A thousand five hundred fifty-four. That’s the number of homes destroyed so far by the rash of wildfires stampeding across many parts of central Texas. The federal government has allowed $30,000 for each affected family to cover such disaster-related expenses outside those covered by insurance as temporary housing, hotel bills, and construction costs. Firefighters, meanwhile, seemed to have turned a corner in their fight against the blaze after managing to contain some 50 percent of the biggest and most destructive of the blazes, the one in Bastrop County.
Except for a few exceptions, the devastation in Texas spells big trouble in the real estate business of the Lone Star State, which ironically, was earlier tagged as one of just a handful of places which had a positive home-price outlook for the rest of the year.
The rebuilding that will surely follow after the fires will only have a significant positive effect on home sales if employment and consumer confidence get a major boost. The federal government realizes this of course and is trying to provide more stimuli to help the doddering economy, but as of August job creation has stalled.
Meanwhile, TX real estate training remains a popular course for real estate professionals who are getting ready for the day when real estate will take off again.
Texas is burning. As this is being written 50 wildfires are scorching different parts of drought-dried Texas, setting houses, barns, farms, and ranchlands ablaze. The fires, originating from lightly populated west Texas, are roaring eastward toward the big cities propelled by dry winds. Near Austin, in the Bastrop County Complex, the fire has torched 30,000 acres and destroyed over 600 homes, forcing the evacuation of more than 6,000 residents. Already, two firefighters and two civilians have perished and a million acres have burned to the ground across the state in 13 days of conflagration.
The wildfires could not have come at a worse time for Texas. Despite a continuing if shallow national decline in home sales prices through the first half of 2011, high unemployment, and anemic consumer confidence, home sales actually nudged up in the second quarter. An encouraging sign for the market. According to the latest report released by Clear Capital, a Truckee (Calif.)-based data and valuation firm, five metro areas are in fact forecast to post home-price gains for the rest of the year: Dallas, New York, Orlando, San Francisco, and Washington.
Now the wildfires are threatening to erase what little recovery the market has managed thus far—but only if the fires reach the big cities. About 1,200 firefighters are currently on the ground and in the air to prevent that and the loss of property and of lives from happening.
Posted:
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011
Category:
OSHA and Safety
At last after two weeks of wanton wildfires and failed firebreaks, desperate residents are finally hearing a break in the wall of bad news—and it’s a big one. The firefighters are reporting that biggest blaze so far (the one in Basrop, about 30 miles southeast of Austin), is 50 percent contained.
It’s fantastic news for everyone, especially for those who are pining to go home after days of being confined to hotel rooms or temporary housing, to check on the status of their properties. Already, recovery teams have been deployed to the affected areas and some families have even been let back inside their neighbourhoods. Time for recovery for these families.
For many of them that means rebuilding their homes and contacting a building contractor. For the contractor that means assembling a crew that has training in Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) 10 and OSHA 30, two courses that teach workers how to identify, mitigate, and avoid or prevent hazards in the workplace.
OSHA 10 is intended for the entry level worker and is designed to teach the worker to recognize, reduce, and prevent hazards in the workplace. OSHA 30, on the other hand, is a comprehensive safety program designed for safety directors, foremen, and field supervisors; it covers all OSHA compliance issues.
Posted:
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011
Category:
OSHA and Safety
After days of cruel conditions creating firebreaks to contain the unprecedented wildfires in Texas, firefighters have finally caught a break—the winds have died down, and firefighters, local authorities, and nervous residents hope that they stay down. The chances of that are good (considering that Tropical Storm Lee, which had been fanning the flames, has dissipated), and already about 30 percent of the big wildfire (the biggest one in the outbreak so far) in Bastrop has been contained following three successive blustery days that brought the number of destroyed homes to 800 from 600.
The task of recovery is daunting because of the scale of the disaster, and hazardous because of the significant dangers that will remain after the fires are extinguished. Search and recovery teams and cleanup crews that will be sent in will face such hazards as smoldering fire, CO2 poisoning, electrical dangers, extreme heat and cold, respiratory hazards, and hazardous materials.
For this reason, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) protocols and OSHA training—specifically, HAZWOPER training—will play significant roles in the cleanup and recovery operations in the weeks after the fire crews finally stand down. HAZWOPER is Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response, a program designed and implemented by the OSHA to protect workers at hazardous sites.
Oshacampus.com, the largest provider of OSHA training, offers online the following HAZWOPER training courses: 8-hour HAZWOPER, 24-hour HAZWOPER, and 40-hour HAZWOPER. The last is especially relevant to the Texas cleanup crews because it covers cleanup operations, emergency-response operations, and storage, disposal, or treatment of hazardous substances or uncontrolled hazardous waste sites.
So, now that you’ve done your pharmacy technician training program (preferably you did it with Meditec.com), you’re ready at last to take your pharmacy technician certification board exam (PTCE).
The PTCE is a 90-multiple-choice test. Ten of the questions are pretest items and therefore don’t count in your final score. However, you won’t be told which of the 90 questions are pretest, so make sure you answer all questions the best you can. It’s not a right-minus-wrong type of exam. There’s no penalty for guessing. But be smart in guessing. That is to say, always exercise common sense and make educated guesses.
If you’re the nervous type, don’t sweat it too much. A five-minute tutorial precedes the test to familiarize you with the type of questions that will be asked, the format of the test, and its structure. The tutorial will ease you into the exam itself. A five-minute exit survey follows the exam. In all, the exam appointment is 120 minutes (two hours) long.
It means filling prescriptions and assisting clients. It means interpersonal interactions and smiles all around. It means working in a medical environment as an integral member of a healthcare team and helping people get well. It means being in a growth career field that’s expected to expand by 25 percent through 2018. It means $45,000 a year ($60,000 for seasoned ones in top medical units) when the national average salary is $40,000. It means you’ve chosen real well if you’ve settled on a career as a pharmacy technician.
As with other regulated professions, you need to secure your pharmacy technician certificate before you can practice. And to do that you need to pass the pharmacy certification exam, a state-licensed certification test—not the easiest thing to do.
Here’s where it gets interesting. You can actually make it much easier on yourself if you enroll in the right pharmacy technician training program, which can only be provided by a school that’s been in the business of training pharmacy technicians for 40-plus years. And that’s Meditec.
Meditec has a roster of certificate training programs, one of them is the Pharmacy Technician Certificate Program, an online course for those who want to obtain comprehensive preparation for the pharmacy certification exam and a pharmacy-technician career.
Meditec also offers such courses as online billing and coding, online medical transcription, online legal transcription, paralegal training, medical office management, among others.
Posted:
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011
Category:
ISO Training
Who can forget the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, quite possibly the world’s worst industrial and environmental disaster of all time? It killed 11 workers and cost untold billions in damages. It also galvanized the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to develop an action plan on international standards to aid the oil-and-gas industry in preventing disasters such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
This plan comes up with two broad-stroke actions: it provides an inventory of existing standards that have an impact on a disaster like Deepwater; and it proposes a program for the design of new standards or improvement of existing ones.
The inventory incorporates 71 existing standards and related documents from ISO or other organizations, including the American Petroleum Institute (API). The program, for its part, puts on the table 31 standards or related documents for ISO, the API, or other bodies to develop or update.
While these new standards are being finalized, the ones already in place or are being implemented across multiple industries in America, but especially in Texas with its huge petroleum industry, have taken on renewed urgency. Standards such as the ISO 14001, which covers the “environmental management” aspects of the ISO 14000 family of standards, act as a company’s first line of defence against natural and manmade disasters.
ISOCampus.com, a leading provider of online ISO training courses, offers ISO 14001 Training, as well as
ISO 22000 Training, ISO 9001 Training, OHSAS 18001 Training, and the ISO 27001 Lead Auditor
Training.
Posted:
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011
Category:
ISO Training
Finally after three continuous days of stiff winds fed by the fast-dissipating Tropical Storm Lee, meteorological conditions have calmed down enough to enable fire crews to make significant headways controlling the wildfires. According to fire chiefs, about 30 percent of the big fire in Bastrop, Texas has now been contained, fuelling hope that the end of the crisis might be in sight soon. Just about time because nearly 800 homes have already been destroyed in Bastrop (1,000 in total, if the entire state is considered), four lives have been lost, and 3.6 million acres have been scorched.
After the last wildfire has been extinguished, the Lone Star State will be looking at a long, difficult process of recovery. For businesses in affected areas, the pain will be less if they had disaster training conducted and protocols established before the wildfires struck. This training and protocols are embodied in relevant ISO standards.
ISO (International Organization for Standardization) develops and publishes international standards for business, government, and society. ISO training is available from both traditional sources and from online providers. Of the latter, one of the leading institutions is ISOCampus.com, which provides ISO 9001 training (quality management), ISO 14001 training (environmental management), and OHSAS 18001 training (health and safety), among others. OHSAS 18001 is important for businesses in post-wildfire Texas because it lays the foundation for emergency preparedness and response.
It is September 12. In Basrop, Texas, where the biggest of the wildfires occurred, 1,554 homes have burned to the ground, 34,000 acres have been torched, and 17 people are missing and remain unaccounted for. But, fire chiefs estimate, 50 percent of the fires are now under control. Search and recovery have started to go into the disaster zone. Evacuated residents are demanding to be let back in their neighbourhoods.
Meanwhile, the federal government has declared Texas a disaster area, enabling residents to receive financial aid. Families will be eligible for up to $30,000 to defray expenses not covered by insurance policies; these expenses include hotel bills, temporary housing and even construction costs.
“The $30,000 can only go so far toward the expenses that some of you have,” stated Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat, talking to residents of devastated Basrop. “But I think it can be a lot of assistance.”
Indeed. But especially so if that sum is used in tandem with whatever insurance coverage the family has. Without insurance, $30,000 may not at all fit the bill of those whose homes were damaged or destroyed, or worse, were casualties of the wildfires.
Irene’s storm winds may have missed Texas, but the vientos calientes (hot winds) of a year-long drought have been hitting their mark since August 31—igniting over 180 wildfires this first week across the state and sparking one of the most catastrophic wildfire outbreaks in the history of the Lone Star State. As of this writing, over 1,000 homes have been razed to the ground, four people have lost their lives, and Texas’s firefighting units have been stretched to their limits.
As whole neighborhoods go up in flames one house at a time, about 1,200 firefighters, many from out of state, desperately try to gain some measure of control over the deadly, seemingly relentless wildfires. Five heavy tanker planes have been deployed to help corral the conflagration, three of the aircraft are built to scoop and later jettison 1,500 gallons of lake water in one pass.
Such a disaster is again spurring interest in getting insurance in as a key component of anyone’s disaster recovery plan. Expectedly, it’s also highlighting the across-the-board need for insurance adjusters, insurance professionals who vet claims by conducting interviews, research, and inspection.
An insurance adjuster needs a license to practice and so must go through insurance licensing classes, usually supplied by schools like LearnInsurance.com, a leading provider of online coursework in all facets of the insurance industry. Courses offered include the Insurance Claims Adjuster Training and the All Lines Insurance Claims Adjuster License Training, the latter a master license entitling the insurance adjuster to sell claims in multiple lines of insurance, not the least property and casualty insurance, in 30 states.
