Are you ready for the next natural disaster or terrorist attack?

If you’re relying on the Department of Homeland Security’s Web site, or think the Federal Emergency Management Agency will be able to help you, then you aren’t ready.

The Web site ready.gov, set up by the Department of Homeland Security ostensibly to help Americans prepare for a terrorist attack or natural disaster, contains numerous “inaccuracies and incomplete information,” according to the Federation of American Scientists.

So in two months, an FAS intern developed reallyready.org, “for the price of a domain name,” said FAS director of biology policy Michael Stebbins. “In comparison, it took millions of dollars and over five months to create Ready.gov.”

The government’s site recently got a facelift and a few bits of updated information, but not nearly enough of it, and numerous errors, redundancies and confusing information remain. In addition, much of the advice given by the government is too generic to be useful, according to the FAS analysis released Tuesday.

“FAS hopes to see Ready.gov updated so that it is more useful to the public that has paid for it,” Stebbins saind, “especially since a 20 year-old college student was able to single-handedly complete the same task in only two months.”

“I know it isn’t good to laugh about such a serious topic, but when I saw the graphic on Ready.gov suggesting that when a nuclear bomb goes off a hundred feet away you might want to protect yourself by walking around the corner, I just couldn’t help myself,” said Ivan Oelrich, vice president of strategic security at FAS. “After three years and millions of dollars, taxpayers should expect a better website from the Department of Homeland Security.”

The appropriate reaction to a nuclear attack is to hide from the light and heat of the blast, then walk perpendicular to the wind away from the dust cloud.

Meanwhile at FEMA, director R. David “Duct Tape” Paulison told reporters Monday that the agency would be ready for the next disaster. He hopes.

“FEMA has got to be a more agile, a more flexible organization than it has been in the past, and that’s what we wanted to do,” Paulison said during a briefing for reporters in Miami.

A key aspect of the improvement has been an effort to increase the supplies available for victims — and FEMA’s ability to deliver them. Paulison said that while FEMA had enough equipment on hand during Katrina, it was not in the right position to be useful. — CongressDaily

So do you think FEMA improved its logistics? This time, will they actually get supplies to the people who need them?

No.

“What we’ve gone out and done is purchased a tremendous amount of supplies,” he said. That includes “almost 800 tractor trailer loads” of MREs, four times as many as they had prior to Katrina, along with massive increases in the amount of water and ice on hand.

Which means that they have far more supplies and materiel to send to the wrong places and prevent from getting to people in need.

To be fair, he did purchase 20,000 GPS units to attach to all of FEMA’s trucks, so that they know where everything is. “So we can give the states a very good heads-up of where their supplies are, how soon before they get there, and we can tell them exactly where it is at that time,” Paulison said. “And we can tell when it arrives.” At least in theory. We’ll see how it works in practice.

You’ll do much better by visiting reallyready.org to get comprehensive, correct information on protecting yourself from a hurricane, and I’ll have ongoing coverage on protecting yourself from FEMA.