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Timely Activation

The Public Health Emergency Dark Site is activated:

  • In any public health emergency, when Public Health Officials and the PIO must provide rapidly changing information to schools, physicians, responding agencies and the public.
  • The County portal and network or the Public Health web site is down. For example,
    • The infrastructure and networked system is damaged.
    • The bandwidth cannot keep up with demand of too many “hits”
       or simultaneous download of large PDF files from the web site

Lessons Learned

  • The initial H1N1 pandemic influenza outbreak in April 2009, showed that the public health web site was not nimble enough to handle the volume and frequency of alerts, announcements and new information distributed by the CDC, WHO and State Health Department.
  • The need to download guides, fact sheets, and FAQ's as PDFs slowed down and eventually crashed the web site
  • Re-directing the public from the usual web site to the emergency dark site made it possible to post rapidly changing information.

Recommendations

  • Aim for TIMELY ACTIVATION of the emergency dark site. Monitor the number of hits to your usual web site and re-direct the public as soon as you know there will be a need to keep people informed.
  • Incorporate emergency dark site activation into procedures to activate the department emergency operations center and the PIO function.
  • Revise the existing public health emergency response plan and crisis emergency risk communication plan and local emergency plan to include activation of the emergency dark site.
  • Minimize use of PDFs and other attachments, as these can take up valuable bandwidth. Instead:
    • Pre-assemble emergency dark site static content as HTML files.
    • When producing a PDF that will be an attachment, use the
       web profile conversion setting and built-in PDF optimizer.
    • Timely activation of the emergency dark site and re-direction of
       the public from the usual web site to the emergency dark site will
       improve public health risk communication during response.

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