From Channel3000.com, Madison, WI’s CBS news affiliate: Several FEMA Trailers May Open With Same Key
The Federal Emergency Management Agency will replace locks on as many as 118,000 trailers used by Gulf Coast hurricane victims after discovering that the same key could open multiple mobile homes.
The agency said some keys could open as many as 50 different locks — causing a security risk in heavily populated trailer parks in Louisiana and Mississippi.
A security risk? You think? Entire households along the Gulf coast have been reduced to one postage-stamp chunk of metal, their last refuge from the elements and others, and they have been given trailers without unique locks?
This isn’t just a risk in highly-populated trailer farms but also in cities like New Orleans, where burglary is a large problem. And all FEMA can do is issue trite statements.
This is one of the reasons the Rising Tide Conference is proud to host as its keynote speakers Chris Cooper and Robert Block, authors of Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security. The latest post to the Disaster blog underscores DHS’s responses as “purely reactive,” i.e. not on the ball prior to the emergency.
The conference’s registration page IS UP. Please put yourself down for the conference which takes place on the weekend of August 25-27, 2006, with talks and discussion on Saturday the 27th and work/trip day on Sunday the 28th. We hope you join us!
In other news, I’m happy to see my icecream man back, but it looks like this person wasn’t.
The Rising Tide conference deserves all the promotion it can get. Know More Media will do what we can to spread the word about it. Wish I could be there.