Emergency Management Magazine posted a great article written by Adam Stone about catastrophic power outages. The article lays out some interesting facts and prompts many thoughts on how our society would sustain with limited power. Mr. Stone also mentions how vulnerable our grids are to both cyber attacks and squirrels!
Tag community planning
Today is the Day Before
I subscribe to disaster recovery e-mails from a company called Agility Recovery, whose primary focus is IT disaster recovery but they recognize the value of a comprehensive approach. They have great marketing and outreach, including regular webinars on various emergency management topics.
This week’s ‘Disaster Recovery Tip’ from Agility made me aware of a new campaign by FEMA (and I must say, FEMA’s campaigns have gotten MUCH better over the last few years – Kudos to FEMA!!!). This one is entitled ‘The Day Before’, and reminds us that we never know what will happen tomorrow, so we should always be prepared. Link to the video below.
DANGER: Templates in use
Sorry… I thought this image was really funny!
Last night I spent some time reviewing the Comprehensive Emergency Management and Continuity of Operations Plan (which should not be combined into one document) for a small town. Having reviewed more plans from within the State of New York than I can count, it was readily obvious that a state-provided template was (mis)used in the making of this plan. The end result: a poorly written plan that can’t be operationalized.
First off, I must say that there is nothing wrong with the template that was used. This template has been provided and is regularly updated by the Planning staff of the State’s Office of Emergency Management. Good templates help to ensure consistent formats are applied and all baseline legal and necessary content is included. There are many planning templates out there across the nation and globally for emergency plans. Some are good, many are not so good. The closest I tend to get to a template is using it as a reference. I generally see the use of templates akin to a Jean-Claude van Damme movie: you think it’s a good idea at first, you soon discover that you don’t really like it but for some reason can’t leave it, and in the end you are left wondering what really happened.
One must keep in mind when using a planning template that one size does not fit all… actually one size doesn’t fit anyone. While a template, as stated earlier, will provide you with a format and essential content, they don’t provide YOUR detailed information. If you simply use the template the way most people (wrongly) do, you are essentially doing the Mad Libs version of emergency planning by plugging in titles and locations where it tells you to. But where does this get you? Is the plan ‘customized’ simply because you filled in the blanks with your information? Of course not. The plan needs to make sense. The easiest way to determine if it makes sense or not is to read it. A good plan should provide a strategic-level narrative of how your company, jurisdiction, or organization will respond to and manage the impacts of a disaster. Who is in charge, and of what? What does the organization look like? What priorities must be addressed?
Templates really should be viewed as guidance documents – this will help prevent most user errors. Plans address needs – so a good needs assessment (threats and hazards) up front will help identify the content of the plan. Don’t forget to read the plan while you are writing it to make sure that it makes sense. Consider how it will be used and by whom. Do we write emergency plans just to fulfill a legal requirement or do we write them so we can use them???
Kudos to Cleveland
As I was typing away at the State Preparedness Report for a client late into the night last night, I would check new blog posts while the FEMA web tool would save and load new pages (the PREPCAST portal was gruelingly slow as the deadline for every state is December 31st). Every couple of hours, a new post would go up in the WordPress Emergency Preparedness category from the Cleveland, Ohio Public Safety Department as they updated readers on the weather, road conditions, snow removal, parking, and safety matters. Essentially, they would provide a mini situation report for the public and include whatever information residents needed to know.
This is certainly a best practice and excellent utilization of a blog to provide up to date information. Great job Cleveland!
How does your jurisdiction disseminate emergency information?
The Emergence of Whole Community Planning
FEMA has contracted the development of a national Whole Community disaster training program. This should result in some of the best planning guidance ever put forward by FEMA since CPG-101. What is ‘Whole Community’ planning? Whole Community planning takes into account everything in your community, not just the hazards, but also the vulnerable populations, as well the community’s resources – all of them, to include the private sector. This is smart planning!
I don’t know what the final guidance will look like, but I’m imagining a process, imbedded within our existing planning process, which is similar to a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) which has long been used as a business analysis tools. Strengths and weaknesses are internal reflections, while opportunities and threats have you looking to the outside. From the perspective of an emergency planner for a community, strengths and weaknesses would reference their innate government-based capabilities (remember capabilities-based planning? I’m still a big fan); while opportunities and weaknesses would reference what is brought to the table by the rest of the community (i.e. private sector, NGO, and even the citizens themselves – such as a neighborhood watch or CERT).
In many ways, good planners and emergency managers have already been doing this. They have been capitalizing on relationships with the private sector and NGOs and building plan annexes based upon these relationships – such as human services oriented plans and logistics plans. Moving forward as a ‘branded’ concept, Whole Community planning will become the standard, not just a best practice, and will evolve as more people do it and make it better. This concerted effort will ensure that the entire community is moving forward in a coordinated fashion and with common goals in the response to and recovery from an incident. I’m also hopeful that this Whole Community guidance will give some input on community preparedness as well.
The project will be released in phases over the next three years, so be looking out for it.
Public Safety Mega-Event Planning aka Super Mardi Gras Bowl
Super Bowl XLVII, February 3 2013, New Orleans. The Mardi Gras Carnival, January 19-February 12 2013, New Orleans.
One word – wow!
The Super Bowl is being held at the Mercedes Benz Superdome in New Orleans, LA. Fan capacity – 72000+. Add in the teams and their entourages, Beyonce and her entourage, event staff, facility staff, security staff, media, vendors, etc… let’s just settle on about 120,000 inside and out of the Superdome.
Carnival – a weeks long celebration leading up to Fat Tuesday (Mardi Gras). The most spectacular of these celebrations is in New Orleans, LA. Crowds of up to one million can be expected each year.
Either one of these mega-events is a public safety planning nightmare. So why not do them both?
There can be no doubt that the city of New Orleans has healed from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. No one takes on something like this without being whole. Yes, there is some scarring and some unfinished business with Katrina, but the people of the Gulf Coast must look ahead, not back.
So how does a community plan for two events like this? First of all, not every community would be able to pull this off as easily as New Orleans will. The biggest benefit they have in all this is that these two events occur every year. The people who plan these things are true experts. While the Super Bowl isn’t held there every year, the city does have experience with it. The city of the Saints has hosted the game nine times previous, the most recent in 2002 – which you might recall was a very emotional (and highly secure) game as the first after 9/11. The NFL itself lends a great deal of support with a small army to ensure their show case event is flawless – right down to the wardrobe malfunctions. Additionally, as a high-profile event, Federal agencies swarm the venue months ahead of time to be part of the public safety planning effort.
The City of New Orleans knows how to plan for Carnival and Mardi Gras. It’s in their blood and they do it well every year. We plan Super Bowls annually in places all around the nation and do it well every year. Combining the two is really just a matter of more people and more resources. They are doing this wisely, though – by suspending Carnival events for a few days around the Super Bowl. This was a very wise move, helping to ensure that resources can be focused on one event at a time. So, in essence, both events aren’t truly being held at the same time.
These things do take a vast amount of coordination and planning. Plans must address all possible threats and hazards and the contingency plans to respond to them. An operational organization (the Incident Command System) must be in place to manage public safety resources and responses for the event. This type of planning begins months ahead of time. I coordinated the emergency planning efforts for Woodstock 99 here in Central New York. Just like Mardi Gras or the Super Bowl, it involved a great deal of coordinated effort between local, county, State, and federal agencies as well as private sector entities and not for profits. Keep in mind that we weren’t planning the event, either – just the public safety portion of it – i.e. what could go wrong and how would we respond to it? There was no official attendance count… ticket sales were close to a quarter million but actual attendance was estimated near 400,000. Through the preparedness effort you need to ensure operational coordination and unity of effort and synchronized plans. Train people to the plan to ensure that they are familiar with its content and their roles. Lastly, exercise exercise exercise. If you don’t bring people together to discuss their actions and the plans you are doing yourself a massive disservice. Exercises familiarize people with the plans in the best possible way and also identify gaps in those plans (and there will be gaps). It’s better to identify them now and have a chance to fix them rather than finding them during the event itself.
Want to know more about public safety planning for an event? Take the Special Events Contingency Planning Independent Study course – it’s free!
Grassroots Recovery with a National Impact
This morning I took some time to browse through the variety of TED talks to see if anything struck some interest with me. First of all, if you aren’t familiar with TED, they host a variety of free talks and presentations on various topics. They get some great speakers and the presentations are short… usually 10-20 minutes. Most of the topics are about something new and innovative – their tag line is ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’, and they certainly abide by that. Sometimes I watch their presentations because the subject area interests me, and other times I watch it to see some innovative or refreshing presentation skills.
The TED presentation I watched this morning is titled: Caitria and Morgan O’Neill: How to step up in the face of disaster. It’s a short, 10 minute presentation which I highly recommend. Their background is on the TED page, but in short these two sisters, both in grad school, experienced an F 3 tornado in their hometown in Massachusetts. From their explanation, it seems that there wasn’t much organization or leadership in their town relative to supporting volunteers. If you’ve been in emergency management for a while, you’ve probably experienced this. There are a wealth of volunteers who want to help in the event of a disaster, but they must be organized and supported. Often times local governments either don’t have the resources to deal with spontaneous volunteers or simply don’t want to – they may not want the trouble, the liability, or would prefer that another organization, often times someone like the American Red Cross, to deal with them.
The main trouble is that most jurisdictions don’t plan for volunteer management. A volunteer management plan is a plan that should absolutely be part of the Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan (CEMP) of any jurisdiction. Yes, not for profits often times do take on this role, especially with a localized disaster and if they have the capability to do so, but in the event of a regional disaster they simply don’t have the people to dedicate to this task – and it’s not something that’s easily done or simply managed. The bottom line is that local jurisdictions are responsible for taking care of their people, and this is one more way to make it happen.
The O’Neill sisters, learning from their home town experiences and leveraging their educations and other experiences, eventually put together a company called recovers.org. They have applied simple but effective methodologies to manage resources, including volunteers, in the event of a disaster. They have traveled across the country applying their system and seem to be quite successful in doing so. One of the things that encourages me the most about them is that they advocate community preparedness. They know that for any system to reach its potential of effectiveness, it must be integrated into preparedness efforts, not just show up after the disaster. It seems they have a product and service that can be applied to any jurisdiction and would work well with existing structures, like a VOAD, and with volunteer management and recovery planning efforts. The information on their website indicates that they are busy helping communities impacted by Hurricane Sandy. It’s great to see local efforts and innovation in emergency management! Best of luck to Caitria and Morgan O’Neill.
Hurricane Sandy – Be Prepared and Stay Safe!
I’m finishing my preparations for a quick trip to California to help evaluate an earthquake exercise. All the while, I’m watching Hurricane Sandy come up the coast after creating some havoc in the Caribbean. According to the latest National Hurricane Center advisory, Sandy will make landfall in southern New Jersey, and progress inland to central Pennsylvania before turning north and heading through New York State, the track taking it through the Finger Lakes area. From there, the current advisory predicts that the storm will turn to the northeast, saturating New England. It’s going to be a very wet, rainy week as Sandy slows soon after making landfall. Of particular concern here in New York is the western portion of the state which has received a fair amount of rainfall over the last couple of days from the cold front that has progressed here from the mid west.
Thus far, there seems to be an appropriate amount of concern over this storm. While I’ve heard some folks say that people are overly concerned, I don’t think officials are crying wolf with this. First, as I’m sure you’ve read in the media, many factors of this storm are unprecedented or rarely seen, particularly the collision with the cold front – resulting in many of the hurricane advisories including snow in their forecast – SNOW for a HURRICANE! Who would have ever thought that would happen? Second, the storm is maintaining hurricane strength right up to landfall, bringing significant winds and storm surge with it. New York City is taking actions which to my recollection are fully in compliance with their hurricane plans, such as low elevation evacuations, closing of mass transit and tunnels ahead of the storm, and other protective actions. States of emergency have been declared all along the northeast states, with the President declaring an emergency in Maryland, which will be the first to feel the full effects of the category 1 storm with sustained winds of 75 miles per hour. I expect the President will make similar declarations ahead of the storm reaching subsequent states. States along the projected impact path all have activated their emergency operations centers (EOCs), pulling together local, state, and federal agencies, as well as some not for profits such as the American Red Cross and The Salvation Army, to coordinate efforts and situational information.
I’ve received storm preparedness information from several sources already, including Ready.gov, the Small Business Administration, Time Warner Cable, and National Grid. I’m certain utility companies in other area are doing the same outreach to their customers. Locally, the Erie Canal is being closed and water levels dropped to help mitigate against flooding, which has devastated communities along the waterway in the past. Local governments are putting out preparedness public service announcements to citizens to help ensure they are prepared. You’ve heard me comment before about the complacency of much of our population when it comes to emergency preparedness. Please pay heed to what is being suggested and spread the word that preparedness for this storm is serious. Be sure to have a few days of water, food, medications, and batteries for flashlights. Keep your cell phone charged and pay attention to weather information and emergency alerts. If you are a New Yorker, now is a great time to subscribe to NY-ALERT to be certain to receive emergency information. If you are outside of New York, many states now have similar alerting systems. Even clearing away leaves and debris, which is plentiful this time of year, from storm sewers and culverts will be a big help. If you manage or own a business, be sure to pull out your emergency and continuity plans (you have these, right?) and be sure to keep your employees and other stakeholders informed of what’s going on.
I’m sure that when I return I’ll be helping with some disaster response and recovery activities in the area. The better you prepare and the smarter you are, the less responders have to risk their lives and valuable resources, so be smart, be prepared, and stay safe!
Public-Private Partnerships: A Necessity in Emergency Management
Over the last several years there have been volumes of articles written on the value of public-private partnerships in Emergency Management. So why is it still like pulling teeth? Yes, we have great private sector partners in EM – the likes of WalMart, UPS, Grainger, and others. The value of having these partnerships has certainly been demonstrated through the years, in both local disasters and national-level disasters. Even in preparedness, these partnerships help carry our message to the masses. FEMA promotes a program called PS-Prep, designed to engage private sector preparedness while encouraging their involvement locally in emergency management efforts.
Government simply can’t do it without the private sector. It’s not because the public sector is lacking, it’s because of the position and resources available to the private sector. They have more resources and greater flexibility. Why wouldn’t they want to help? Their customers and employees live in the area. It’s a solid decision to invest in the community (or communities) in which your company is located. It doesn’t always involve a financial commitment – it encourages preparedness for the business itself; it provides an opportunity to engage employees in community efforts (all with the company name being recognized – it’s free marketing!); and perhaps an opportunity to provide products – discounted or free – to relief efforts in the aftermath of a disaster. Commodities such as building materials, water, and food are in great need in the aftermath of a disaster. Even trucks and people. Yes, these things all cost money, but there is a lot of free press and good will that goes along with it.
There are plenty of businesses that contribute after a disaster occurs – certainly they want to help. They can all have more impact, however, by joining up with local emergency preparedness efforts before a disaster ever occurs. Joining a community organization, such as a VOAD, or entering into memorandums of understanding with local emergency management agencies prior to a disaster makes a huge impact. The partnerships made with other businesses, government agencies, and community organizations will also be to their benefit.
Businesses large and small – consider both the preparedness of your company and your community. There are opportunities to be had with both!
Emergency Preparedness for Persons with Disabilities
My post is in reference to an article in Emergency Management Magazine (found here:http://www.emergencymgmt.com/disaster/Emergency-Planning-Disabled-Uphill-Battle.html). The author’s article brings up several pertinent points around preparedness planning for persons with disabilities. This, like darn near everything in emergency management, requires a multi-agency, multi-disciplinary approach. We also need to be very certain to not lump all persons with disabilities into one category. There are various levels of function that people may have. Many people live with disabilities every day and are highly functioning, requiring little or no help. Others may require daily or constant assistance from family, friends, or other care takers, including medical professionals. Some folks are dependent upon medications or medical equipment (insulin dependant diabetics, those requiring dialysis, or home oxygen), while some have mobility impairments. Some may have cognitive disabilities such as autism, Down’s Syndrome, or a traumatic brain injury. Some persons may have several disabilities which need to be considered. A community’s planning efforts must incorporate the full spectrum of needs.
Following our emergency planning steps, we can easily pull together the people and information we need. First, form a planning group. Emergency management, local health department, and local organizations that advocate for persons with disabilities, such as the Arc, associations for the blind and hearing impaired, diabetes association, MDA, UCP, etc. These are all important stakeholders as they serve and advocate for our disabled populations on a daily basis. You should probably know your community’s hazards, but we should analyze how they can impact persons with disabilities. We have to define what needs exist that we need to address. We can even consider mitigation measures, such as obtaining strobe light alerting for those with hearing impairments.
Help your community keep its finger on the pulse of the needs of persons with disabilities by forming a special needs registry. Those utilized now are web-based and help first responders and emergency management identify, plan for, and address the changing needs in the community. Having current information such as names, addresses, and type and severity of disability are extremely important. Planning for notification, evacuation, transportation, and sheltering are often times the most challenging. Expand your planning group when these challenges come up. Include utility companies (who will prioritize power restoration to those who are dependent for medical reasons), local and regional transportation authorities, and those agencies and resources who will staff special needs shelters.
Remember, most persons with disabilities are not an idol portion of our population. They are highly functioning and can help, needing only the right accommodations to do so. Also, be sure to promote special needs preparedness. FEMA, the American Red Cross, and others have excellent resources for this. Your local association for the blind and visually impaired can help you obtain materials in large print or braille. The National Organization on Disability is also a great resource (nod.org). Don’t leave anyone behind!
The Contrarian Emergency Manager 