Tag Archives | technology

National Hurricane Center Announces Changes

Straight from the National Hurricane Center press-release: Product Changes for the 2010 Hurricane Season’s Effective May 15, the National Hurricane Center will implement important changes in some of its text and graphical products. It will also make some additions to its Web site and experimental products. This is part of a continuing effort at the […]

FLOAT House Suggests New Approach to Floodplain Living

No matter what you’re trying to do, it rarely hurts to have Brad Pitt on your team. When Make It Right, a group founded by Pitt after he saw the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward, revealed its new FLOAT House last week, the announcement received a fair amount of media […]

Wall of Wind to Blow Houses Down

In a quest to develop a novel residential connection device, researchers from the four Gulf of Mexico Sea Grant college programs have constructed a full-scale testing facility capable of producing winds of up to 140 miles per hour. While most previous testing relied on miniature models, researchers home that the full-scale destructive testing of houses […]

Can Bill Gates Stop Hurricanes?

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has applied for patents to slow or stop hurricanes through the use of special barges to pump cool water from deep in the Gulf of Mexico to the surface. When the hurricanes hit the cooler water, the thinking goes, the hurricanes will dissolve. As reported in USA Today, if the patents […]

Disaster Preparedness for Your Community Records

How safe are your community’s critical records from wind and floodwaters? Major (and sometimes even minor) disasters take their toll on the files your community needs to keep itself running, adding more challenges to the already overwhelming task of recovering from an event. Two articles (below) explain why it’s so critical to protect your records […]

National Hurricane Center Urged to Update Warning System

The Miami Herald reports that U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (FL) told forecasters and federal, state, local and Red Cross emergency managers on Friday that the nation’s emergency warning system needs to join the wired and increasingly wireless 21st century. During a House subcommittee hearing on national and state hurricane preparedness held in Miami, he argued […]

TECHNOLOGY: Twitter for Evacuation?

The Mississippi Department of Transportation (MDOT) announced a new plan to use micro-blogging phenomenon Twitter to help provide evacuees with the latest news on major evacuation routes. MDOT will update the feeds so anybody can access them via computer, cell-phone or other electronic devices. Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with the the easy-to-use but […]