Dungog Shire Community Centre received a NSW Office Emergency Management grant last year to develop a community approach to disaster preparedness – Connect and Prepare.

The Centre’s manager Sarah U’Brien said those resources have now been shared throughout the shire, Hunter and interstate.

“To support our community and others to continue to engage with the project and build their preparedness and share the message with friends, family and their community we have developed a web page,” she said.

The Connect and Prepare web page aims to support residents to build their preparedness – for any event  – by helping build strong community connections.

“In our most vulnerable moments that’s where our strengths lie,” she said.

Ms U’Brien said research on how communities around the world reacted to catastrophic events such as earthquakes or fires reveals what got them through the crisis was their local connections such as the relationships with hairdressers, real estate agents, schools and sporting groups.

As an example of staying connected to be prepared,  parents could keep up to date with their child’s school or day care centre’s policy to ensure they and other members of the family knew where the emergency evacuation centre was so they could locate their child in the event of a crisis.

“Our community rallied when we needed it to,” she said of the 2015 storm event when sporting clubs, service clubs,businesses and local organisations worked together before the emergency services were able to access the town.

“We live in a privileged place where we get to share these stories across Australia,” she said.