Tag Emergency Management

FEMA Seeking Comment on Preliminary Damage Assessment Manual

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

Released last week, FEMA is seeking comment from emergency managers on the draft FEMA Damage Assessment Operating Manual.  The manual establishes (much needed!) national damage assessment standards developed from historic lessons learned and best practices already in use by local, state, tribal, territorial, and federal emergency management agencies.

The draft manual and comment matrix are posted in the FEMA Library.  FEMA asks that comments be submitted no later than November 14, 2015 to Mr. Ryan Buras, Senior Program Advisor at PDAmanual@fema.dhs.gov.

Emergency managers – Be Heard!

-TR

Community-driven Preparedness

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

As many of you know, September is National Preparedness Month.  The website offers a number of resources, mostly for governments, to engage citizens and community groups in preparedness.  Higher level engagement of citizens is extremely important to better enable to them to care for themselves for a period of time so they are less dependent upon government and emergency services in the event of a disaster, freeing up these services to address matters of high impact and high importance.

National Preparedness Month is a great opportunity to get information out to everyone!  Consider every facet of your community.

  • Schools and day cares
  • colleges and universities
  • nursing homes, assisted living facilities, retirement homes
  • business and industry
  • community organizations, service organizations, labor unions
  • religious organizations
  • government offices
  • travel and tourism offices and entertainment venues

What will you do to get the word out?  I’d suggest a multi-pronged approach… static information on your website is a good central point to direct people to.  Pamphlets and handouts are great to get information into people’s hands, especially at gatherings.  Social media is a great outreach tool that should be used often.  (and if you think you are OK just having a Facebook account, you really need to take a social media class!).  With organized groups, invest time to meet with them and present to them.

One of my biggest tips is to actually give people something to do, give them a mission.  Don’t just direct them to preparedness information and count on them to do something with it.  Busy people (and even non-busy ones) aren’t wired that way.  ENGAGE them!  Don’t just speak at them.  Challenge them to be prepared and give them benchmarks.  Tell them how important it is for them to be prepared, not just for themselves, but for their families, their neighbors, and their communities.

Target your message to the specific groups you are speaking to.  A senior citizens organization should be getting a vastly different message than the Chamber of Commerce.  Organizations at all levels can be encouraged to join a VOAD (if you don’t have one – form one!) or other coalition to provide services before and after disasters.  There is no longer any mission for the community that is just for one organization any more.  The demands are too high for that.  Sheltering can’t be handled by the Red Cross alone and the local humane society or ASPCA can’t handle all pets in a disaster on their own.  I’m betting even your health department could use a hand with points of distribution.

Businesses can help, too.  Along with becoming a community partner, they also need to be prepared.  The SBA, through Agility Recovery, is offering a number of webinars this month which can be found here.

Yes, all this campaigning takes some serious time and effort.  Engage others to help you, establish a strategy and a message, and get out there.  Community preparedness pays dividends.

As with most things I write about, Emergency Preparedness Solutions can help you with community messaging and engagement – any time of year!  Info below.

© 2015 – Timothy Riecker

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC

WWW.EPSLLC.BIZ 

A book of worst-case scenarios

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager 3 Comments

I came across this article yesterday about US Rep Michael McCaul from Texas (who happens to chair the House Homeland Security committee) penning a book titled “Failures of Imagination: The Deadliest Threats to Our Homeland — and How to Thwart Them”.  The book, set to be published in January, will apparently outline a variety of terrorist attack scenarios against the US and how they can be stopped.

I’ve written in the past about the necessity to consider credible worst-case scenarios (natural and human-caused) which can impact your jurisdiction or organization.  Following the model outlined by Comprehensive Preparedness Guide (CPG) 201 for the Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (THIRA) process, it’s not just enough to say you are vulnerable to flood or wild fire.  To identify what your specific vulnerabilities are (location, duration, severity), it is necessary to flesh these out into scenarios.  Identification of these vulnerabilities will then help identify impacts, such as those to infrastructure, resources, and populations.  Plans should then be based upon these impacts.

I’m doubtful that Rep McCaul’s book will provide any foundation for planning (although I don’t think it’s intended to), however the scenarios contained may be eye opening to EMHS professionals and even citizens.  Regular readers of this blog know I feel that we are on borrowed time regarding terrorist attacks.  Yes we have experienced some on US soil (and the UK, Canada, Australia, France, India, and many other nations), and they have been devastating, but we have to know that with organizations such as ISIS thriving on our planet, more will come.  Mumbai-type scenarios, with multiple coordinated simultaneous attacks can be crippling and certainly demonstrate what a credible worst-case scenario could look like.

I’m interested to see what Rep McCaul’s book contains.  I’ll be sure to publish a review once it comes out and I’ve had an opportunity to read it.

© 2015 – Timothy Riecker

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC

WWW.EPSLLC.BIZ 

Are You Really Considering All Hazards?

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager 1 Comment

Natural hazards, such as flooding, tornados, wildfire, and earthquakes, bring about the greatest losses, calculated in nearly every metric possible, as compared to human-caused incidents.  Human-caused incidents, either accidental or intentional, still bring tremendous impact to communities world-wide on a daily basis.  While working to prepare for, mitigate, respond to, and recover from natural hazards will always continue to be important, it seems that many still often forget about human-caused incidents despite all the conversations out there.

Human-caused incidents include a variety of hazards such as infrastructure failure, transportation accidents, hazardous materials incidents, and intentional attacks.  These are all things which we can fit into our traditional model of Prepare, Mitigate, Respond, and Recover.  The National Planning Goal introduced the model of the five Mission Areas – Prevention, Protection, Mitigation, Response, and Recovery – to help address our many of our major functions (Core Capabilities) for human-caused incidents (note that Preparedness is now a higher level concept that applies to all Mission Areas).  While this Mission Area model has helped bring these key activities into the greater fold of what we do, it has also kept them largely isolated through the thought that many human-caused incidents are only addressed through Prevention and Protection Mission Area activities.

Nowhere, it seems, do we see this more than in the area of hazard mitigation.  The vast majority of hazard mitigation plans which exist only address natural hazards (even at the state level).  Since many readers view this blog for my opinion, here it is – this is archaic and dangerous thinking!  We have all seen hazard mitigation plans which claim they are ‘all hazards’, yet only list natural hazards.  That’s fine, if by some unbelievable circumstance, your jurisdiction is only impacted by natural hazards.  This is a circumstance which I am highly doubtful of.  Some mitigation plans get a little more realistic and will address human-caused hazards such as dam failure and/or hazardous materials release, which were likely the greatest human-caused threats they may have been vulnerable to in the previous century.  In today’s world this still doesn’t quite get us to where we need to be.  There are a great many mitigation activities which we can leverage against human-caused incidents.

How do we fix this?  It’s easy – start with conducting a hazard analysis.  A hazard analysis, be it as a stand-alone activity or part of the THIRA process, should review all possible hazards which your jurisdiction, company, or organization is vulnerable to.  It should be comprehensive, not just limited to the set of natural hazards.  Along with infrastructure failure and hazardous materials incidents (both in-transit and fixed site), consider hazards such as active shooters, cyber attacks, improvised explosives, and civil unrest.  This may require bringing some additional subject matter experts into the room for your hazard analysis – like your IT director.  In a hazard analysis, each hazard is ranked (at a minimum) by its likelihood to occur and its severity of impact should it occur.

A well conducted hazard analysis provides the basis for everything we do in emergency management and homeland security.  It not only informs our activities such as planning, training, and exercises, it also helps assign priority to those hazards which require the greatest focus and allocation of resources.

© 2015 – Timothy Riecker

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC

WWW.EPSLLC.BIZ

Most Disasters are NOT Extraordinary Occurrences – OR Crowdsourcing Volunteers

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

I listen to A LOT of podcasts.  While some are focused on emergency management and homeland security, most are pop culture related and have nothing at all to do with EM/HS.  At least not directly.

Listening to a recent podcast, it struck me how often the hosts mention disaster-related occurrences.  During this podcast there were several mentions of disaster related issues including the Louisiana theater shooting (which was breaking news while they were recording) and the Tom Selleck legal drama in California over stolen water (which ultimately relates back to their drought issues).  The same podcasters (one of which is in New England, the other in the National Capital Region) often comment through the year on weather-related incidents which impact them and others including winter storms, flooding, and warmer weather storm damages.

The point is that most disasters are not extraordinary occurrences.  Routine incidents aside, some measure of disaster occurs fairy regularly, certainly around the world and even just within any of our nations.  Turn on the news tonight and see for yourself.  So WHY, I ask, is there such a mentality with the general public (and maybe even with us public safety types) about disasters being out of the ordinary occurrences?  Sure they don’t happen within our own jurisdiction every day, but they happen somewhere EVERY DAY.  I’m not saying we have to be paranoid about it, but I see the COMPLACENCY getting WORSE.  We discuss preparedness often, and the aspect of getting the public better engaged in preparedness almost as much, yet we have yet to see real, meaningful success in this.

We’ve recently seen a bit of a paradigm shift in how we deal with climate change (insert groaning sound here).  For many years we tried to prevent it, as if we could.  The reality is that part of it is influenced by the actions of humanity and part of it by the natural cycle of our planet.  There are things we simply shouldn’t be doing and we still need to work on those, but we have also come to grips with the inevitability of the impacts.  We have realized that they will happen no matter what we do and we have decided that we need to ADAPT in order to survive.

Adaptation is an important realization for us (I’m now speaking in generality – not just climate change issues).  If there are things that we pound our heads against the wall over in futility, such as public engagement, maybe we are doing it all wrong?  I’m not saying that we stop trying to engage the public.  There are certainly successes we have seen, but I don’t think we are seeing the return on investment we should be.

Let’s look at society today.  People seem to have less time ability interest in volunteering or committing to efforts ahead of time.  We have to understand and acknowledge that first and foremost.  Have we turned into soulless uncaring creatures?  No, of course not.  We have just seen a shift in culture.  Trying to fight this culture is foolish.  Instead, we need to adapt.  How do we adapt?

Social media is the greatest embodiment of our need for instantaneous information and feedback.  It doesn’t take much preparation (download some apps, create accounts, find friends).  The vast majority of the information that rolls across the screen is crap, but every once in a while there is a worthwhile nugget that will garner some responses.  Sometimes (usually disasters or a new statement by Donald Trump) information that comes across garners a great deal of attention and people want to take action.  Do they know how to take meaningful action?  Often not.  But they will follow along with the good ideas of others.  (aka leaders).

Let’s broaden this concept within public engagement.  What this essentially comes down to is managing spontaneous volunteers – a concept we have seen much need for in EM for years.  I think we need to emphasize this more than ever.  We also need to update the way we think about it.  These spontaneous volunteers will not only show up at town hall, the fire house, local diner, or house of worship; they will show up online via Twitter and Facebook.  They will be locals, they will be from out of state, across the country, or across the planet.   ALL of them can be engaged.  Let’s crowdsource volunteers in emergency management.  We just need to identify how to engage them.  Identify gaps and figure out how these good natured people can fill those gaps with little no upfront investment of time or effort on their part.  Build plans that address spontaneous volunteer engagement – both in the physical aspect as well as virtual.  Train to these plans and test these plans.  Let’s stop struggling against old ways of thinking.  Improvise, adapt, and overcome.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

I do want to take a moment to thank my followers and readers – something I don’t do enough of.  Your support and comments are greatly appreciated.  Also, if you like my blog, spread the word.  Please feel free to forward/repost/retweet to friends, family, colleagues, and complete strangers.

©2015 – Timothy Riecker

EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS SOLUTIONS, LLC

WWW.EPSLLC.BIZ

We need to talk MORE about Emergency Management

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

My company is currently finishing a contract which involved almost two dozen site visits to local government entities (cities and towns) to meet with local officials (emergency management, police, fire, EMS, schools, elected officials, public works/highway, etc.) to discuss certain emergency management and homeland security needs they may have.  The topics we needed to address were set in conjunction with our client and the meeting times were capped at 4 hours.  Based on the discussion generated by those we met with, discussions took anywhere between an hour and a half to all four hours.  At the end of most of these meetings, many people who we met with thanked us for bringing them the opportunity to discuss emergency management with such depth.

At first I was a bit puzzled about this gratitude… the meeting was intended for us to gather information from them, so it was us who thanked them for their time and input.  Why would they thank us?  They could talk about this stuff any time they wanted to, right?  In theory, yes.  In practice, NO.

Looking back at the project in retrospect we saw the value in the opportunity we provided these local stakeholders.  Absent a recent disaster or a specific issue of concern, it’s a rare occasion that local leadership takes the time to convene and discuss emergency management and homeland security matters.  We, rather serendipitously, provided them with an opportunity to do talk about many facets of EM/HS, to share thoughts and ideas, and to identify needs.

In many local government meetings (town/village/city council, selectboard, etc.) the topic of emergency management (or anything related to it) is generally not on the agenda.  Some may have a formal briefing by department heads, which would include the fire department or police department (if they have one), but these are usually fairly general statements.  Because of the depth of discussion that can take place, I don’t even think that these monthly governance meetings are the right venue for most discussion.  I would suggest that jurisdictions have a separate meeting, at least quarterly, to discuss emergency management in depth, with all department heads, elected officials, and others present and participating.  Preparedness should be discussed across the spectrum of all mission areas.

Many of the jurisdictions we met with had seen tropical storm impacts within the last few years – and that was the last time, for many of them, that the impacts and lessons learned were discussed.  What of their corrective actions?  Aside from a few largely individual efforts, little progress had been made.  Stakeholders self identified this gap, some commenting directly about the necessity to meet more often.  Many brought up gaps that were identified after the tropical storm, or even more recently, which were never addressed.

Along with the success of our intended project, we hope that at least some of those jurisdictions were able to get energized and organized to revisit some of those past concerns and move forward to make some progress with preparedness and mitigation efforts.

What do you do in your jurisdiction to prompt more discussion about EM/HS?

© 2015 – Timothy Riecker

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC

WWW.EPSLLC.BIZ

Incorporating Social Media Into Your Exercises

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

Incorporating Social Media Into Your Exercises, a post within the idisaster.wordpress.com blog.

This blog was first brought to my attention through the most recent DHS Capacity Building Webinar Series episode called Innovating with Disaster Drills and Exercises (also available on iTunes, which is how I usually listen to them).  The blog’s primary writer, Kim Stephens, is very well spoken and well versed in using social media in emergency management (#smem).  Claire Rubin, who I’ve referenced several times before, also guest posts on the idisaster blog.  I’ve spent some time looking through the blog and find it to be well written and very informative – they certainly gained a new follower!

Be sure to check out both idisaster.wordpress.com and the DHS Capacity Building Webinar Series.

– TR

Effectiveness and Efficiency in Incident Management – Resource Tracking

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager 4 Comments
Incident Check In

Incident Check In

I recently took part in the management of an exercise in which a Type 3 incident management team (IMT) was among the players.  As part of their initial set up they immediately recognized the importance of checking in and tracking resources.  This is an activity which is often overlooked at the onset of an incident and is a royal pain to catch up on once the need is realized.  There were a few things which they could have improved upon, though, which seriously impacted their effectiveness and efficiency.

  1. They spent time checking in each vehicle as equipment. Not every vehicle needs to be tracked in an incident.  Generally, the sedan, pick up, or SUV you come in on isn’t special enough that it requires tracking.  Huge waste of time, people, and effort.  Consider the nature and capability of the equipment that is coming through your access point.  Is it a specialized resource?  Will it be applied tactically?  Will it be supporting logistical needs?  Is it rented or leased?  These are the conditions that should be considered when deciding what equipment to track.
  2. They marked equipment using bottled shoe polish. Not a bad idea, except it rained all week, and within hours of application most of the markings couldn’t be read.  Windshield markers, similar to what car dealerships use, are cost effective, waterproof, and clean off easily with mild window cleaners.
  3. Equipment that was checked in was never logged in detail. What’s the difference between E-01234 and E-01235?  We will never know as no descriptions were entered into their tracking system.
  4. As vehicles flowed in to the staging area, people will directed to check in at the command post. This is obviously excellent, except to get to the command post people had to pass by the main access to the incident site.  This meant that many people did not check in as directed.  They got distracted by the incident and associated response activity and never made it to the command post to check in.  This severely impacted the effectiveness of accountability.

Sometimes people would try to explain these things away by saying “It’s just an exercise”, but exercises are an opportunity to do things the right way, not skimp and cut corners.  While their intent was good, their process and results were quite poor.  If we are supposed to train the way we fight, as they say, this team has a ways to go to be more effective with resource accountability.  On the surface resource tracking looks easy… but it’s not.  There is a lot of complexity, variables, and attention to detail that must all work together well in order to be successful.  The Resource Unit Leader has one of the hardest jobs in the Incident Command System.

Being who I am, I’m left wondering why this all happened.  I have little choice but to blame poor planning and training.  Planning is to blame for a lack of clear procedures, guidance, and decision models.  The training which people receive tends to be just as vague.  By now, most, if not all of you are familiar with my opinions on the current ICS training.  While the referenced article does not go into the IMT/position training curricula, from what I recall of the courses I’ve taken, there are certain things taken for granted.  It’s easy to put an item on a checklist that says ‘Establish check in’.  OK… how?  Where?  When?  What?  Why?  The answer to those questions, or guidance to help answer those questions, should be provided through training.  Let’s tell people not only why check in is important, but what people and resources should be checked in, where to establish check in (what to look for and what to avoid), etc.  Once we’ve trained people on it, let’s provide job aids… not just the ICS forms, but job aids that will actually help people do their jobs.  While it may seem like minutia and unnecessary detail, keep in mind that we are training people to operate in austere and chaotic environments which they are trying to establish order over and only do these activities on rare occasion.  Those conditions signal the need for detailed training and job aids to support sustained performance and limit the degradation of the training they received.

Bottom line – let’s take a step back, fix what we have to based upon what we’ve learned, and proceed forward so we can operate more effectively and efficiently.

Thoughts and comments are always appreciated.  What have you learned or observed from incidents or exercises that needs to be addressed foundationally?

© 2015 – Timothy Riecker

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC

WWW.EPSLLC.BIZ

FEMA Releases a Consolidated Online Training Course Catalog for First Responder Training

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

This is a great resource I discovered last week that has just been officially announced this week. It is comprehensive and easy to use. Check it out and see what’s out there! – TR 

(Official release follows)

FEMA released a consolidated online training catalog for the First Responder Training System, including courses available through the Emergency Management Institute (EMI), the Center for Domestic Preparedness (CDP), the National Domestic Preparedness Consortium (NDPC) and the Continuing Training Grant (CTG) program. The site was developed in response to customer requests and is known as the “National Training & Education Online Course Catalog.” It allows users to search for all FEMA preparedness training initiatives in one location.  

The main entry page of the combined catalog briefly describes each training organization—EMI, CDP, and the National Training and Education Division—while providing a list of training courses in each catalog, along with links for scheduling and individual websites for each training organization. First responders can access the consolidated course catalog by clicking directly at www.firstrespondertraining.gov/NTE. 

The catalog itself is searchable and can be viewed in full or by the individual NTE training entities. Users are able to filter by organization and/or training provider, delivery type, discipline, core capability and mission area at www.firstrespondertraining.gov/ntecatalog.

Course catalog feedback can be sent to firstrespondertraining@fema.dhs.gov.