After having met Mr. Mike Andrews on Wednesday and getting a very detailed overview, we are now mostly briefed on the current situation regarding our project and the entire spectrum of what we could contribute to. In this post, we will outline some basic information that we have learned and what we wish to do with the project.

With a population center as urban as the North Shore communities (North Vancouver and West Vancouver), there is a need for a constant stream of supplies which facilitate the day to day activities of the city. In the event of a disaster, that stream of supplies is cut off. Many important items that people depend on will run critically low in a short frame of time. With our current project, our ultimate goal is to contribute to a system that will enable us to prepare for and mitigate disaster scenarios. Within that broad spectrum, there are many subcategories that we could focus on as well, such as planning the following:

• efficient and safe ways to bring help to those who need it
• different methods supplies could be transported to the affected areas
• the gathering and bringing emergency response personnel to affected locations.
• the reduction of panic and subsequent chaos that may befall the public
• locations where emergency personnel and supplies can be brought in through different modes of transport

From the meeting, we have gained an understanding of what the NSEMO desires. Due to the amount of information and the complete overview of the project given to us, we are required to cut the entire scope down to focus and fit our time frame and availability. The next objective on our agenda is to decide on what our plans are regarding the extent we wish to contribute to the project.

Due to the mismatching of schedules, our information session with the North Shore Emergency Management Office will not occur until Wednesday, February 6th. Without obtaining more information, we are not able to relay the details of our project. Instead, this blog post will contain what we are planning to do and the division of different responsibilities.

Our current focus is on setting up the resources, file distribution system that we will use, communication fronts, and the scheduling of team meetings. With the information that was already provided to us, a rough schedule could be constructed. From the information, we can see that this project will be broken into four distinct components: researching, developing a plan for the emergency supply chain (which can be further broken down once we have more details), creating a report to showcase our plan, and creating a presentation. 

With those 4 general steps in mind, it is easy to see that a majority of the focus will be on the research and planning phases. Given that this project will end during late March, we will have approximately eight weeks to complete everything. With those eight weeks, five will most likely go into research and planning, two into writing the report, and one week in composing the presentation.

Our group has decided to meet once a week to keep each other updated. Currently, Herman is tasked with keeping up the technical back-end (technical drawings, file systems, and information distribution), Coco, Carrie, and Ibtida are focusing on research, and Weike (pronounced “wake”) will be mainly handling communications.