Ready.gov Not Quite Ready

By Cooked Goose (Jenny Mincin)

A friend and colleague in emergency management, Zach Goldfarb, just wrote an article in the Washington Post.com today reporting on how one 20-year old college intern challenged information on the US Department of Homeland Security’s preparedness website, Ready.gov.  It’s a little funny and a little scary at the same time.

Apparently, there’s quite a bit of misinformation on the Ready.gov website (can’t say I spend too much time there myself, I use other sources).  So much so, that the Federation of American Scientists, at the behest of summer intern Emily Hesaltine (a sophmore college student), created their own, “correct” version of the preparedness website, Reallyready.org. 

I’ll have to do a little comparison myself and report back my findings.  For what it’s worth, it is raising some eyebrows in the emergency management community and has the potential to lessen civilian confidence in the federal government’s ability to provide accurate preparedness information (that is if it’s actually possible to lessen public confidence in the government right now).  As usual, the administration’s response was defensive, notifying the public they could get confused with the new site that has the supposed corrections. I’ll check it out and give my take.