The Emergency Dark Site Advantage

The emergency dark site is used to:

  • 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.

|