West Seattle Emergency Preparedness Seminar (video)

The West Seattle Emergency Preparedness Seminar was a milestone in that it was the first West Seattle-specific event focused on emergency preparedness (that we know of) and a first for our group, then known as the Emergency Preparedness Committee of the Southwest District Council, now known as West Seattle Be Prepared.

Even though this seminar happened some time ago, the information presented then is still quite relevant today. Specifically, the Government Planning segment provides excellent background and details about how the city departments and agencies will respond immediately following an emergency.

The seminar videos are currently offline due to our website move — we will upload and post them soon —  so check back…

The videos are organized into 3 segments: Overview, Government Planning, and Community Planning. To accommodate various technologies, we’ve posted each video segment in two different file formats. Hopefully one of them will work for you! If you have requests for other formats, or encounter problems getting them to run, please let us know.

Overview (20 minutes): The first segment features a short introduction and an overview of the seminar by Cindi Barker, the head of our committee. Most of this video segment features keynote speaker, Ken Jones, KING5 TV Senior Photographer; his keynote presentation, “Disaster Overview”, includes video footage of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath and interviews with survivors.

West Seattle Emergency Preparedness Seminar: Overview (.m4v file; runs nicely in Quicktime)

West Seattle Emergency Preparedness Seminar: Overview (.wmv file; Windows Media Player)

Government Planning (56 minutes): This segment explains how our local government agencies, police and fire departments will respond immediately following a disaster; it includes presentations by Barbara Graff (Office of Emergency Management), Mark Howard (Office of Emergency Management), Richard Conlin (Seattle City Council – EEMU Committee), Battalion Chief Bill Zander and Captain Preston Bang (Seattle Fire Department), Lt. Levandowski (Seattle Police Department, SW Precinct”, Sandi Ciske (King Co. and Seattle Health Dept.)

West Seattle Emergency Preparedness Seminar: Government Planning (.m4v file)

West Seattle Emergency Preparedness Seminar: Government Planning (.wmv file)

Community Planning (57 minutes): This segment features presentations by Mark Sheppard (Seattle Auxiliary Communications Service, the ham radio network ), Jack Mayne (West Seattle Herald), Cindi Barker (on behalf of the West Seattle Blog), Joe Ulatoski (Vashon Be Prepared), Cindi Barker (Morgan Junction Community Association), and Fred Pot (Pelly Place Ravine Ham Network).

West Seattle Emergency Preparedness Seminar: Community Planning (.m4v file)

West Seattle Emergency Preparedness Seminar: Community Planning (.wmv file)

These videos are huge files (the smallest is well over 200 MB); if you have trouble running them from our site, you might consider saving them to your computer before running them (right-click the link and choose Save Target As).

The seminar was held on June 23rd, 2007. It was sponsored by the Southwest District Council and the Delridge District Council; it was hosted by the Seattle Police Department Southwest Precinct Advisory Council at West Seattle High School.