by James Tracy
June 19, 2015
Crisisactors.org, the website established to represent the collaboration between the Visionbox professional actors studio and FEMA’s Emergency Management Institute has been dormant since August 2014. This is according to information obtained from Internet Archive on June 15, 2015.
On July 29, 2014 a notice retrieved from Internet Archive for crisisactors.org announces:
Maintenance
We apologize for the inconvenience, but Crisis Actors is currently undergoing maintenance.
On August 5, 2014 a moderately revised statement announces:
Sorry! We’re under maintenance. We are making some updates to the site. We’ll be back soon, thanks for your patience [sic].
Less than one month later, on August 26, 2014 a static page is prompted via the url that has remained through June 19, 2015.
404: Not Found. Please double check the address you’ve just entered. If you entered “www.example.com/networkname.com”, try “networkname.com instead.”
It is clear from the continuum of these announcements and their identical features that the most recent notification is an attempt to convince the casual browser that the site never existed, when in fact it appears it is being retained for possible future use.
One may recall that in late 2012 the use of professional actors for a variety of roles in “live shooter drills” was becoming common practice. Indeed, as the Sandy Hook massacre event was dominating the news cycle crisisactors.org even maintained a department of “Crisis Actors News”–hyperlinked headlines of stories on active shooter drills where its stable of actors are presumably engaged.
