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About one-third of the people invited to District 5's planning session did not attend. "Generally people are not thinking about emergency preparedness," said Lowenstein. "You've got sanitation issues. You've got the parks. Getting people to sit down with this is a challenge."

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The District 5 group made progress at its meeting, developing a list of 10 initiatives to be carried out over the next year. They plan, among other things, to conduct training and drills at their respective institutions and to encourage their neighboring institutions to adopt and adapt the incident command system that the police and fire departments use in a disaster. That system defines the key roles and responsibilities of an emergency response team.

Zandra Myers, a Far Rockaway community organizer who started an emergency preparedness group in her neighborhood, ended the meeting by delivering a speech underscoring the importance of their efforts. "Emergency preparedness is top heavy," Myers said. "You have Homeland Security and FEMA, you have the Office of Emergency Management. And then you have the community, wondering 'Where do we go? What do we do?'"