Tag preparedness

How to Replace Five Common Vital Records

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

I was sent the following from USA.gov on Friday.  It’s a good reminder to keep copies of these documents so you at least have a starting point and can reference the registration numbers of each.  I also keep copies of my driver’s license and credit cards (all front and back).

From a business perspective, you should also consider what documents you maintain copies of.  What records are vital to you?  Are the copies up to date?  Are they stored off-site?

 

How to Replace Five Common Vital Records

Vital records, like birth and marriage certificates and military service records are often necessary to access a variety of government benefits and services. But sometimes life happens and those vital records go missing. Maybe they were misplaced in a move, were stolen or got damaged in a fire.

USA.gov has information to help you find copies and replacements of your vital records so you can apply for whatever benefits and services you need.

Birth, Marriage and Death Certificates

These records come from the states. To find a copy, you’ll have to contact that state office where the life event occurred. Find the contact information for state and territory offices that can help you.

Passport

Report lost or stolen passports to the State Department right away by calling 1-877-487-2778. To report and replace the lost or stolen passport, you’ll have to submit forms DS-11 and DS- 64 in person at a passport agency or acceptance facility. If you lose a passport, and then find it again, you won’t be able to use it to travel. You should return the lost passport and request a new one.

Military Service Records

You often need copies of military service records to apply for a variety of government programs available for veterans, like health care, retirement or education benefits. The National Archives keeps copies of all veterans’ services records, and you can apply online to receive a copy of yours or an immediate family member’s if they are deceased. If you prefer to mail or fax a request for your records, you can download form SF-180. You can also find out how to replace lost military medals and awards.

Social Security Card

If you can’t find your Social Security card, you may not actually need to replace it. As long as you know your Social Security number, you will still be able to collect Social Security benefits, get a job and apply for many government benefits and services. However, if you do want to replace the card, you’ll need to gather documents proving your identity and citizenship to mail or take to a local Social Security office.

Green Card

If you have a U.S. Permanent Resident (Green) Card, you may need to replace it if it was lost, stolen or damaged or if your name or other biographical information has legally changed since it was issued. You can easily request a new one online. If you’re outside the United States and have lost your green card, you should contact the nearest U.S. consulate or immigrations office before you apply online for a new card.

If you need help getting copies of other vital records like tax returns or school records, you can find the information you need to replace them at USA.gov.

 

Emergency Management and Considerations for Visiting Populations

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment
Radar loop, Labor Day 1998 Upstate New York. This storm impacted the New York State Fair.

Radar loop, Labor Day 1998 Upstate New York. This storm impacted the New York State Fair.

The inspiration for this blog was a paper posted to LLIS by Dr. Susanne Becken, Professor of Sustainable Tourism at Griffith University (Australia) and Lincoln University (New Zealand).  The paper is titled The Christchurch Earthquake and the Visitor Sector, which is also available from this link if you don’t have LLIS access.

Dr. Becken highlights the Christchurch earthquake of February 22, 2011, which killed 185 people from more than 20 nations, 80 of which were listed as visiting, rather than residing in, Christchurch.  She states that as a result of this M 7.1 earthquake infrastructure was badly damaged, accommodation capacity was reduced by half, and the number of international visitors dropped by almost 30 percent in the aftermath.  Dr. Becken identifies many of the challenges visitors had, including loss of travel documentation and other important items, and the value of the tourism industry in the area to assist response efforts (such as providing lodging for displaced citizens as well as responders from out of the area).

This paper brings to mind the vast amounts of visitors and transient populations that are found in many communities across the nation.  When visiting an attraction such as an amusement park, where tens of thousands of people congregate on any given summer day, take a look around.  Many of the amusement parks I know of are in fairly rural areas.  These towns are likely to have small volunteer fire departments and may not even have their own police services, instead relying on a county Sheriff’s Department or State Police.  How about a small city that has popular attractions at certain times of the year, such as horse tracks or other sporting events?  These events will also draw tens of thousands of people from near and far, staying in hotels, motels, and campgrounds.  Sure, these small cities might have a 24-hour staffed fire department, and probably even a small police force.  But how prepared are these types of areas for an incident that can cause mass casualties and fatalities?

Incidents such as this underscore the need for our preparedness to be through and needs-based.  As part of our Threat and Hazard Identification and Assessment (THIRA), which is the latest evolution of the traditional hazard analysis (see CPG-201), we must be sure to recognize visitors and transient populations and the events that bring them to our areas.  We should consider tourist attractions, field days, concerts and performances, large conventions, sporting events, and even college populations.  The potential impacts, in the event of a disaster, are certainly greater with these populations given that they are likely to be unfamiliar with the area, don’t reside locally and probably have no local contacts, and aren’t familiar with the threats.  Given the nature of the event they are attending, they may very well be consuming alcohol, as well.  All this makes for a rather fragile and dependent population in the event of disaster.

Planning on the macro (community) level should consider the specifics mentioned above.  With this information you can estimate the resources needed for certain scenarios (this is part of your THIRA), which will lead you determine gaps which you then plan to address.  Take some time to examine the demographics of the visiting populations.  These demographics will help determine their level of need in the event of a disaster and some areas of support you may need to provide.  Your local chamber of commerce and/or tourism authority can be an important planning partner for this information and other purposes.  Certainly consider the nature of the events and the age range of the attendees.  Are there language or cultural issues that should be prepared for?  Much of this specific information can be obtained event by event, looking at the micro (event-specific) level of planning for these events.  In New York State, a mass gathering permit is supposed to be issued for any event estimating attendance over a certain number.  The primary purpose of these permits is to ensure that officials are aware of the event and that potable water and sanitation is appropriately available, as well as other caveats.  Most states have a similar type of permitting requirement.  Become familiar with it and use it to your advantage.

In any of these events, how will you handle alert and notification in the event of a disaster?  You may have sirens in place, but would a visitor know what it means?  Given that such a high percentage of people have cell phones, use of area blast messaging may be an appropriate consideration.

A lesson learned from airline crashes can and should be brought into your planning: family assistance centers.  Family assistance centers were brought about in the aftermath of the crash of TWA Flight 800, realizing the importance of providing support and information to the families and loved ones of victims.  This concept has been applied as a standard to other mass fatality incidents since then and has proven to be beneficial to all parties.

Be sure to conduct preparedness exercises on these plans, and include members of your local hospitality and tourism industry as they will certainly be involved in some aspect of the greater response should an incident occur.

Sometimes local communities view visiting populations as a hassle, particularly when they don’t have the care for the host community that the locals do.  These populations are usually important to the economy of the local area and, depending in the event, will be back year after year.  No matter what your take is on that argument, you must consider the safety of any visitors or tourists as if they were your own citizens.  Be prepared through regular planning, training, and exercising activities and be sure to include your local chamber of commerce, tourism and hospitality industry as they are not only stakeholders, but they have a great deal of support and information to provide.  Most importantly, remember that all good preparedness efforts begin with a solid needs assessment.  Conduct a THIRA for your community, you might be surprised with what you discover!

What experiences do you have with planning for visiting populations?

Planning in Perspective

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

planI just finished reading an article by Lucien Canton, CEM – who is a well-respected and often published emergency management professional.  He maintains a blog, which he posts to often, and provides great insight to various EM-related topics.  The article that struck my interest was ‘Paper Plans and Fantasy Documents’.  Canton poses the question as a subtitle to his article – ‘Are we over-thinking planning?’.  In all actuality, based on his article and my own experiences, no – in fact we’re under-thinking it by maintaining a cookie cutter approach across the entire nation.

Canton’s commentary is similar to the thoughts I had in an earlier post on the (mis)use of templates in emergency planning.  Standards are good to have in every industry, certainly in emergency management and homeland security.  There are folks who become true experts through a great deal of experience, research, and trial and error.  The best ones share their expertise with the rest of the world in the hopes that we can all benefit.  Eventually, these standards become embraced by ‘standard setters’ – those in government or regulatory bodies who can pass laws, regulations, or codes to compel others to adhere to these standards.  This is all absolutely necessary – but, as Canton mentions, these standards become the basis for how people plan.

Just like I often write in my training-related posts, it’s all about the audience.  Our planning priority must be to meet the needs of the jurisdiction/company/organization who will be using the plan.  The plan must have utility – i.e. it must be usable.  Just because a plan meets established standards, does not mean that it can be operationalized.  Obviously our plans must still meet standards, but that really is a secondary concern to usability.  I think we are missing the forest for the trees and need to seriously re-think how we plan.

Any ideas?

Safeguarding our Electrical Grid – Reblog

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

More thoughts on the vulnerabilities of our electrical grid.  Great post.

Andy (אברהם נפתלי) Blumenthal's avatarandyblumenthal

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Popular Science (28 January 2013) has an interesting article on “How To Save The Electrical Grid.”

Power use has skyrocketed with home appliances, TVs, and computers, causing a significant increase in demand and “pushing electricity through lines that were never intended to handle such high loads.”

Our electrical infrastructure is aging with transformers “now more than 40 years old on average and 70% of transmission lines are at least 25 years old” while at the same time over the last three decades average U.S. household power consumption has tripled!

The result is that the U.S. experiences over 100 mass outages a year to our electrical systems from storms, tornados, wildfires and other disasters.

According to the Congressional Research Service, “cost estimates from storm-related outages to the U.S. economy at between $20 billion and $55 billion annually.”

For example, in Hurricane Sandy 8 millions homes in 21 states lost power, and…

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Strenghtening 9-1-1 Systems

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

Tim RieckerThis morning, Government Security News (GSN) published an article regarding the FCC‘s examination of last June’s derecho storms that severely impacted Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, DC, and Ohio.  The FCC looked into the long-lasting down time of 9-1-1 call centers in these impacted areas, provided comment, as well as recommendations – which largely are pretty sound.

If you’ve read earlier blog posts of mine, you’ll know that I more-often-than-not tend to defend utility companies.  Yes, we can all be better prepared, but I believe that sometimes the expectations are unreasonably high, especially with wide-spread disasters.   Also, utility companies are just that – companies – their primary goal is to be profitable.  With this in mind, there comes a point when the cost of mitigation may, at least in the short-term, make them unprofitable.  While in theory I would say ‘suck it up’, share holders tend not to see things that way.  So that does leave us with a bit of a quandary.

9-1-1 is an absolutely critical service.  Outages and disturbances in these systems occur every day throughout the nation, but are typically short in duration.  The derecho left 3.6 million people with interrupted 9-1-1 service, some for many days.  While there are general infrastructure issues that result from storms that can impact a utility system, this was compounded after the derecho by continued high winds for a few days, making many repairs impossible.  The FCC report cites, however, a few easy fixes that could have greatly reduced both the number of outages and the duration of many of these outages – including emergency power generators at central offices and distribution hubs.  There were also planning gaps that were discovered, that, once addressed should help reduce impacts by both number and duration.  I believe we also need to harness the technology we have to discover redundancies and back-ups that can be implemented in the even of future system failures.

Every incident is a learning experience for all involved – and hopefully even for those fortunate enough to not be involved.  The challenge is accepting these lessons learned and applying them to improve our measure of preparedness, increasing our awareness, and better enabling us to respond more effectively the next time around.

What lessons have you learned from disasters???

Today is the Day Before

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

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.

FEMA: The Day Before

NYPD Active Shooter Recommendations and Analysis – December 2012

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment
Timothy Riecker

NYPD Logo

This document, updated by NYPD last month in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, was brought to my attention through LLIS.  It’s also posted on the NYPD’s website here.  This document is a good compilation of practitioner research; official recommendations suitable for schools, businesses, and public buildings; and reflects on the ‘Run, Hide, Fight’ recommendations we’ve seen (NYPD’s version is a little more of a mouth-full – Evacuate, Hide, Take Action).  I like that they provide some information relative to attackers including gender, age, number of attackers (98% of active shooter incidents are carried out by a single attacker), planning tactics, targets, number of casualties, location of attack, weapons used, attack resolution, and other statistics – with this data provided for over 300 case studies (all included in the document).

The real value of this document is that the information which is provided to the reader allows for better informed (instead of emotional or ‘trendy’) decisions on facility security and planning relative to active shooter scenarios.

Thanks to the fine folks at NYPD for doing this work and sharing it with the public safety community.

Active Shooter Video – Run, Hide, Fight

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

Timothy RieckerAlabama Homeland Security, at the request of the Governor, modified the City of Houston’s Run, Hide, Fight video in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook school shooting.  Despite a few comments I’ve seen around the internet about the video being ‘sensationalized’, I think it’s a very well done video hitting emotions as best as possible through an instructional video.

It appears that the concept of ‘Run, Hide, Fight’ is the best approach we have against these types of horrific incidents.  It makes sense.

See the video here.

 

– Tim Riecker

Managing an Exercise Program – Part 3: Identifying Program Resources and Funding

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

This post is part of a 10-part series on Managing an Exercise Program. In this series I provide some of my own lessons learned in the program and project management aspects of managing, designing, conducting, and evaluating Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP) exercises. Your feedback is appreciated!

Managing an Exercise Program – Part 1

Managing an Exercise Program – Part 2: Develop a Preparedness Strategy

Managing an Exercise Program – Part 3: Identify Program Resources and Funding

Managing an Exercise Program – Part 4: Conduct an Annual Training & Exercise Planning Workshop.

Managing an Exercise Program – Part 5: Securing Project Funding

Managing an Exercise Program – Part 6: Conducting Exercise Planning Conferences

Managing an Exercise Program – Part 7: Develop Exercise Documentation

Managing an Exercise Program – Part 8: Preparing Support, Personnel, & Logistical Requirements

Managing an Exercise Program – Part 9: Conducting an Exercise

Managing an Exercise Program – Part 10: Evaluation and Improvement Planning

 

Exercises can be very resource intensive, have no doubt about that.  Generally speaking, the more you invest in them, though, the more you get out of them.  Certainly discussion-based exercises are usually not as expensive as operations-based exercises.  For all exercise types, however, the largest costs are in the design (staff or consultant time, as well as meeting time), and conduct (again, staff or consultant time, plus the time of the participants).  What resources do you need for your exercise program as a whole?  How do you get them?

First of all, let’s discuss human resources.  In Managing an Exercise Program – Part 1, I discussed the importance of having an exercise program manager and what some of the qualifications should be for that person.  A program manager is probably the most important human resource you could have for exercises, but certainly this person can’t do it alone.  A good exercise program is able to leverage the experience, support, and ideas of others – both within and outside.  The exercise program manager needs to be a great networker, able to draw people from various agencies into a mutually beneficial partnership.  Some of these agencies will come and go, but some will be strong, permanent partners.  Each partner agency, including your own, should be contributing to the efforts of the group – not only with ideas, but with people to serve as controllers, evaluators, planning team members, etc., physical resources suitable for whatever types of exercises you conduct, and perhaps even funding.

In March of 2008, I founded and co-chaired the New York State Exercise Coordination Committee, composed of several state agencies, departments, authorities, and the Red Cross.  Meeting regularly and communicating often, we were able to pool our resources not only for each individual exercise, but for exercise program management as a whole throughout New York State.  We formulated consistent policies and practices, allocated Homeland Security funds state-wide for exercises and corrective actions, and developed and delivered exercise-related workshops and training courses.  We became the core group for the Training & Exercise Planning Workshop (more on this in the next part) and applied for and coordinated funding requests to FEMA for the Regional Exercise Support Program (RESP), which provided contractor resources to state and local exercise initiatives.  We were not only able to help each other, but we were able to benefit the state as a whole.  This model can be applied to other states; county and local governments; and consortia of public, private, and not for profit groups.

Keep in mind that the HSEEP cycle is just that, a cycle.  You will constantly be revisiting each of these steps – sometimes out-of-order – including determining needs and sourcing of resources.

HSEEP Cycle

HSEEP Cycle

What resources do you think you will need to manage your program?

Be on the lookout for Managing an Exercise Program – Part 4: Conducting an Annual Training & Exercise Planning Workshop.