capabilities. In the past year the group has focused on increasing its search-and-rescue capabilities, Miarecki said. About 20 group members have CERT or equivalent training. About 12 households in the area have agreed to install vibration-sensitive gas shutoff valves, and they’ll get a price break because they’re doing it as a group.

Kick-starting a disaster-response group

Neighborhood disaster preparedness entails moving beyond a nodding acquaintance with your neighbors—to knowing that you can rely on them, and vice versa. The Berkeley Disaster Preparedness Neighborhood Network can help people get from the first stage to the second. The BPDNN, which is all-volunteer and unaffiliated with the city, both helps neighborhood groups get started (or jump-started) and serves as a clearinghouse for information sharing among existing disaster-response groups. It offers a low-cost CD or DVD on how to organize your neighborhood and is developing more videos and a field manual on what to do if you are a first responder. The BPDNN has a Facebook page and Yahoo group; it also holds a meeting every other month. The next meeting, on July 22 at 6:30 at the Berkeley Unitarian Fellowship at Cedar and Bonita, will cover how to develop a communication system and walkie-talkie practice.

Virginia Street/Virginia Gardens disaster drill, February 2010. Photo courtesy of BDPNN.

Some people have strong ties to a community within Berkeley but not necessarily to the block they live on. The Office of Emergency Services has been experimenting with outreach beyond neighborhood groups, to try to involve a wider cross-section of Berkeleyans in disaster preparedness. For example, the city has offered CERT trainings at St. Paul AME Church on Ashby—on the opposite side of the city from most of the CERT trainings, held at the Fire Department training center on Cedar Street. The OES has also reached out to UC student groups such as fraternities because they are a big subset of Berkeley’s population, and lots of students live off-campus.

Even modest disaster-preparation efforts can help you feel more capable and confident. As the BPDNN has encouraged recently, do something, and be better prepared when the inevitable happens.

If you need to bring home the scale of the BP oil spill, have a look at Andy Lintner’s In Perspective. He updates the map with the latest data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and uses Google Maps to let visitors center the map wherever they want. Needless to say, we wondered what it looked like centered on Berkeley (above).

Earlier this month we took a look at well-known Berkeley tweeters. We identified those who do — among them Dave Winer and Markos Moulitsas — those who sort of do, such as Michael Pollan, and then we compiled a wish-list of noted Berkeley people who we hope will take to the Twitter-waves.

Of course, our readers then weighed in with many good suggestions of Berkeleyites to follow on Twitter, as well as adding a few names to the wish-list.

John King, urban design critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, got in touch to say that contrary to our report, he does, in fact tweet (sorry John!) at @johnkingsfchron. “Nothing on Berkeley yet, but there will be,” he wrote.

We mentioned that author Annie Leonard’s Twitter feed had a firewall, and she wrote in to say she tweets via her organizational account (@storyofstuff). “Please join! We tweet about all kinds of issues related to our stuff and opportunities for action,” she wrote, adding: “Tweet on.”

We omitted to mention Wired editor and Berkeley resident Chris Anderson (@chr1sa) who has 30,033 Twitter followers as of this writing. Following the success of his last book, “Free”, Anderson is at work on a new book,”The New Industrial Revolution”, the story of how entrepreneurs are using web principles to rejuvenate manufacturing and the economy.

Reader Tim urged us to follow UC Berkeley’s journalism school at @ucbsoj and Greater Good (Christine Carter) at @raisinghappines. And reader Berto suggested Buy Local Berkeley (@buylocalberk) and would like to see Cal sociology professor Dr Harry Edwards on Twitter.

Jasmine Sunshine was keen for everyone to check out the Seva Foundation (@seva_foundation), and several people mentioned Wavy Gravy.

Finally, we were reminded that our own Berkeley Twitter feed (in the right-hand column of our site) throws up some interesting Berkeley tweets — and that both Dave Winer and East Bay Express reporter EC Klein have compiled Berkeley Twitter lists which are worth checking out.

In most surveys of Internet speed, the U.S. fares badly compared to South Korea or Sweden. But when Akamai focused in on individual cities the top three cities in the world were Berkeley (18.7 megabits per second), Chapel Hill, North Carolina (17.5Mbps) and — ha! — Stanford (17.0Mbps).

Of course, you and I get speeds more like 6Mbps (as in the test I just did, right). Berkeley’s average soars because of the university and Berkeley Lab, just as Chapel Hill benefits from the University of North Carolina and Stanford benefits from its university.

Still, if the city is looking to top global league tables, Akamai’s is a good one to top. It’s nice to be number one.

If you want to read the complete Akamai report, you can download it here.

Because Berkeley is Berkeley, it was only a matter of time before someone launched a blog about Berkeley being, well, so Berkeleyish.

“Go Back to Berkeley” documents random elements that make Berkeley what it is, be it an altered street sign (pictured above) or environmentally friendly initiatives which, in the blog’s view, belong firmly in “that city in the East Bay“.

“Go Back to Berkeley” is run by Adam Singer and Chelsea Pearl, and SFist calls it “the greatest nascent site you aren’t reading but should”.

Last week Berto’s Facebook group, “Your Mom is So Berkeley”, welcomed its 1,000th fan (today the number stands at 1,062).  Berkeleyside discovered the group back in December and has been hooked ever since.

Some recent entries testify to how rich this seam is for rib-tickling memories:

My mom is so Berkeley my 3 brothers became Republicans.
A neighbor of ours is so Berkeley she named her kid “Eleven” (I’m afraid to ask why).
My mom is so Berkeley that when she was arrested for yelling at a cop over a parking violation, she stayed overnight in jail just so she could have the “experience”.

Writing on Facebook about the fanbase milestone, Berto says he’s overjoyed to see that the group has meant a little something to so many people. He adds: “And it’s weird to say, but this has been the most satisfying way I’ve found to honor my mother’s memory… Here’s to all the Berkeley moms who inspired us, and to all the Berkeley moms of the next generation.”

Check in on what’s being said about those Berkeley moms here.

Photo: Your Mom is So Berkeley/Facebook.

I’d love to be enthusiastic about City of Berkeley see it! (not my exclamation mark). There are many good intentions in the interactive website, designed to present both the city’s Climate Action Plan and progress towards realizing its goals. But the site has one of the worst user interfaces I’ve encountered in a long time. It’s fussy, over-designed, filled with infojunk and prone to leading users up blind alleys.

If you make the mistake of clicking to see the Climate Action Plan, you end up with a PDF shoehorned into a small window and you lose all other navigation. The only way back to the interactive site is to reload the page. Ugh. And under no condition should you click the link to the CAP Blog. It’s totally mystifying why you are directed to page 13 of 29 of… I’m not sure what. It’s not a blog that I’d recognize.

The tools to do so much better are readily available, and I’ve met people in City Hall who really understand new media tools. I assume they were not consulted.

The site is the work of a Vancouver-based software company, Visible Strategies, which works principally with government bodies. If you look around, some governments are doing extraordinary work in information visualization. It can be a powerful tool for helping citizens see what their government is doing. To my eyes, Visible Strategies is obscuring, not clarifying.

Some of the site, I’m sure, was done locally, and not by Visible Strategies. So it’s unclear where the blame for this trainwreck of a website lies. Still, if you want to persist, you can uncover all sorts of environmental statistics about Berkeley. Use with caution.

The average resident donated $10.64 on-line to charities, according to Convio, a Texas company which organized Internet fundraisers. It has an office in Berkeley.

How does San Francisco fare? Read here to find out.

I’d never heard of Bundle before, but Presh Talwalkar has used the service to figure out whether his decision to live in San Francisco rather than Berkeley made financial sense.

I’m not entirely sure why, but it seems as though a young, single male in the city spends considerably more on food and drink than his equivalent here (what, do young, single males not like the Gourmet Ghetto?). Less surprisingly, housing costs in the East Bay are way less than in the city. The other categories, shopping, travel & leisure, getting around, and health & family have less dramatic differences.

“I have to swallow my pride that I was wrong,” writes Talwalkar. And Berkeleyside readers know there are many reasons other than money to live here.

Keith Skinner has lived in Berkeley, off and on, for nearly 30 years and he likes to walk the city. He recently set up a blog, Berkeley Afoot, to record in words and photos the many walks he makes to and from work — from his home in Westbrae to downtown — and in his downtime, such as when he snapped Peruvian dancers at the Solano Stroll (above). He writes:

As a result of my walking habit, I have come to appreciate to an even greater degree, what an odd and wonderfully diverse community Berkeley is. Contrary to the stereotypes one often sees in reference to this town, it is a place of infinite variety and inspiration.

Skinner was recently the walk coordinator for the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association, so he’s a semi-professional. Enjoy his musings here.

[Photo: Keith Skinner.]