1) We did better than last year, which was better than the year before. This shows that we are trainable and there's hope.
Michael Whitehead, State Mass Care Coordinator for Florida, briefing the 2014 National Mass Care Exercise participants on the morning of the 3rd day. |
One of many visual displays on the walls of the Shelter Task Force during the 2014 National Mass Care Exercise. |
4) The organization that we developed in order to coordinate 4 Mass Care Task Forces at once (see chart below) was not effective. I wrote about this organization in my March 2014 blog post. Everything worked except the part about using a Task Force Coordinator to coordinate with the four Task Forces. Larry Shine, the Texas State Mass Care Coordinator, and I tried to figure out how to coordinate the activities of the 4 Task Forces and we got some things right and, for multiple reasons, we got some things wrong.
Getting things wrong in this Exercise is not a crime. We deliberately tried to stretch the horizon of what we knew so that we could learn what did and didn't work. We found out that this organization didn't work but discovered what we think is the solution. What's the solution? See #5 below.
The Feeding Task Force conducting business during the 2014 National Mass Care Exercise |
Identifying and training Mass Care Planners is another matter. I first identified this problem in my October 2013 blog post. The issue is that in smaller disasters (where we are assisting thousands or tens of thousands of survivors) a failure to adequately plan can be overcome by pouring more resources on the problem. In disasters involving hundreds of thousands or even millions of survivors this isn't possible. The physics of time and distance interfere with our lack of planning.
We need people with the skills to project how many #10 cans of green beans, wheel chairs, and clean up kits we will need in 5 days for a population of 5 million impacted by a Category 3 hurricane or a Modified Mercali Intensity of X. We can't train people to perform this function until we agree upon a doctrine. At the 2014 NMCE we advanced the cause in this area and are close to a crude spreadsheet to give us these answers (and by crude I mean better than making up the answers).
The mass care discussions continued on into the evening at the 2014 National Mass Care Exercise |