This episode of The Engagement Ring features a conversation, recorded this past spring, with Dr. DeeDee Bennett Gayle, chair of the Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security at the University at Albany’s College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity. Dr. Bennett Gayle’s research examines the influence and integration of advanced technologies on the practice of emergency management with a particular focus on vulnerable populations, including older adults, people with disabilities and racial and ethnic minorities. Her current study, funded by the National Science Foundation, uses virtual reality to improve disaster preparedness for older adults.
DeeDee Bennett Gayle, UAlbany webpage
Article and video from UAlbany News Center: Disaster Response Researchers Test Virtual Reality Tool With Older Adults, August 26, 2025
News story from WTEN: Disaster prep software created by UAlbany researchers, August 29, 2025Article from UAlbany News Center:
Article from UAlbany News Center: CEHC Researchers Use Virtual Reality to Improve Disaster Preparedness for Older Adults, September 26, 2024
College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity, University at Albany
Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security, UAlbany
Extreme Events, Social Equity, and Technology Lab
The Engagement Ring, Episode 29: A Potential 'Game Changer' for Improving Emergency Preparedness and Response
[Lively, upbeat theme music plays as program host Mary Hunt introduces the program and plays excerpts from the program.]
ANNOUNCER /MARY HUNT:
Welcome to the Engagement Ring. Your connection to an ever-widening network of higher education professionals, scholars and community partners working to make the world a better place. I'm Mary Hunt. Today on the podcast…
ANNOUNCER MARY HUNT:
… a conversation recorded this past spring with Dr DeeDee Bennett Gayle, chair of the Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security at the University at Albany's College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity. Dr Bennett Gail's research examines the influence and integration of advanced technologies on the practice of emergency management, with a particular focus on vulnerable populations, including older adults, people with disabilities and racial and ethnic minorities.
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
The people that I look at are those that I see in after-action reports, in congressional reports, in news reports, after every storm, after every tornado, after every hurricane, after every earthquake or anything that are the ones that are most at risk, that have lost lives, that have lost their livelihoods, that have lost their houses, that have to be relocated.
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
Dr Bennett Gail's current study, funded by the National Science Foundation, uses virtual reality to improve disaster preparedness for older adults.
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
Our behavior as just everyday citizens actually factors into what works and what doesn't work, how prepared we are, how easily we will recover, and how much response efforts we're needing.
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
Here's my conversation with DeeDee Bennett Gayle, recorded in May of this year as she was preparing to recruit participants for her study.
MARY HUNT:
Welcome to the podcast, DeeDee, thanks so much for joining me.
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
Thank you for having me and thank you for inviting me.
[Music fades]
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
This is this is quite an honor.
MARY HUNT:
Oh, the honor is mine, and you and I have talked on a couple occasions in the past, and I'm always fascinated by your research, and it's so important, it's so relevant, especially now as we're coming into hurricane season. So a lot of the information we share today, hopefully will be of use to people, but what we're going to talk about is not just hurricanes. I think we have in our mind this idea of what a disaster, what an emergency, is, but really, there's quite a spectrum of risks and hazards that present themselves. But first, I want to talk about the people that you're trying to help through your research. We're all at risk when it comes to an emergency or a disaster, but your work is particularly focused on those that you identify as the most vulnerable among us. Can you tell me who are these populations and what is it that makes them vulnerable or more vulnerable in an emergency situation?
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
Yeah, in the disaster research space, the term we use is socially vulnerable populations, which is a term that's up for debate on whether that's the best term to use, but we use it to identify or group people and groups of people who tend to have disproportionate risk or disproportionate impacts during a disaster, and this term has been around for quite some time, but it's also something that we found that… I guess over several decades I'm trying to, in my head, count how many decades, but let's say go back to like Loma Prieta earthquake, or 1980s that that kind of thing we started seeing, that there was a group of folks that we can kind of keep saying we're not getting to them, or there's something that's missing there. And so, what does that really mean? The people that I look at are those that I see in after-action reports, in congressional reports, in in news reports, after every storm, after every tornado, after every hurricane, after every earthquake or anything, that are the ones that are most at risk, that that have lost lives, that have lost their livelihoods, that have lost their houses, that have to be relocated, that have had their wealth decrease after a storm or after a disaster, and that tends to be people with disabilities, older adults, certain racial, ethnic minority communities, depending on the space, immigrant populations, transients, people who are Just visiting, or people who are here working and commuting from other places. That also includes children sometimes. That includes homeless populations, low-income populations, anybody relying on transportation to get them from point A to point B. So, when we start to think about who that is in the in the U.S. society, it's over 50% of our population that falls into one of those categories. And then you're trying to figure out, okay, so then why are we planning not thinking about the majority of the people. And so, the work that I'm doing is looking at majority of the people who are the most impacted during disasters, and that's how I like to think about it.
MARY HUNT:
That's interesting. 50% of the people are considered vulnerable. So that means that either 50% aren't prepared or have some inability or some challenge that prevents them from being prepared.
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
So, the terminology of what makes us vulnerable is different depending on the hazard, depending on our location, depending on who we are, but that term isn't an indictment, so to speak, on the person itself. It could be their characteristics or their situations that have put them into this space. It could also be the way in which we've set up our framework for emergency management, preparedness, response, recovery, mitigation, the entire thing, right. So some people might be more vulnerable in the preparedness stage, some people may be more vulnerable during response. And so that that can change as well. It's not necessarily that everyone in that space is vulnerable, but certainly to some degree, someone might be right. Not all older adults are going to have the same vulnerability, but when you think about older adults in the U.S. and then where we tend to see them living, either alone or in nursing homes or in congregate care facilities, that, you know, changes their dynamic and how much risk that they would have.
MARY HUNT:
You touched on some of the types of emergencies, disasters that we may naturally think about, but I would imagine it encompasses storms, but it also might be an electrical glitch in the system, or it could be, I don’t know, an accident out on the main street that knocks out all the lights or the power, an ice storm, I don't know, tell us a little bit about... you know, I'm limited as you can see, I keep going back to weather, but there's a lot of things beyond weather that threaten people's safety and property and lives.
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
So, you know, I like the fact that I work in the emergency management space, but when I talking to family members and friends, the term emergency is kind of a misleading term for them. I tend to work on things that are more large-scale disasters that are affecting a large community, whereas when you think of emergency in a home, it could be like, I have a fire in my home. That's like, that is an emergency, not necessarily a disaster that you'd call your emergency manager for. It includes things like infectious disease outbreaks, like the pandemic, drought, pests you know that are affecting our food supply. It includes all of the different large-scale weather-related disasters. So you could have hurricanes or tropical storms, flooding, landslides. There are also tornadoes that are included in there. You could have more human- induced type of disasters, depending on the start of it, a wildfire could be either naturally induced or from a person. And then you can also include things like oil spills, chemical spills, chemical accidents, large scale trail derailments, things like that, biological so while I don't get involved in the actual terrorism-type of thing, but when you think about the impacts of a terrorist attack some of them can be quite large. So we go back to something like a 911 that becomes a large-scale impact what's happening with recovery starts to mimic a lot of what happens after a storm. So that's where you'd see some of the same things happening.
MARY HUNT:
You are currently working on a project where you're using virtual reality to improve outcomes with the elderly population after disasters or during disasters. I'm going to let you explain it. You're the expert. So tell me a little bit about that project… where the idea for it came from, what your methodology is and what you hope to achieve.
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
So this is a project I've loosely been working on for the last I want to say five or six years, and I have thought about, you know, more conceptually thought about the use… well, thinking about changing the culture of preparedness in the U.S., right. Just point blank, we are under prepared. We've done a couple of studies, and no one is 100% prepared on anything, even as we're going through stuff, right. So why is that? And it kind of comes back to this idea that you might hear emergency managers speak about all the time, is that if we're better prepared, then we can better respond, right. If people know what their hazards are they can better prepare their households and the like. And so that's kind of the whole idea behind it. How do you get that information to people? If you are familiar with who your emergency managers are, or gone to certain fairs, sometimes you've met them and they've given you a pamphlet or two that says, hey, these are the hazards in your area, and that's great, but most people don't know where they're supposed to be getting this information from, whereas a lot of emergency managers feel that it is their charge to inform the public as well. And so, for the last several decades that I've been or, you know, a couple decades I've been doing this work, I've noticed that it's kind of the same thing. We're going to give out a pamphlet; we're going to give out some information. We have increased in using technology. Maybe we are sending you social media posts or putting sorry, not sending you, but putting it out there through social media that these are the hazards in your area, and if you're not following emergency management, then you probably wouldn't see it. And so that's the extent of what we know.
MARY HUNT:
Yeah, and if you can't read, or you don't know the language, or you're blind, or you have some disability that you can't use print material that’s…
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
Yeah, so there's all of that, but in the broader sense it’s like, you're not even getting to the folks that can.
[Laughter]
MARY HUNT:
True, good point.
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
Yeah, yeah, we're going to focus on some of these groups. It’s like, I wouldn't assume that you know, those who are, you know, let's say middle-aged adults with, you know, even with a good sizable savings that you know, can do, know what to do. And so that's important, right. That's telling us that there's something missing in this space. And so I've been thinking about ways to do that, and it just seemed that like putting someone through a simulation would stick with them in a way that they could then say, oh, wait, now I kind of know something, I'm better off than before I got into this simulation. And so we're doing a study, and the study is basically assessing what data we can collect on preparedness among the population in general. We're starting with older adults, because we're dealing with the technology that we feel like if we can get it working with older adults, that will increase the likelihood that it'll work for most other populations. We've gotten the ease of use. We've thought about it, putting it forward, thinking about accessibility as a feature, so that everybody can use it, but the tool is going to I think be useful in a certain on a couple of different fronts. It's one going to help us fill in the knowledge gap that is missing, right. The fact that we're still doing pamphlets and the like, similar things like that for preparedness is indicative of where our research is. Also, we're collecting information, but it's always a one off, right. So, it's after a disaster that we ask people what their preparedness was, and then that's how we're formulating what people did, what worked, what didn't work, who was better off because of it, and that is only telling you about their one incident for that one population, maybe not for another area. So, if I do something, maybe wildfires in California, and then I do another thing for tornadoes in Oklahoma, there's a lot that might be different those two populations. If I do something, you know, hurricane in New York City versus a hurricane in Florida, there's a lot that's different that you know, that they may or may not know. There's, you know, a lot of things to consider there. So, this will allow us to standardize some of it so that we can do some experiments to see and test out if what we've been doing is connecting to the theories that are that are around preparedness.
MARY HUNT:
Talk a little bit about the technology. How does it work, and how does the person interact with the technology?
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
So, what we are developing is we’re gamifying the idea. That's the whole thing. So, we're creating a game out of it. People will wear the virtual reality headset, and then when they're in there they will see the game that we've created. And we're collecting data through the game, so as you're doing certain things, it's informing you, but then it's also selectively pulling information so that we can test out certain theories. That's kind of the gist of it. When people are in there, they just say, oh, I'm using a game, this is kind of cool. But, yeah, so it's cool in that way. What we're really trying to figure out is about preparedness. So, this is all of the stuff you're supposed to be doing once you know that a disaster is occurring. So, what we're not doing is focusing on the communication as much. So, if you have the hypothesis that we're running off of is, let's say everything is perfect with the message. You receive the message perfectly fine. You understand the message, but you're still not doing what the message is telling you to do.
MARY HUNT:
The message being what, an emergency message?
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
The warning.
MARY HUNT:
Okay.
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
So, let's say you received a warning message for some sort of impending disaster or impending hazard that could be very terrible. Then you receive it, you're like, okay, there's a hurricane coming, right. This is the question that happens every year, right. We have a hurricane comes through. Everybody seeing it. Got four or five days now that people are talking about it, and then it comes. It's worse than it was before. There are still people there. Why? Most of the research is focused on improving the message and improving the message receipt, or improving the dissemination of that message and saying people didn't understand it. People didn't comprehend it. It wasn't even in the right language. It wasn't they didn't receive it on their phones, or they didn't have their phones on, or they turned the feature off, or they didn't know that they were supposed to opt in to something. And that's the reason why. There's a little bit of information that says some people can't afford to and that's where the other end of the spectrum goes. It's like, okay, they received it. They couldn't afford to do it, is the other thing. So, we're basically trying to test this out. What is it that people do? So, there's a small, burgeoning amount of research that's in this space saying that once people receive a message, they want to learn more about it, they start looking around, finding information to corroborate what they've seen. Like, oh, okay, it says there's a hurricane. Is that my area, or is that somebody else's area? So, they don't actually leave right away. They still start looking and trying to figure out if it's going to be, if it's going to be as bad as everybody says it's going to be.
MARY HUNT:
How do you manage, though, for the people that say, oh, it would never be me. This doesn't happen here. Couldn't be me, won't happen to us.
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
Well, that's the thing, is like, who are those people? What are their characteristics? Are there similarities between them? I know that there isn't a trend that has been seen through research that older adults tend to be like, well, you know, it might, you know, if it happens, it happens if it doesn't happen, you know, that kind of thing. Or I've been here all this time. I've experienced so many whatever, and it hasn't been as bad as it was before. So, trying to basically home in and kind of repeat some of the things, the same testing that's been done before, but in an environment in which we can actually also assess what you're doing. And that's new, because right now you're just taking people's words for what they think they did in the past. And there was a really good quote someone said yesterday in another meeting, which was basically, people are very bad predictors of their future selves…
[Laughter]
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
… to some extent, right? So, asking them, well, what they plan to do in the future, asking them about how they prepared, and if it was better or worse, very bad. If we can have some clear cut, you know, metrics is what I like to say, measurable actions that we can say, this is what's happening. That's the intent. So, it's really exploratory to see if we can get that, and if it's useful.
MARY HUNT:
Who are the participants, or how did you identify the participants for the study?
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
Well, we have not yet identified participants for the study. We will be doing the study this summer. The actual experiments will take place, and we're scoping out two different locations for them, and we're working with, you know, emergency managers and the like, to make sure that this is something that one will be useful for them, but also that the data and things that we're collecting makes sense to collect, right? Is going to not just help the emergency managers, but this is the stuff that people need to know, right. So, we're, we're working on that, and we'll start doing recruitment in the summer.
MARY HUNT:
And how did you develop the game itself? Did you develop it? Did? Did colleagues? Did partners develop it? And the tool itself? The VR tool in the game?
DEEDEE BENNETT:
Well virtual reality is, you know, you can pick up any virtual reality… you can purchase a virtual reality headset. And so, in the same way that we're using virtual reality we could use, you know, a computer game. So, we can say we're doing a computer game, and we just develop the game. And so yes, my myself and my colleague from Georgia Tech, like I said, we've been working on this for about five years now. I can't believe it's that long. We came up with the idea to like, this would be a fantastic idea, and then we story boarded it. So, we developed kind of what we thought was going to happen at each point in the game. It has evolved since those storyboards we developed in like 2021, ‘22 I'd say, actually, no, it was pre-Covid. Oh, my God, pre-covid. And then as we started to really formulate what we wanted to pull from it, we started including other people. Then I was here in UAlbany, pulled in a couple of folks from UAlbany, and had my colleague here from Information Science help us to kind of pull it all together.
MARY HUNT:
Well, you've got an interesting background. You're an engineer, and you have a master’s in public policy from Georgia Institute of Technology, and then your PhD in Fire and Emergency Management from Oklahoma State. How does your work as an engineer, or the fact that you are an engineer, a trained engineer, inform your work in emergency management and response. It makes perfect sense, especially when you think of the tool that you're using for this study, but I’m just curious how you…
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
Perfect sense…
[Laughter]
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
Now, yeah when I when I'm able to pull it together, I will say that it was one of those things that kept making people scratch their heads when I first was moving towards emergency management. My interest in the field was that that at the time, emergency management was very under researched. So, it was just this gaping hole of you can pretty much do whatever, right. But anything you did was going to be highly impactful, and that was what kind of drew me to the emergency management field. It was something tangible that a lot of people could relate to, because most of the time when I'm in a room, there's at least a few and now it's even more than usually half of the audience, that have been through a disaster and knows somebody that's been through a disaster. And because of that, it makes it very, very tangible for people, in a way that talking about your work on a transistor doesn't, like I worked on this transistor. People are like, what's a transistor, right. So, it's one of those things that's more impactful in that way. But the other thing is, I wanted to do more, I guess, future forward working from knowledge transfer from research to practice in a space that I felt like I could contribute and do a lot. And that's sort of, I mean, the short answer for how I got to here. I've always been trying to pull it all together. And so, my research focus has always been to figure out how to leverage different new emerging technologies to reduce vulnerability during disasters. And so that's the overall goal, and that's exactly what this project does, right. It's looking at a way of leveraging a technology off the shelf, technology we already see. Virtual reality is out there. Maybe it can be used in other ways, and so now developing those other ways for it to be used and mirroring the stuff that I didn't know before. One of the things that I will say a lot of fundamental and basic research gets right is that there's so much more that we can do right in the space of pulling in technology. One of the things that it's often getting wrong is the... and I see the pivot right. Right now, most people are thinking about community engagement or thinking about pulling in different partners and doing interdisciplinary teams, but at the time when I was making this transition it was because there was this space and area of emergency management that I did not know a lot about, and I wanted to focus my attention on that so that when I get ready to apply certain things, I'm coming at it from a standpoint of I understand how this space works, and we have now a lot of technologies. The last conference, the natural hazards conference, no, sorry, not the natural hazards conference… the national hurricane conference. That one… I was just sitting in on a session, and there was, it's just a practical conference, and everyone's like, yeah, there's all of these different tools that people are creating, and they're great, but we start using them, and then we realize we can't use it for everything that we wanted to use it for, it only works half of the time, or worse yet, once we start really using it and it works, they increase the price on us, and we have to get rid of it anyway. So, there's all of these things that are going on and trying to think about a project or a product that could be used and will be useful on the other end and more holistic in its design is important.
MARY HUNT:
Well, I think that's the engineer in you. I mean, we look to the engineers for the solutions. You know, they're the problem solvers, so that, as I say, that really makes perfect sense to marry it with emergency management and response. You have a facility on campus here at UAlbany called the Extreme Events Social Equity and Technology Lab, the ESET lab, I guess you'd call it. Tell me a little bit about that and how that's used in your research, and who else you pull into that lab. I understand you're working with students, not only college students, but high school students as well. Can you talk a little bit about the work of the lab and how you're working with students.
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
Yeah. So that same colleague Dr Jenny Yuan from Information Science is the co-director of the lab. We started that lab together I'd say loosely, during Covid. So just on the tail end of Covid we started saying, hey, if we could get this space, it would be great. And then we started working together. So, some of our work during Covid 19 started to launch that space. With her knowledge and information science and human computer interaction in particular, we're able to work together on topics that hit all the marks of connecting to extreme events or disasters and with reducing our vulnerability and thinking about using technology. So that's where all of that kind of fits in. So, it's not like necessarily like leveraging the space for the projects. It's that the projects are informing why this lab needs to exist. So, through there we have a number of PhD students working right now. We have, let's say, six or seven of them, and then we've had a few master's students come through, several at this point, over 30 or so undergraduate students that have worked in and with the lab or with different projects in the lab. For the VR project alone we've done, we've included over 20 undergraduate students, so that they have explicit experience designing and working in the design space of virtual reality and game design, and we've had one high school student that's come through. He was phenomenal actually. So yeah, that's something we would enjoy having come back and having other students who are high school students who are interested in that work. And we've received really good helpful feedback from the students about what works and what doesn't work, and having all of them in the lab, and one of the things that we do is try to incorporate them in a way that makes them feel like they too are involved in the projects and that they have a stake in what's being done. We have meetings that all the students have to learn about pretty much every project that's being done, undertaken in the lab, so that they can see where everybody is working and that, oh, okay, just because I'm only doing this one thing, it's not that everybody else is just sitting around not doing anything. And it always shocks them because they feel like it's such a different environment when you're in a laboratory space and there are so many different people working.
MARY HUNT:
DeeDee, you mentioned that you had a high school student in the lab in the past, and I know you've had high school students visit the lab. Talk a little bit about why you think it's important to expose high school students to emergency preparedness management at this point in their lives. They're young. Is the information going to last? Is it making an impression now? Why is it important to get them in when they're young like this?
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
One of the things that drew me to the University at Albany was the fact that there was a College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity, a college in which I realized that you'd have an interdisciplinary space to work on the topics that I knew were super important, that when done in a siloed fashion doesn't actually solve any of the complex problems. So, I ran like, okay, I'll surely come here, you know if you guys will have me. And so, I'm here, and it's great working in this space because, you know, I don't have to explain what it is we do and what, you know, who we do it for, and the like, and the research. Because of the research here, everybody's kind of on the same page about what they're doing. But that doesn't always translate to outside of our college, I feel like I still, especially since now that I'm chair, I'm still explaining what emergency management is, explaining what the differences are between our faculty in terms of the Homeland Security side. What are they studying? What is it actually that they're teaching the students and I was contacted by Omayra Padilla De Jesus in June of 2021 because she read something about the work that I was doing and wanted to have it featured in one of her programs the RISE High Program. And I thought this is a great opportunity to start laying the groundwork for some sort of community engagement with high school students that may lead to students at least being more prepared or understanding the space of emergency management and homeland security but maybe they come to UAlbany, maybe it's just a way I didn't really know. It's just like, how can I get this information out there? One of the frustrating things is, the more I work in this space of disasters, the more I realize our populace doesn't know a lot about the disaster space. So, any opportunity to reach students and to tell them, hey, even if you go out and you get a business, businesses are underprepared for disasters, right. So just getting it in their head early, I feel like overall, and so that's what they were just like. We just wanted to expose the students. That was the charge. Can we expose them to new and different fields that if we don't have a program like this, they may never even hear about, they may never think that they could do. And so, from then, it's been every year that we've hosted a group of students, eighth, ninth graders, to come to UAlbany and to expose them to what emergency management and homeland security is. Now fast forward to this year. What we did was… and when we wrote the grant, we pulled in that community engagement piece to say we are going to have, we already know we can have these students come through. We're going to have high school students come through. We're going to give them a chance to kind of help us alpha and beta test the virtual reality and give us some pointers on what they think works or what doesn't work in terms of the gamification of it, not necessarily the content. We know what we want to look for, but making it fun, making it something that they would want to engage in. And that's because, ideally, this game would be useful for everyone, right, not necessarily just one particular population. So, the students were more than happy to get in there and put the headsets on and walk through the game, and they really enjoyed themselves. So, this year we had, I believe it was somewhere between 13 and 15 eighth and ninth graders that came through, and because we knew we were going to get that and solicit some information from them to help us to develop the game further, we tried to make sure we incorporated that into the grant.
MARY HUNT:
Why is emergency management, preparedness and response a priority in terms of scientific research funding?
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
There's a couple of things right, and I might not say this in the clearest fashion, but one of the things is that, historically, from 1990 to 2022, 2023, whatever, the cost of storms, the cost, the significant cost, is literally exponential rate, like the exponential curve, and it looks exactly like that. It's just going up, right. It's increasing billions and billions of dollars is going out because we're doing something wrong. So, it's costing us a lot. That's one thing, and because that cost is going up, a lot of people also indicate the cost is connected to a frequency and scale of the disasters that are changing, or the fact that not just but the compounding effect of different disasters, the time in between is shortened from disasters. The cost is astronomical, right. When I was sitting on the hearing for the older adults during disasters, the cost of disasters was one of the things that was a focal point for the senators, and they were saying, how can we bring this cost down. And it's great to ask that question, but if we're not thinking about how to affect change so that the cost comes down, then we're not likely going to say… all you're going to do is cut costs, but then it's just going to be taken out somewhere else, right. So that's one way of thinking about this is that that cost is indicative of something that we can probably change and improve to get better at it. That will bring the cost down for everyone. Second is, like I said, not just the culture of under preparedness, but the fact that if I were to say to people, and I had a news someone from news media asked about is 72 hours really the amount of time that we need to know. Because this was recent, because someone mentioned people need to be prepared for 72 hours just in case of and they were like, is this new. Does everybody know this? And I'm like, That's not new. That’s quite old. That's been around for some time. You need to have, you know, 72 hour’s worth of food, worth of clothing, worth of everything in case there is a particular disaster you're being a part of. And the fact is that, you know, at our best, we could not anticipate that an official would get to you quicker than 72 hours. Recently, I saw that the UK is actually sending things out… France and Brussels… about stockpiling is what they're calling it for the exact same time frame, too — 72 hours. And so that is, it's a rule of thumb. Why is the research in this space so important? It’s because it affects lives. You have 72 hours, and we know we honestly have just a rule of thumb about what you should have and could not tell you if the things you have for one storm is better than the things you have for a hurricane is better than the things you have for tornado. That I haven't seen it. The cost of disasters means that the scale and intensity of these, let's say storms, or whatever that we're going through, is likely going to be more disruptive. That could mean loss of property, loss of life and livelihoods and the like, and that is important to study. So, we can study that from a number of different features. So, we can look at it from infrastructure and how we can build up the infrastructure, but we also have to look at it from human behavior, right. There are some people that are looking at it from a meteorological standpoint, for especially for those that are related to weather. But then there are others that are looking at it from what's happening with bad actors that may cause some of these things. And so, when you're putting it all together, our behavior as just everyday citizens actually factors into what works and what doesn't work, how prepared we are, how easily we will recover, and how much response efforts we're needing. So, all of that factors in. Do you have insurance? Do you know how to turn off your utilities? Do you know when to put up your sandbags? Do you know that you should have sandbags? Like all of this stuff is important to know, and there is a slight gap that we're seeing in literature there, and so studying that is important because the more we know in that space, the more we can hopefully help people prepare better, and then we can hopefully have those costs of disasters come down.
MARY HUNT:
You mentioned a lot of the reasons that we need to be prepared, and we know your research is ongoing and will be in full swing this summer when you have your participants doing the virtual reality activity. What will happen after you have your findings? After you've done the study, you've made some findings, conclusions, where will you share those? Will they get shared with policy makers or the people that make the decisions about how to disseminate this information, how to better prepare the public? How do we get the information to them so we can operationalize what we learn?
DEEDEE BENNETT:
So, some of that's happening, that's ongoing, and we have a list of folks that want access, not to the data, but to know when this works and how it works and the like. We've already done a little bit of a beta test with emergency management personnel from across the nation and had them sit in the virtual reality headset and go through it and had different age groups, you know, surveyed them and the like. And it was pretty fun. They enjoyed it. And what's really important to us is that they found that even if they were skeptical in the beginning, that they thought it was going to be very useful, and so that's very helpful for us in terms of where we go next. Right now, we're focused on the research portion of it. We're focused on theoretically, you know, challenging certain assumptions and seeing what comes out of that. We'll start to publish our findings for the broader research community, and then start translating some of that into practical implications. Likely we'll also have some different iterations of this game because we've already encountered that there are things that we can include and things we should change and the like. So, we're already starting to think ahead. And we're full speed ahead on this. It's really exciting to see. This project is, you know, includes like I mentioned before, Georgia Tech, but also includes Minnesota State University, Mankato and I mentioned an Information Science colleague. And we also have a number… we have a PhD student, Masa, who's working with us. And we have Superluminal, which is our industry consultant group that's working with us. And I also have a couple of other consultants here and there that are working students that have started the project, want to keep with the project and have already graduated, so then they come on as consultants, and that's pretty cool to see.
MARY HUNT:
You talked about the 72-hour rule, which three days, three days goes by in the blink of an eye. What other closing advice do you have just for the general public, in terms of, you know, how do we prepare for emergencies, hazards, disasters? Nobody knows they're coming. Sometimes we have some notice. Sometimes they just come out of the blue and hit us. What's your best advice for people in terms of being prepared?
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
Ready.gov Is a good start. That website has a list of emergencies and disasters that are you know, are familiar to a lot of people in different locations. And when you click on it, it actually gives you some information about what you should care about in terms of by the hazard. It also has spaces for you to build a kit or plan ahead and think about different ways you can do it. They start talking about what you can do for low to no cost. There's some information there for businesses, and there's information in there for kids and resources, if you are thinking about how to prepare and you have kids and that and the like. So that's a good start to do. I know that a lot of state governments also have a ready.gov-like space that you can find a lot of this information. Getting traffic there is the important part, right? So, if you can read it and know if you can’t find that pamphlet, at least knowing where to go and where to maybe download some resources. That's a good beginning point. The other thing is, start figuring out what nonperishable food you can right so, so that you can be familiar with that. But a lot of this information is there. It's just that we have to kind of consume it.
MARY HUNT:
Yeah, take advantage of the resources that are there. DeeDee, this has been really helpful. It's been informative and helped me be a better preparer for emergencies. I hope it's helped others as well, and I wish you best of luck with your important work.
DEEDEE BENNETT GAYLE:
Thank you for having me.
MARY HUNT:
Oh, it's been pleasure. Thanks for being my guest.
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
DeeDee Bennett Gayle is an associate professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity at the University at Albany. She is the lead director of the Extreme Events, Social Equity and Technology Lab. Dr Bennett Gayle’s research broadly examines the influence and integration of advanced technologies on the practice of emergency management and for use by vulnerable populations, in particular, older adults, people with disabilities and racial and ethnic minorities. Recently, her studies have focused on workforce development and participation in disaster management fields.
For more information on Dr Bennett Gayle's work, visit the resource page for this podcast online at the dash engagement dash ring dot simplecast dot com
The Engagement Ring is produced by the University at Albany's Office for Public Engagement. If you have questions or comments or want to share an idea for an upcoming podcast, email us at UAlbany O P E at Albany dot E D U.
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