Earthquake preparedness for Neighborhoods

Well, I went to a presentation by the coalition of neighborhood groups in District 5: SF5Together, and was amazingly frustrated by (when we finally got around to discussing it) how the Office of Emergency Services (OES) seems to either not know what NERT does, or wants to recreate the organizational structure, or, possibly, just likes to create folders with presentations in them... that can sit nicely on shelves.

The only way we all are going to get through the aftermath of a big earthquake here in SF is if a vast number of people get trained by NERT and keep involved. (And, personally, I think the NERT training has a ways to go to be fully effective.) The NERT folks (and I'm one) say that about 11,000 people have been through their program. Sounds like a good number, but I'd say that only about 7,000 are actually still around (remember: they started this program 15 years ago, pre-dot.com and there's been a lot of turn-over in this town since then) and probably only 4000 of those actually feel like they would participate when the excrament hits the cooling device. Then add ridiculously rosy numbers of, say 75% of those people not traveling and actually surviving, you've got 3000 trained NERTs to suppliment something around 700 actual 'safety officers' (if most of them survive, get here from their homes in the east bay, and actually want to leave their families to fend for themselves) to cover the 1,000,000 people who will be in SF when it hits (we've got a sleeping population of 750k and a workday pop of 1.2m, so take an average)

Of course, keeping with our rosy numbers 75% of them will be dead, so we're back to our 750k, or only 202 dazed, scared, wounded people per trained responder to manage. No big deal, right?

(not surprisingly, I have a business proposal in to the Fire Department to consult on how better and more efficiently connect with the neighbors and improve their outreach, organization, and training.)