Emergency Preparedness: Harlem Initiatives Expand to Inform and Empower NYC Residents

Episode Transcript

Vincent Boudreau00:00:09

Welcome to From City to the World. I'm your host, Dr. Vince Boudreau, the president of City College of New York. City College is a living mosaic of discovery and expression where science and engineering meet the humanities and the arts, where education, social science, architecture, and medicine all converge to help us imagine with our students and our community what's next. In each episode of this show, we will shine a light and peer into those vibrant areas of research and connectivity. Through conversations with students, faculty, and staff who are reshaping their fields, and with community partners who carry this work beyond our campus, we explore how ideas born here at City College ripple out across our neighborhood, our nation, and into the world. Together we'll explore ways to tackle urgent challenges such as climate change, public health, social justice, economic opportunities, and how through collective action and with local and global partners, we can turn our ideas into real solutions.

So this is From City to the World, where knowledge meets purpose, where research meets upward mobility and the impact of our work reaches far beyond the City College walls. September is Emergency Preparedness Month, and here at CCNY we take care to ensure that individuals and families are prepared for any disaster or emergency as a very important function to build out our continued relationship with our campus community and also with the Harlem community. Emergency Preparedness Month is specifically observed every September to encourage individuals, families, businesses, and communities to take steps to prepare for the various crises that may take place. The Awareness Month is sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency that's also known as FEMA through a targeted ready campaign. It serves as a reminder that emergencies can strike unexpectedly at any time, and events throughout the month are expected to prepare individuals and families on how to take action before first responders arrive. How to protect ourselves, how to protect our loved ones and the community at large.

At CCNY, WHCR leads our emergency preparedness initiatives each year through our emergency broadcast team, which you'll hear me refer to as the WEBT, but where do we start with emergency preparedness on WEBT? Who are the key players involved? These are the questions that we're going to dive into today and to give us insight into the inception of the WHCR Emergency Broadcast Team here at CCNY, I'd like to welcome my first guest, Stuart Reid, who is a longtime friend of WHCR and CCNY. Let me start by telling you a little bit about Stuart. He's worked with community-based organizations focused on bringing equity and empowerment to under-resourced communities in New York City for decades, whether it be building community wireless networks, creating resident operated podcast studios and programs, or training public housing residents in emergency radio communications, procedures and protocols, Stuart's work has always focused on providing skills and tools that enhance the resilience and sustainability of our communities.

Following the devastation of Superstorm Sandy in 2012, Stuart and a team of communications specialists at CCNY's WHCR Radio created the WHCR Emergency Broadcast Team. Again, that's WEBT, and you can find it online at www.whcrebt.org, and this was created as a way to keep our communities aware, informed, and prepared for emergencies and disasters. As director of WEBT, Stuart and his team have produced the Harlem Emergency Preparedness Day event annually since 2013 to bring emergency preparedness resources, information, and training to New York City residents. As the co-founder of Digital Divide Partners and co-chair of the Smart Communities Initiative, Stuart and his business partner, Doug Frazier, have worked collaboratively with public and affordable housing leaders to develop and manage the deployment of innovative technology applications and services to help improve the quality of life in our communities.

Stuart Reid is also the President and Chairman of the Board of the New York Chapter of the Internet Society, a globally connected organization that strives to empower individuals, communities, and organizations by promoting the internet as a force that enables innovation, economic growth, education, and social progress. As the co-producer and co-host of a weekly radio show community and technology, Reid works to spread the word about technology, resources and information as they affect our communities locally at NYC over WHCR FM 90.3. Stuart has worked with his wife, Linda Tarrant-Reid since 2012 to create and manage several community farms in Westchester County that provide free fresh produce to the food insecure in the metropolitan area. Stuart Reid is a graduate of Columbia University, has lived and worked in New York City area for over 40 years. Stuart, welcome to From City to the World.

Stuart Reid00:05:11

Thank you, President Boudreaux. I appreciate that. I'm a little embarrassed by that long introduction, see my whole life going before me, but thank you. It's a pleasure to be here on the air with you.

Vincent Boudreau00:05:21

You see your whole life flash before you. Are you feeling okay?

Stuart Reid00:05:26):

I feel pretty good about it.

Vincent Boudreau00:05:28

Good.

Stuart Reid00:05:28

I'm happy with what I'm doing.

Vincent Boudreau00:05:29

I'm glad. I'm glad. Listen, I didn't know about the work you did with Community Gardens and it just so happens Tiffany, one of the producers of the show and others, we are managing gardens on campus and putting fresh food in our food pantry and so offline after the show, at some point it would be good to talk to you about the work that you do up in the county around that area.

Stuart Reid00:05:55

Absolutely.

Vincent Boudreau00:05:56

Let's now start with the topic at hand, emergency preparedness. I want to start by going back to 2012, Superstorm Sandy, and I want to know what it is you saw during those days that convinced you that community-led broadcast systems were vital and needed and kind of prompted you to get involved in designing our own emergency broadcast system here at City College?

Stuart Reid00:06:19

Well, what happened was during the storm, Tina Dixon, who's a program director at WHCR FM and Black Icon, one of the DJ hosts were in the studio and they were manning the station, if you will, putting out information about what was going on. But after a while, they had to leave. It was difficult getting into the station, additional hosts couldn't get in, the flooding. We learned about some new flood zones in Harlem as a result of Superstorm Sandy. Some areas in East Harlem flooded tremendously that had never flooded before, and so our hosts and DJs couldn't get into the station. As a result of that, we eventually, after about the first 18 hours or so, had to go on auto program. So that meant that there was no real-time information going out into the community from WHCR. And of course that is very much the mission of WHCR to keep the community informed.

So we got together, Wally Abdul-Noor and Angela Harden and Hajah Worley and Bob Ponce and a few other folks, including myself, my business partner, Doug Frazier. We got together and started to talk about what we needed to do to ensure that information could be both collected and disseminated during disasters and when emergency times hit the community. One of the things that we also learned is that there was no information about what was going on in Harlem per se, which if you tune into the major media, they talked about downtown, they talked about different areas around the city, but no real focused conversation on what was going on in our communities. So we realized we needed to create a team. So what we did was that that was the genesis of the WHCR Emergency Broadcast Team, pulling together local folks from the community, from Harlem, from the South Bronx and training them, us in emergency communications and emergency protocols, and we started to learn under the tutelage of Wally Abdul-Noor, he also brought in a group from the outside called Citywide Disaster Network, which during Superstorm Sandy events was one of the only communication systems working.

Wally was on their radio system during the height of the storm and listened to cries for help from Far Rockaway where the flooding was tremendous, flooding went up to the second floor of some public housing developments, it was incredible. There was no internet, there was no phone system. The police were not in communication. The only network that was working, communications network, was this mobile handheld network by Citywide. So when we started putting our team together, Wally brought in Citywide Network to train us about mobile radio communications. And so we learned about that and how important that was and how vital that is and how it works when everything else is out. That was kind of my initiation into emergency broadcast and emergency preparedness.

Vincent Boudreau00:09:58

And this is a little bit off to the side of that. We did a show just a couple sessions ago where we were talking to this new United Nations University hub in our engineering school where the focus of the work is on remote sensing, so satellites and other kinds of sensors, climate change and urban environment. And you could absolutely imagine a relationship between the emergency broadcasting team and that team to get information that maybe is not available from government sources about what's going on in our community.

Stuart Reid00:10:35

Absolutely.

Vincent Boudreau00:10:36

It'd be an interesting conversation to have. But now you've been doing this for over a decade, since 2012. What would you say are the big lessons you learned about local radio community broadcasting and how you keep community safe through public radio?

Stuart Reid00:10:56

Well, I think the biggest lesson and biggest foundational piece of what we do is local folks on the ground. Finding recruiting and training local folks in the community. They are really the heartbeat of what we do. It is so important that the information that goes out over the air on WHCR be vetted and be trusted. And so therefore, we really want a team out in the community that knows what they're doing. They're not just kind of willy-nilly reporting off the cuff. So what we went through as a whole rigorous training in emergency radio protocols, there's a whole system incident command system, a way to talk on the radio so that no matter who's listening, whether it be emergency responders, first responders or others, that the information is clear, concise, and understandable by whomever may be listening.

So we learned about that. We learned about how to talk back and forth, and so to your question about important factors, what we did is we started every week having a situation report and wellness check-in as a way to keep all of the team members practiced in radio communications. So every Monday from eight to ten a.m., we do a radio check where we check in with all the team members throughout Harlem and the South Bronx about their situation where they are, and this kind of keeps everybody on point. We also, every quarter or so we do an exercise, for instance, when the marathon, the bike marathon and also the running marathon happens, we deploy out into the community and have folks out on the street reporting back about traffic and pedestrian conditions. And again, that's a way to keep our team focused and practiced in reporting back.

Vincent Boudreau00:13:07

Stuart, I want to go back to those weekly and event-based practice exercises that you do to keep everybody sharp. Is that the kind of thing, if I'm in my home in Harlem, can I listen in to that just to get a sense of how it works? Or is that kind of in a closed network of people that are directly involved in the network? How does that work?

Stuart Reid00:13:29

Well, it is closed, but it's available to anyone who wants to become trained and to participate in the network operations. So no, it's not available for casual monitoring, but anyone in the community that wants to become part of the team, we are open. For instance, Saturday morning we're having an online training session that's open to anyone in the community that's training folks and doing an overview about how this whole communication system works and training folks in this two-way radio communication procedures and protocols.

Vincent Boudreau00:14:05

So this, it's important I think, because you've got this close affiliation with WHCR. When we talk about a radio-based emergency broadcast team, we're not talking about people in the first instance communicating over the radio waves that we're using right now. We're talking about a network of people using two-way radios. Is that correct?

Stuart Reid00:14:27

That's correct. We have a couple of different platforms that we use. Again, we need redundancy. You never know what's going to be working and not working during emergency. So we have a mobile radio network that works point-to-point over the air. The college has an FCC license that permits to transmit a broadcast WQKJ 301 with these mobile radios, and they go radio to radio and radio to a repeater. So as long as that repeater is powered, we can talk with each other throughout Harlem, reaches down sometimes, depending on the atmospheric conditions as far as 59th Street, goes over to parts of Jersey and into the South Bronx. So when everything goes out, that system is still working.

We also have another walkie-talkie system that works over the internet, and we have two different radio platforms there. We have a smartphone application and we also have an individual radio, a rapid radio device that works over the internet. So we've got three different devices and platforms so that if one system goes out, we got backup. So yes, those are separate and apart from the radio station, but they report back to the radio station, so the radio station can have up-to-the-minute accurate, vetted, trusted information that they can then push out to the general community over WHCR 90.3 FM.

Vincent Boudreau00:16:08

So the message to people who aren't directly involved as a member of the broadcast team is if you want accurate, on the ground, verified information about what's happening in your immediate vicinity during one of these crisis turn on WHCR 90.3 and you would get feeds in from our emergency broadcast team. Correct?

Stuart Reid00:16:31

Yes, yes, absolutely. The other resource is our website, whcrebt.org, where we have live feeds from the studio where you can listen and see live feeds from the hosts and the DJs in the studio. We also have links there to first responders, FDNY and NYPD on the site so that you can get up-to-the-minute accurate information about what's going on. That's at whcrebt.org.

Vincent Boudreau00:17:05

And again, folks, just to repeat what I said earlier, we will have all these email and website addresses on From City to the World website so that you can track those down. I want to talk a little bit about the relationship between technology and emergency preparedness because so much of what you think about is what's in my go bag, where do I go? Is there a place where my family should gather if we get separated? Those kinds of things. But increasingly all of that requires that you have accurate information and as you say, in some of these really devastating events like Hurricane Sandy, most of the that we're used to in a day-to-day basis, including things like cell tower communication go out. And so can you talk about, I'm curious specifically in how the work you've done with Digital Divide Partners and the Smart Community Initiative helps you close the gap and bring the idea of technology into the emergency preparedness space.

Stuart Reid00:18:11

Well, as you mentioned, communication is key. In an emergency, if you're not able to communicate with the family, with your loved ones, you get disconnected and the results could be really disastrous. So even if you've got go bags and you have your plans, you have to be able to communicate with each other. And so that's where technology comes in. As I mentioned before, we've got within our team multiple levels and platforms, but families need to have the same thing. Families and communities need to have the same thing. So one of the things that we do, we do training, we do a lot of stuff in the public housing community events where we go out and we train folks in the public housing community, resident leaders and folks on their board of directors and interested individuals in those communities in emergency preparedness and communications treatment stuff that I just talked about.

How to use your smartphone and the walkie-talkie. And we also distribute really inexpensive walkie-talkies, consumer-grade walkie-talkies, which work within a given community. They don't work across town, but within a given housing development, they work fine. So that's a way for families to be connected. So we try and raise a consciousness within the communities about emergency preparedness, emergency safety. We've created streaming situations, streaming platforms in various housing developments where emergency notifications and information goes across the stream, which is available on your smartphone, on your laptop, on your computer, on your Fire Stick. And interestingly enough, we also have been able to stretch out and extend the reach of WHCR in the communities beyond Harlem.

For instance, we do stuff in Brooklyn where we are training folks in several housing developments in Brooklyn in the emergency preparedness, emergency communications, and the WHCR broadcast stream is out there on the local streams in a couple housing developments in Brooklyn. So again, it is bottom up, it's folks on the ground being trained. It's about having a family communication plan. One of the things that I always stress, it sounds kind of simple, but in the old days, I go back a ways, we used to know everybody's phone number. Today, I know my phone number, I know my wife's phone number, and I think that might be it. I got kids, I don't know their numbers, I got sisters, got siblings, I don't know their numbers.

So what I do is, and what I recommend everyone do, is just, smartphone goes dead. If you don't have it and you need to contact somebody, you don't have their number. So write down all your critical phone numbers on a piece of paper and keep it on your person, whether it be in your wallet, in your purse or wherever. Keep that with you. So that's something I have on my person and in my wallet and I walk around with that every day because you never know when you got to get in touch with somebody. Back to communication, you don't know what technology is going to work, your cell phone is dead, but you borrow a neighbor's cell phone. I remember being on a train during one of the blackouts and my phone didn't work, and a fellow pastor said, "Here, you can use my phone." And luckily I was able to pull the phone numbers out of my wallet and dial my wife's cell phone number, the home number. That's the other number that I have memorized. But otherwise beyond three or four numbers, I don't know them. So it's really important that we have those numbers, contact information on us so that we can communicate during emergencies.

Vincent Boudreau00:22:07

That's such an important point. I'm like you, I think I have two numbers memorized. I could tell you that when I was five years old and my mother called my father at work, she would say into the phone, "GI-6262, please." So I have that. So that's my third one. Wouldn't do anybody any good, but that's right, making sure that what we get online is available offline when we need it because-

Stuart Reid00:22:30

That's right.

Vincent Boudreau00:22:31

... it's not always going to be there. You've referenced a couple times the work that you do in housing developments and housing projects, and I think that is so important because you're actually constituting a team of people who may have never thought about emergency preparedness as something that they need to involve themselves in. But I think, I assume that you bring a group of people that are in one building together with a local leader and they develop a sense of ownership in this technology and the network and everything else. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what you've observed in terms of the importance of local ownership of the technology, but also B, the program, the project.

Stuart Reid00:23:19

Yeah, thank you for that question because it really strikes to the heart of what we do and it just kind of warms me inside looking at some of the results of this.

We were at a big presentation, this is going back about a year or so ago, talking with leaders. This is out of Brooklyn development, and we had a number of the board members there that were talking about the importance of the communications network that we had. Then not just the radios, but the streaming that we have. We're also putting monitors and lobbies of developments so that folks can see in real time what's going on, messaging, communication, going across that. Anyway, what this one housing leader board member said, just a regular person, but he's a board member. He said, "This is bringing back community. This is bringing back the way it used to be when I was a young person." He is an older guy like me, "And back in the day when your neighbors looked out for you when if you were doing something wrong, somebody, your neighbor told your mother and she heard about it before you got home. And it really is community building."

That's what I see the power of what we're doing and how we're using the technology is community building, pulling the community together, helping the community to look after each other. One of the slogans that we use with our video monitoring, we have a monitoring situation initiative called Virtual Tenant Patrol where residents are able to see what's going on in their lobby, in public spaces, on their phones. And the slogan for that is, 'We are watching us.' Not 'We're watching you,' but 'We are watching us.' Where the community is looking at each other and taking care of each other and taking ownership of the actual technology and of the systems that we use to communicate with each other. And it is really been quite heartwarming to see that.

I just want to mention one other little piece that came out of the residents themselves with the radio network. I mentioned the weekly radio checks. So one of the things that came out and one of the resident leaders, this is about three, four years ago, said, "Why don't we do daily building checks?" Because in so many of the public housing developments, you have an elevator, you have hot water, and you have heat issues almost every day across the city. The developments are so huge, and when the elevators go out on a ten-story or fifteen-story building, it is a crisis.

So what the residents are now doing in a number of developments in Harlem and in Brooklyn is in the morning and in the evening, twice a day, they're doing building checks, building situation reports where they're reporting into each other. "We have heat, hot water, and the elevators are running." Or, "We don't have elevator service, and I put in a trouble ticket to management." So again, it's a way for the residents to take control and ownership over what's going on in their developments and with the quality of life in their developments. And that was something that came from the ground up. We didn't come up with that. The residents came up with that as a use case for the technology.

Vincent Boudreau00:26:36

That's amazing. I mean, you're right. The residents are right. This is really building community, especially during a time of a disaster emergency, when the alternative is you sit around for somebody who's on the other side of the city to tell you what's going on and what you should do. I mean, this is really a way of giving people a sense of efficacy and empowerment at a time when they're going to need it most.

Stuart Reid00:27:00

Absolutely.

Vincent Boudreau00:27:01

And we are now joined by specialist Taish Rochester. She's known across campus and in the community as Rocky. That's how I'll refer to her in this show. Let me tell you a little bit about her. She serves in the Department of Public Safety at City College of New York where she brings over two decades of dedicated service in law enforcement and community affairs to her work. In her current role, she leads investigations, collaborates with external law enforcement agencies and works closely with student affairs, student life and campus stakeholders to ensure the safety and wellbeing of all CCNY community members.

She's also though the community affairs liaison, and in that role, Rocky is deeply committed to bridging the gap between law enforcement and the community, fostering trust, transparency, and proactive engagement. She also serves as the LGBTQ plus liaison advocating for inclusivity and safety across all campus spaces. She's got a strong background in safety preparedness, crisis response and community education. She's organized and facilitated numerous trainings, awareness campaigns, and collaborative events with local organizations. Her passion lies in empowering individuals with the knowledge and tools to stay safe, prepared and resilient in the face of emergencies. Rocky's career reflects her basic belief that public safety is not only about enforcement, but also about education, collaboration, and building a culture of preparedness. She's honored to contribute to the 11th annual WHCR Harlem Emergency Preparedness Day, which will reinforce CCNY's commitment to safety and readiness within both the campus and the Greater Harlem community. Specialist Rochester, welcome to From City to the World.

Taish Rochester00:28:45

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Vincent Boudreau00:28:48

So listen, before we jump directly into emergency preparedness, you spent over two decades in law enforcement. What motivated your shift away from traditional law enforcement work towards community engagement and education and public safety?

Taish Rochester00:29:05

Wow, that's an interesting question because it came surprisingly to me as well. My mom was a big part of her community in St. Nicholas Houses, and she, interestingly, she was one of the people that I would now work with to help build community engagement and help with events and just be out there feeding and helping her community. And growing up, I always was like, "Oh, I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that." I just saw the craziness that thought was craziness over it. And then when I transferred to City College, it was my first time working as a law enforcement officer in this role in the community that raised me. And I seen that it came with a different love and it came with a different focus and it was more about helping. I was happy to be out there with my community, helping the people, talking to the people, and these are the people mostly that raised me. So it came with a different passion and I just became my mother all over again, but on the other side of the coin, so it's, it's hard for someone.

Vincent Boudreau00:30:18

Yeah. So you do that community liaison work, as I said earlier, you're also doing liaison work with the LGBTQ plus populations. So how do you tailor safety messaging to different communities to make sure that it resonates, that it feels inclusive and people they grab onto it and say, "Yeah, this is for me, this makes sense to me."?

Taish Rochester00:30:43

So while I'm out there talking to the community, I try to, many times, depending on the environments that I am in, I many times do not wear my uniform. And sometimes I do wear my uniform. That's also for me to gain the trust and the comfortability of the people around me that I'm serving so they can see me as a person and they won't just see the uniform. I think that's very important. We know it comes with a harshness sometimes, and that is a guard for some people to not even try to open up to you. So if I know that I'm going to go in spaces where I know I might get that tension, I'll just drop the uniform so I can relate to them as people and we go from there and it is helped me a lot.

Vincent Boudreau00:31:36

Yeah. So let's talk a little bit now specifically about emergency preparedness. And we were talking to Stuart earlier. We talked about technology as being the step beyond the go back. And I want to kind of ask you the same question. When you think about talking to communities about emergency preparedness, what does it mean besides just sort of assembling the things you need in a bag by the door in case you need to grab and go?

Taish Rochester00:32:01

Stuart, he brought up, the key important thing is communication. I would go back to say the blackout. The blackout I was off duty and a lot of phones went down. I wasn't in the mindset that I'm in now, so I felt myself unprepared for that. And it was hard for me to contact my family members. And now being in this role, I understand, "Oh, it's just not for law enforcement, it's for everyday people." So when I'm not in uniform and when I'm out just being a, if something happens, what do I do? So I do have those numbers in my wallet, but I also took it up a notch. I laminated them. I always thought, "What about if we have a water disaster or a flood," something like Superstorm Sandy, "and my wallet gets wet. What do I do now? How do I use this wet piece of paper?" Or even something simple as me getting sick and passing out and someone needing to go on my wallet and look for contacts because they may not have access to my phone even if it's working.

So us just thinking out the norm and not leaving the sole responsibility on first responders and other people to care for us and think of, "What may I need for me and my family?"Or just someone sitting next to me. It doesn't have to be my family member. How can I help them? Tourniquets. I strongly speak to people about tourniquets because you can save someone's life, Stop the Bleed, talk about Stop the Bleed to people, just watching basic videos online on YouTube that are free. Just little information for you to inform yourself of how you may be able to help yourself or someone else sitting next to you. And a lot of these things are free that we could just look on YouTube, scrolling on our cell phones and looking up on a daily basis. It's the education.

Vincent Boudreau00:34:09

Yeah. Could you say a little more about Stop the Bleed? It came into your sentence, but it's a whole program. Can you talk about how people can get access to the resources in that program?

Taish Rochester00:34:23

So Stop the Bleed, they have a whole website and there's also some informational things, free things on YouTube. Stop The Bleed is learn how to control bleeding in crisis incidents. And it's not only if someone is shot, it could be a car accident, something fell. It could be a construction site that you may be walking past, a construction worker got injured, and you see that they're bleeding profusely. It saves people lives because you understand that when somebody's bleeding out, they have minutes sometimes if not seconds, depending on where that injury is. And just that knowledge you can help yourself if you get into something you can help yourself.

Vincent Boudreau00:35:10

I referenced the Emergency Preparedness Day that's coming up. You're very involved in helping to put it together and organizing it. Can you tell people what some of the hands-on activities they could expect to see if when they come to that event?

Taish Rochester00:35:25

We will be talking about tourniquets. We also will be putting together small go-bags to show people how to put together a go-bag. And it's very specific. My medication may be different from someone else's medication or my needs is different from someone else's needs. When people think about go-bags, they're like, "I carry bags and I have all this stuff. Why do I have to carry another bag?" It can just be the loose things that you can put into your bag to call it a go-bag. It doesn't have to necessarily be a whole another bag of all these things. So we are going to put together some things to show people how to be prepared on an everyday basis while they're just out and about coming from work to and from or just out at an event and maybe something happens, you could at least have something on you to help you with someone else.

Vincent Boudreau00:36:19

I mean, you do an awful lot of talking to people in different settings around emergency preparedness, and I'm interested in some of the blind spots people have, and one of them may be exactly what you just discussed. A go-bag doesn't have to be a separate bag. It can be things that you have to have in your bag, but are there other blind spots that keep cropping up when you talk to people about how they prepare themselves for emergencies?

Taish Rochester00:36:45):

Stuart mentioned this too. I talked to people about having, there's apps on your phone that you could do walkie-talkies, and you can just have you and your friends' channel or you and your family have a channel. People are very unaware of that. Even like Life 360, some people are unaware of that, giving your close family members your location. And I know as individuals, we want to be adults and we all feel, "Oh my God, I don't want people to see where I'm at or I don't want people in my business." But you have to understand if you are somewhere and your family can't get in touch with you, at least they can see your location. Something, emergency pops on their screen and they think that, "Oh my God, my child is in class. They're at City College. This alert is saying something's going on around City College." They may not know that you didn't have class that day and you're actually home.

Right? So you see, okay, it makes them calm down a little bit and say, "Okay, they're not in that area. It's still an emergency, but they're not in that area." So just blind spots are talking about having discussions with your family before these things happen. Having code words, if you sense something that you feel that you can't say, you feel like something's not right, have a code word for you and your family, and the same for your family to have a code word for you. Have designated locations, have those talks before you go to places. "If we go on this movie theater and something happens, go out that exit, meet me here. Try to go out this exit if we get separated." Pay attention to exits and entrances. I talk a lot to people a lot about that too, because I find myself doing it too. You're out and you want to just enjoy yourself. I feel like I don't want to be on alert 24-7, but it's just so embedded in me that I find myself talking to the people that I'm with. "If something happens in here, where are we going to go? Where are you going to go?"

Vincent Boudreau00:38:50

Yeah. Situational awareness, right?

Taish Rochester00:38:52

Situational awareness.

Vincent Boudreau00:38:54

And I want to talk a little bit, Rocky, about you do so many trainings and there are things you emphasize. I wonder if you look at, you see an emergency situation on the news or you see something that happened in a community that you just did a training around, do you notice when people have picked up on some of the training and it's made a real difference in how they've responded to an event? Have you had that experience?

Taish Rochester00:39:25

Yes, I have. We had gave a CPR class in the community, and then maybe about a month or two later, I ran into one of the participants and she said that her mom at the time had passed out in the house and she said normally she would freak out. She still freaked out a little bit, but she said that she was able to calm herself down a little bit faster because of the training because she had the education on how to assist or help her mom, and she actually helped her mom. She had to perform CPR. She told me, she was like, "I know we did it in class, but I didn't think it was that rigorous."

Vincent Boudreau00:40:07

Yeah.

Taish Rochester00:40:09

It is. Just because your adrenaline was going. She's like, "I'm so out of breath." But she was able to help her mom, and that right there just kind of like I did a million classes, but that one right there was like, "Oh, thank God."

Vincent Boudreau00:40:22

That's amazing.

Taish Rochester00:40:24

Thank God the education that we are giving, people are taking in and using it.

Vincent Boudreau00:40:28

Yeah, and you give that story, I think about some of the things Stuart said about the teams in the housing projects, and so much of what we're talking about is giving people the resources they need so that when they're faced with a disaster, they're able to respond from a place of knowledge and calmness, which, I mean, everybody always talks about how you've got to be cool in a crisis and you got to keep your head together and be calm. Well, how do you do that if you don't know how to respond? But this theme of knowledge giving people the ability to navigate calmly and to lead others through crisis is I think really, really important.

When you think about the beginning of the academic year, and there's all kinds of potential scenarios we think about on campuses, you must think about active shooter events. You must think about, we had a number of bomb threats over the last couple of years, there's a different response to that. We are also in a time when extreme weather events are becoming more and more common. Stuart talked earlier about during Hurricane Sandy, there were floods in East Harlem that had never been flooded before. Are New Yorkers more aware or more overwhelmed around those kinds of events, hurricanes, blizzards, floods than before? How prepared are we to face extreme weather events?

Taish Rochester00:42:01

I think I get a mix emotions, more I think because it's happening more, are we starting to pay attention to it more? I think many times that I find myself saying, "Okay, you said you was going to take this class. You said you was going to do this training. Have you done it yet?" New Yorkers we're so busy moving about.

But it's interesting when you go into these trainings that when we speak to people, they're like, "Oh, okay, this is a real life thing." You see it happening on TV, but when you're doing this trainings, it becomes a little bit more real. And they're like, "Okay, this was needed. I knew I needed to do it, but I kind of also thought it was a waste of time. But because I'm sitting in this training, you made it almost a real life scenario," and they get more of an emotional connection to it. And them speaking to other people, now we're getting more requests for a lot of trainings. So I think people want to be more prepared, but life just be going on. And that's why we try to walk around campus and just grab people and say, "Hey, sign up for this training. Sign up for this training." So I think we want to be more prepared. It is just us getting to the point that we act on it.

Vincent Boudreau00:43:24

Do you find young people today, incoming students are more kind of tuned into the need to get themselves prepared for this kind of thing? Or is it easy to bring somebody that you've set up for this training into the training? Or what kind of response do you get?

Taish Rochester00:43:41

We get a good response. Interestingly, we get some professors that reach out to us because the students are asking them to train just their individual class on active shooter training. We are going into a classroom and even do a 15, 20 minute short training on active shooter training, on what to do if something was, active killer on campus, what to do. So we have found ourselves doing individual classes. I think it's timing, right? We put together a class, and if it doesn't work for people's schedule, then it's kind of like you might get four people. But if those individual classes is a little bit more targeted, because we get a more range of people.

Vincent Boudreau00:44:27

So this is a good note for faculty and staff at City College and also people out in the community. One of the things that we are eager to do is to do this kind of training. And so if you're teaching a class and you think it would benefit from some preparedness work, I think this is a great resource. The other thing is we hear all the time coming out of COVID and with all the other pressures that society is now putting on young people, that we have a generation of young people that have a lot of anxiety. And again, one of the things we've heard throughout this show is one of the anecdotes for that kind of anxiety is preparedness, training, and knowledge. So if you are approached and you have that kind of question about what you would do in that situation, raise your hand, join one of these trainings. I think it's important.

What would you say to... I mean, I've been giving a lot of orientation speeches and welcome to college speeches in the last month. Here's your chance to give one yourself. If you're now addressing a group of first year City College students, what advice would you give them about how they can be proactive about their safety on campus?

Taish Rochester00:45:42

I think that message will go out to everyone, just not the first year students. Situational awareness. Situational awareness is very big. We're a commuter school. So many times you'll have students attending this area that never been to this area, commuting for the first time. Situational awareness, keep your heads out your phones, step to the side and do your text messages. Put your phone back in your pocket. I think that's one of the biggest things that we advocate is situational awareness. If you see something, say something. If something doesn't feel right, listen to your gut, right? Reach out to public safety. When you see an officer, don't feel afraid to speak to them or tell them that this person is making you feel uncomfortable or just you seeing something that just doesn't feel right. We are better to be proactive than not to say nothing and something happens. So I hopefully say that's my biggest, and I talk that to everybody, situational awareness.

Because even us, right? Even me, when I'm off, I have to find myself. "Take your head off your phone, pick up your head. Look what's going on around you, who just walked past you?" I'll ask myself that, "Who just walked past you?" And I'm like, "Ooh, I don't know." Right? If something happens, how do I know how the people around me look? So I think that's a very big thing, especially for our generation now. I think that's just like a everybody thing. It's just not first year students.

Vincent Boudreau00:47:17

Yeah. Yeah. Pick your head up. That's a good one right there. I got one more question for you. We asked about the events that are going to happen at the Emergency Preparedness Day coming up, but where will we find you on that day? What are your responsibilities on that day?

Taish Rochester00:47:36

So me and Sargent Valdez will be there speaking about situational awareness, and I like to have a open conversation and make it conversational too, because I can sit and talk to people about things all day, but it may not be about what their target needs are. So I like to speak and then ask people, "What is it that you need to know? What is it that you're looking for? What's your individual needs?" So we could create a conversation because I want to tell you what you need to hear or what may help you as an individual, as a group. So that's how we like to go about with our trainings, so we can give the best information needed for the people that's attending that particular event.

Vincent Boudreau00:48:22

So listen, thank you for listening From City to the World. I want to especially thank our guest, Stuart Reid, who's the co-creator of the WEBT and Specialist Rochester Community Affairs and Investigations Unit, both for the time they spent with us today, and the really important work they've been doing for years in the space of keeping our communities prepared and, through preparation, safe. Talk to you next month everybody. Thanks a lot.