Re-direct the public to
event-specific information they need to know immediately.
Assemble and maintain risk
communication materials for emergencies.
Keep up with rapidly changing
information.
Your existing public health web site may
not work well in an emergency because:
The bandwidth may not be
able to handle a high volume of simultaneous hits.
The web site was designed
to showcase all Public Health Department programs. It can
be difficult to find emergency information using this design.
The web site is not nimble
enough to quickly post new information.
It may be difficult to
manage updates to the existing web site from the Emergency
Operations Center (EOC).
In some communities, the
way the web site is managed can impede emergency use. A
“bottle-neck” can occur if there are too few
people authorized to post new information.
The emergency dark site makes it possible
to:
Maintain access to the site in
emergencies because the emergency dark site is hosted “in
the cloud” on servers in data centers with built-in
redundancy and reliability.
Off-load bandwidth from
the usual public health web site
Re-direct users if the
public health web site infrastructure is overloaded or interrupted
in an emergency.
Keep up with rapidly changing
event information.
Provide targeted, situation-specific,
event information.
Update information from any Internet-connected
computer by logging onto Google Sites.
Subscribe to RSS or Atom feeds.1
1The Atom
Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds,
while the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub or APP) is a simple
HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.
Atom is a way to read and write information on the web, and
is considered an alternate format to RSS.