|
|
|
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.
<
previous | next
>
|
|
|
|