Today we announced a whole slate of initiatives supporting National Preparedness Month as a coalition member. The coolest of all of these is easily our Preparedness Add-On pack, built to help communities & families prepare for disaster.

We based the add-on on the three steps for preparedness from Ready.gov. From our release:

• Get a kit: The add-on provides a new Depiction map element, the Emergency Kit, which includes a checklist of the items recommended by the Ready campaign, allowing families to keep track of both the location of their kit and its contents as part of a depiction of their neighborhood.
• Make a plan: More new elements, representing meeting places, utility shut-offs, vulnerable neighbors and more make it easy for families and neighborhoods to make detailed plans of what to do and how to communicate in an emergency, and Depiction's powerful but simple simulation tools allow users to easily make changes to the plan in response to events, such as blocked roads or flooded buildings.
• Be informed: New Quickstart data sources, such as historical hurricane tracks and earthquake data, enable users to quickly get information about natural hazards in their region that they should be preparing for.

Check out all our National Preparedness Month initiatives.