Disaster Podcast

On this week's episode, Dan DePodwin joins us to discuss the unique weather implications surrounding the widespread wildfires hitting the Los Angeles area this week. We discuss Santa Ana winds and the source in the mountain deserts around the Four Corners region of the Southwest.

Our amazing Disaster Podcast team got together this week to share their favorite episodes from 2024. We covered a lot of topics and disaster responses over the previous year but there were a few standouts for each of us.

With the approaching holidays here at the end of December, along with the accompanying winter storms tracking across the midwest and into the northeast, it's important to review preparedness and travel warnings for your region. Becky DePodwin, our disaster emergency management expert, joins us to cover some of the weather and preparedness concerns.

Our ski patrol and disaster meteorology expert, Kyle Nelson, comes by the episode tonight with fellow snow and mountain rescue expert Carl Kishbaugh. Karl is a ski-patroller with years of experience in mountain and ski-lift rescue as well as avalanche dog handling. Ruby, his avalanche search and rescue dog, recently trained with he and Kyle on helicopter acclimation and landing zone handling.

Henry Mitchell joined the show and we switched gears to discuss emergency planning and management of diverse community resources to prepare to respond to emergencies and disaster situations. Henry is Deputy Director Office of Emergency Preparedness Response in the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. He holds an MS Emergency Response and Biosecurity and specialized for a time in Disaster Behavioral Health.

Tom Cotter, MPH, serves as executive director of Healthcare Ready, bringing more than a decade of global health readiness and response expertise to expand nonprofit’s mission-driven work addressing health equity. Healthcare Ready is a nonprofit organization established in 2007 to help strengthen the US healthcare system and assist all communities in planning for, responding to, and recovering from disasters and disease pandemics.

The National Science Foundation NHERI (Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure) organization had teams out in advance of the recent hurricanes to strike Florida. They set up for the Sentinel Program from the University of Florida to use sensor platforms to detect all the various forces from incoming storms. This was the first full deployment of the Sentinel system.

ZeroEyes technology delivers a proactive, human-verified visual gun detection and situational awareness solution. It integrates into existing digital security cameras on a site to stop mass shootings and gun-related violence. Jonathan Norton, VP of Commercial Sales for ZeroEyes comes on the show to talk about their ground-breaking software and human verification service that completes the process to eliminate false positives causing needless lockdowns.

Former San Ramon Valley Fire Chief Richard Price was having lunch one day when he saw one of his engines stopping in front of the restaurant. Someone in an adjacent business had suffered a cardiac arrest. What really bothered him was that he, a trained responder was only yards away and he had an AED in his vehicle. Had he been alerted, he could have provided care much sooner than waiting for the responding professionals.

Tim Conley and Dr. Kateryna Riabko from Med Global to talk about the training mission they worked on together in Ukraine. Med Global provides surgical and nursing training along with equipment training with things like ultrasound devices. They also work to train medical staff on chemical weapons that might be released during the war there.