Session 81: Who You Gonna Call? Disaster Busters!
Channel: Libraries In Response
Date: 2024-02-02

Become familiar with ITDRC, a national service organization that has helped thousands of communities in distress respond and recover from various outages, mostly driven by extreme weather events. It's an inspiring story and wonderful free resource to call on.

Tornadoes, floods, fires, hurricanes, even pandemics are arriving with increasing frequency and severity. Each presenting its own flavor of devastation and challenge for recovery.

When disaster strikes telecommunications infrastructure can go down for days if not weeks making requests for critical timely assistance even, filling out FEMA forms, a severe challenge. 
 
"We identified the problem, and ITDRC took care of the solution. During the early stages of COVID, the lack of connectivity meant that kids were falling behind. One phone call expanded our capacity beyond anything we could have ever done on our own. ITDRC took care of everything." -Dianne Connery, Library Director, Pottsboro, TX

ITDRC is the primary national organization in US offering technical assistance recovery services to communities in crisis from any of a wide range of disasters and outages.

"America's premier team of volunteer technology professionals - Connecting Communities in Crisis™"

Speaker
Joe Hillis,  Operations Director, Information Technology Disaster Resource Center (ITDRC.org)