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Articles & resources 4/17/2020

Resources

Scams in the News – FTC Issue Warning About Coronavirus (COVID-19) Scams (GAO Notices) While the world is trying to take better care of themselves, cybercriminals are trying to seize the opportunity by creating COVID-19 scams. Here are a few tips that you should consider regarding COVID-19 scams:

·         If you receive any robocalls regarding at home techniques, do not press any buttons! Simply hang up the call.

·         Do not click on any links in emails that are advertising COVID-19 home test kits or vaccinations.

·         Be cautious with any emails that claim to be from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or any expert saying they have information about the virus.

If you suspect that you have received a suspicious email at GAO, report it immediately by using the Report Phishing button in Outlook.

 

Community Resilience Indicator Analysis (CRIA) and Resilience Analysis and Planning Tool (RAPT) (FEMA) The Resilience Analysis and Planning Tool is available to the public. FEMA released expanded capabilities to the Resilience Analysis and Planning Tool, including census tract data and additional infrastructure layers for all state, local, tribal and territorial jurisdictions across the nation. This update to the tool enables a more granular analysis of community resilience indicators and allows users to calculate the population of individuals with specific indicator characteristics in selected census tracts.  Supporting documents and information on scheduled webinars can be found on the FEMA website.

Hospital Experiences Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Results of a National Pulse Survey March 23-27, 2020  (DHS OIG) Hospitals reported that their most significant challenges centered on testing and caring for patients with COVID-19 and keeping staff safe. Hospitals said that severe shortages of testing supplies and extended waits for test results limited hospitals’ ability to monitor the health of patients and staff. They also reported that widespread shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) put staff and patients at risk. This report is based on brief telephone interviews (“pulse surveys”) conducted March 23-27, 2020, with hospital administrators from 323 hospitals across 46 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico that were part of our random sample. Our rate of contact was 85 percent.

Emergency and Disaster Management Case Study: Standing Panel on Intergovernmental Systems, March 2020; National Academy for Public Administration (NAPA).  The NAPA study articulates what has been learned from past experiences to inform the necessary transformation of roles and restructuring of responsibilities to support emergency management systems that can realize the objectives of effective and efficient prevention, preparedness, response and recovery to the broadest array of natural disasters possible. Also see FY19_ALL_STAFF-#1489088 in our EM CoP Resources folders.

IBM Watson Assistant for Citizens Answers COVID-19 Questions (Governing) To help agencies address situations, IBM has specifically designed a virtual assistant, Watson Assistant for Citizens, that is pre-loaded to understand and respond to common questions about COVID-19 directly leveraging CDC guidance. Additionally, agencies can customize unique intents leveraging other important information–via voice calls and digital text channels–to quickly help citizens get answers and stay informed.

FEMA Releases BRIC Policy for Comment (FEMA) The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is accepting comments on the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities Policy. This policy describes a new program authorized by recent legislation that allows FEMA to set aside 6 percent of estimated disaster expenses for each major disaster to fund a mitigation grant program to assist States, territories, Tribes, and local governments. The new program would supersede the existing Pre-Disaster Mitigation grant program and would promote a national culture of preparedness through encouraging investments to protect communities and infrastructure and strengthening national mitigation capabilities to foster resilience.  A copy of FEMA’s policy is in the EM CoP Resources folder, DM file # FY19_ALL_STAFF-#1504931

 

Articles

All-Hazards:

·         Compliance Considerations for Companies and Individuals Donating Funds, Goods, or Services to Domestic Government Entities (Inside Political Law)

·         Pa. Only Shares COVID-19 Information with Some Counties (Governing)

·         Cities Are Flouting Flood Rules. The Cost: $1 Billion (NY Times)

·         He Spent $500,000 to Buy Coronavirus Tests. Health Officials Say They’re Unreliable (Rt. Fifty)

 

Resilience:

·         FEMA Publishes Stakeholder Feedback For New Pre-Disaster Hazard Mitigation Program (IAEM)

·         Firefighters Say Coronavirus Will Obstruct Emergency Service, Evacuations As Wildfire Season Closes In (CNBC)

·         How Can Big Cities Adapt To Risks Of Floods? (Euronews)

 

Public Health / Biosurveillance:

·         Black Americans Face Higher Rates of Coronavirus Infection (Rt. Fifty)

·         Competing Hospitals Cooperate to Meet the Crisis (Pew Stateline)

·         Exercise in 2018 Informing Washington’s Coronavirus Crisis-Care (EM/Gov Tech)

·         Animal Viruses Are Jumping to Humans. Forest Loss Makes It Easier (NY Times)

 

Innovations & Interconnections and Deep Thoughts:

·         How Do We Ration Health Care When We Really Have To Do It? (EDM Digest)

·         New Mathematical Models May Help Us Predict The Spread Of Future Epidemics (BBC Science Focus)

·         Small, Mid-Sized Cities Currently Cut Out of Direct Coronavirus Funding (Rt. Fifty)

 

 

Featured

First blog post

This is the post excerpt.

The purpose of this blog is to provide myself a platform for retaining information, ideas, etc.*, mainly in the areas we shall refer to as:

Professor Vocino:  Adjunct Professor, University of the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C. (2015 to present). Expertise: disaster management, U.S. emergency preparedness and disaster resilience.;

Coach John: Assistant (volunteer) Coach, Eastern HS, Washington, D.C. / Principal: Red/White/Blue-HardBall (Baseball, Slo-pitch, Fastpitch Softball) program –

 

*Included but not limited to: observations, insights, factiods, epiphanies, bad ideas, unfinished thoughts, sniglets, incomplete sentences, fuzzy reminiscences of what i learned in college –  that i didn’t recall ever paying attention to before–  deconstructed concepts, personal revisionist histories, lists of what i want to be when i grow up, hopeless fears and fearless hopes. )

post

A pathway to achieve high well-being and a safe climate without relying on GDP growth

https://phys.org/news/2026-03-pathway-high-safe-climate-gdp.html

“”… existing studies show that post-growth principles can be highly transformative even when applied individually. For example, we know that basic needs could be satisfied universally using less than half of the energy and materials currently consumed globally,”

The wetland puzzle that stumped hydrology for decades—how physics and AI joined forces to predict unmeasured regions

https://phys.org/news/2026-03-wetland-puzzle-stumped-hydrology-decades.html


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The wetland puzzle that stumped hydrology for decades—how physics and AI joined forces to predict unmeasured regions
by Ali Ameli

edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Robert Egan

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The wetland puzzle that stumped hydrology for decades — how physics and AI joined forces to predict unmeasured regions
Conceptual overview of pothole-controlled runoff generation and how our hybrid framework represents it. The top row illustrates the threshold sequence in depression-dominated landscapes: water first fills isolated potholes, then spills once local storage is exceeded, and finally forms connected flow paths that rapidly route water to streams. The bottom row shows how a physics-informed learning step estimates key, hard-to-measure parameters controlling these thresholds (e.g., effective storage capacity), enabling the hydrologic model to reproduce both storage dynamics and the resulting streamflow behavior across space. Credit: Ali Ameli

For years, the Prairie Pothole Region has bothered me in a very specific way. On a map, it looks like a normal landscape: fields, gentle slopes, small streams. But hydrologically, it behaves like something else entirely. The surface is peppered with countless depressions—wetlands and “potholes”—that can store water for days, months, or even years. Most of the time, rainfall and snowmelt do not move cleanly downhill into channels. They disappear into storage. Then, sometimes, they don’t.

A wetland fills. It spills into a neighboring depression. A chain of depressions connects. And suddenly, a watershed that looked “disconnected” on Monday behaves like a fast-draining basin on Tuesday. Streamflow can jump from near-zero to a flood pulse with very little warning. The same watershed can act like two different systems depending on how full the potholes are.

That threshold-driven behavior—fill, then spill, then connect—is why this region is among the most difficult places on Earth to predict streamflow. Traditional conceptual models struggle because they were not built around thousands of small, interacting storage elements.

Purely data-driven models can fit historical patterns, but they often fail when asked to transfer to new basins or new periods, especially in a region where the governing “state” is storage, and storage is rarely observed well.

This left us with a question that sounds simple but turns out to be hard: can we build a model that predicts streamflow in this landscape for the right reasons and can be transferred to watersheds where we do not have long streamflow records?

Our new paper, published in the journal Water Resources Research, is our attempt to answer that.

Why this matters
People often assume hydrologic prediction is mainly about precipitation. If we know how much rain falls, we can estimate how much water will show up in the river. In the Prairie Pothole Region, that assumption breaks down.

Here, what matters is not just input (rain/snow) but the internal configuration of storage. Two years with similar precipitation can produce completely different runoff depending on how full the pothole network already is. That is exactly the kind of nonlinearity that creates surprises—sudden flooding, unexpected lack of flow, and big interannual swings that are hard to anticipate.

The stakes have grown. The Prairie Pothole Region is North America’s agricultural heartland—the breadbasket that helps feed the continent. Over half of its wetlands have been drained for farming, removing natural sponges that once absorbed floodwaters.

The wetland puzzle that stumped hydrology for decades—how physics and AI joined forces to predict unmeasured regions
Geographic location of the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR), spanning parts of Canada (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba) and the United States (Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa). The red boundary delineates the region’s extent across both countries. The blue pixels represent long-term inundated areas (potholes and lakes). Credit: Water Resources Research (2026). DOI: 10.1029/2025wr040280

As climate change intensifies precipitation extremes, communities across the northern Great Plains face growing flood risk with fewer tools to anticipate it. And the vast majority of watersheds in the region have no stream gauges. Prediction in these unmeasured landscapes—where managers actually need forecasts—has remained essentially unsolved for decades.

If we cannot predict when watersheds will connect, we struggle to forecast floods. If we cannot represent how water is retained and later released, we struggle to anticipate nutrient pulses and water-quality impacts. And if we cannot generalize across space, we cannot provide useful information in the many places where observations are sparse or absent.

Coping with catastrophe | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

https://news.mit.edu/2026/coping-with-catastrophe-miho-mazereeuw-book-0302

Japan incorporates more disaster planning into its buildings and public spaces than any other nation. Miho Mazereeuw’s new book explains how they do it.

New database enables comparative archaeological and historical urbanism

https://phys.org/news/2026-02-database-enables-archaeological-historical-urbanism.html

“…”URBank is a long-term sustainable project and database that represents a fundamentally different approach to combining and studying data relating to the urban past.”

Combining the latest advances in archaeological urban theory, URBank has a data model which aims to encapsulate cities as not just points on a map, but as the products of dynamic processes and networks.”‘

Resilience bonds could serve as an insurance solution to address climate change risks

https://phys.org/news/2026-02-resilience-bonds-solution-climate.html

By calculating how much risk will be reduced through resilience improvements, insurance companies provide the necessary data for local governments to issue the bonds. These investments simultaneously enhance the insurer’s financial sustainability and enable the expansion of coverage to vulnerable populations and marginalized communities, who often suffer the most from slower recovery times and lack the capital for these resilience improvements.

Preserved hair reveals just how bad lead exposure was in the 20th century | Live Science

https://www.livescience.com/health/preserved-hair-reveals-just-how-bad-lead-exposure-was-in-the-20th-century

A new study reveals the dramatic decrease in lead exposure in the U.S. following the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency 55 years ago.