Community Emergency Site Launches: Serves Charlottesville, Albemarle, and UVA

By: Bianca Spinosa Email

Updated: Thu 8:34 PM, Sep 04, 2008

September 4, 2008

September is emergency preparedness month, and in anticipation of Tropical Storm Hanna, a new local community emergency website has been launched: Community Emergency.

The thought process behind this new site is for it to act as a portal with links to direct students, faculty, and citizens to information on how to prepare for any disaster situation.

For example, if Tropical Storm Hanna strikes the area, the site has tips on how to prepare.

Users can find links to emergency information from the area as well as the National Weather Service and the Virginia State Websie.

With so many storms coming up, officials say they were eager to launch the website.

"We had always planned to launch it in September. That was really our goal, but we did get hurried a little on our timeline with all these hurricanes that came very early in September," said Lee Catlin, Albemarle County Community Relations. "So it's probably good for us. The urgency made us get things done and get it ready to go."

Nancy Tramontin is the UVA Webmaster and helped design the site. She says, "Students and faculty may be at UVA during the day, but they live in the community as well, and during a hurricane, tornado, or other disaster situation, we wanted to have one common site."

Information about natural disasters like hurricanes and droughts are readily available on the site. It also offers links to streaming video from local media.

The UVA Webmaster told CBS19 that the site is still a work in progress.

The key links are there but, she says, they're planning a Phase 2 where RSS Feeds from Charlottesville and Albemarle will be on the site along with feeds from UVA which are already there.

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