At 11:00 a.m., January 26th, the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management (PBEM) initiated the first-ever, citywide test of Portland’s relatively new community notification system operated by Louisiana-based vendor First Call. Despite previous small-scale successes activating the system for neighborhood emergencies, First Call was able to reach less than one percent of the targeted population during today's citywide test.

“Clearly, this failure is a disappointment. If First Call cannot adequately and immediately resolve the problem, we’ll have to reevaluate our service contract with them,” said PBEM Director Carmen Merlo. “We expected some room for improvement with this ambitious test. We did not expect this high degree of failure.”

First Call President Matthew Teague issued this statement in reaction to the failure: “The City of Portland’s notification system is a highly customized and powerful portal which has been built from scratch to meet the needs of the City.  With any new software, load testing under live conditions is necessary to reveal issues that internal or small scale testing will miss and the problems encountered today are currently being addressed.” [more]

Thursday (1/26) marks the anniversary of the great Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake that shook the Pacific Northwest on January 26, 1700. Scientists believe Oregon is in the average window of time during which another massive, destructive quake could occur.

There are many actions you can take to prepare for the next earthquake. Click on the links below for more information:

• Check out “Living on Shaky Ground: How to Survive Earthquakes and Tsunamis in Oregon” published by Oregon Emergency Management;
• Visit Ready.gov for resources on how you can be prepared before, during and after an earthquake; and
• Explore Portland’s Residential Seismic Strengthening program run by the Bureau of Development Services and read “A Homeowner’s Guide to Nonstructural Earthquake Retrofit.”

At 11:00 a.m. on Thursday – to coincide with the Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake anniversary – the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management is conducting a citywide test of Portland’s community notification system. Click here for more details. You can sign up to receive the test and future notifications by visiting PublicAlerts.org.

The following is from an online story posted by National Geographic News on January 24, 2012:

Earth is currently weathering the largest solar storm recorded in more than eight years, thanks to a giant wave of charged particles from the sun that slammed into the planet's magnetic field Tuesday morning.

In the early hours on Monday, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught an extreme ultraviolet flash from a solar flare, which was followed by a giant coronal mass ejection, or CME—a cloud of superheated gas and charged particles hurled off the sun.

The cloud headed toward Earth at a speed of about three million miles (4.8 million kilometers) an hour, reaching the planet a mere 35 hours after it had been unleashed. [more]