Working the Bugaboo Fire

The biggest wildfire season in Florida for headline-inducing drama was the 1998 season, when the whole state almost burned down, and we had every other disaster except volcanoes and locusts. The Bugaboo fire didn’t hit the headlines like the others but was personally the most dramatic fire that I ever worked from the State EOC.

Florida Division of Forestry firefighters working a wildfire in Florida in 1998.

The Bugaboo fire reached out and touched me at about 9 PM the evening of May 10, 2007. I was sipping on a Scotch at the bar of the American Legion in Tallahassee when the state issued cell phone on my hip started ringing. We had just finished the monthly members meeting and I was having a drink with my friends before heading home.

I put the phone to my ear and gave my standard greeting. “Mike Whitehead.”

I recognized the voice on the other end of the phone as Amy Godsey, the State Meteorologist. The background noise indicated that she was calling from the State Emergency Operations Center.

“Dave Halstead wants you to come to the State EOC,” Amy said. Dave Halstead was the State Emergency Response Team Chief, or the man who ran the EOC during a disaster.

“What’s going on?”

“The Bugaboo fire is blowing up.”

“OK,” I said. “Tell him I’ll be there in about 20 minutes.”

The Bugaboo fire was born on Bugaboo Island, deep in the Okefenokee Swamp in southern Georgia. The fire crept south, following the National Forest, and moved into Florida. Much of what I knew about wildfires and the combating of such conflagrations I had learned from Jim Karels. Jim worked for the Division of Forestry in the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and by 2007 had risen to be Director of the Division. Later on Jim became the Team Lead of the Yarnell Hill Fire Serious Accident Investigation. The Yarnell Hill Fire was a wildfire near Yarnell, Arizona, ignited by lightning on June 28, 2013. On June 30, it overran and killed 19 City of Prescott firefighters, members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots.

In one of many conversations that I had with Jim he explained the arcane art and science of “fire behavior.”  And how there was a difference between fighting wildfires in the Western United States and in Florida. The pine trees and scrub palmetto in the Florida forests, he explained, provided considerably more fuel per acre than the grasslands out West.

I parked my car in front of the Sadowski Building, swiped my badge at the reader, heard the audible click and then entered the State EOC through the door under the archway connecting the two buildings. On the drive over I wondered why, for the first time in my career, I’d been summoned to the State EOC to work a wildfire at night. I’d worked fires during the day. And I’m not an expert on fire behavior but seem to remember Jim telling me that, at least in Florida, the wildfires would rage during the day but “lie down” at night.

I’d also been known to say, if not in presentations then in private conversations, that we didn’t do mass care at night. And I mean by “we” I mean those of us working mass care from the State EOC. Obviously, the Red Cross worked shelters and multi-family fires at night but there wasn’t a lot of mass care coordination that happened at night. People went to bed, got up the next morning and worked out the problems.

And another thing: at the State EOC we never did anything that had to do with mass care immediately. Most of the time when somebody wanted something (a truck of water or ice) that was sitting on hand at the Logistics Staging Area then we would enter the request and they got it the next day. If we didn’t have it already we had to get it from FEMA or, as a last resort, try and get the State to buy it. In any event, that would take days to make the request and then more days to get the product trucked in and delivered to whoever needed it. And whoever needed it would be most unhappy, because when they made the request their expectation on delivery was in minutes, not days.

The Big Room at the other end of the building contained about 30 men and women in various stages of activity. Most of the people I knew well. Jim Karels was there. Carla Boyce, who later went on to work for FEMA was there. Roy Dunn, who had worked the 2004 and 2005 hurricane season with me, and who also went on to work for FEMA, was also there.

A low-pressure system off Jacksonville had intensified and generated a steady wind out of the northeast. That meant that during the evening of May 10 the fire didn’t “lie down.” The wind from the low-pressure system disrupted this pattern, stoking the fire with oxygen and driving it toward the southwest. As I walked into the room several people verbally transmitted the situation to me.

“… there’s a wall of fire twenty miles wide and 200 feet high heading for Lake City…”

“… all the fire fighters can do in this situation is get out of the way…”

“… the State Fire Marshall is rounding up all structural fire fighters they can and sending them to the North edge of the city to make a last stand…”

I can’t remember if it was Dave Halstead, or Amy Godsey, or Carla Boyce, or Roy Dunn,  who told me the reason that I had been summoned to the State EOC at 9 AM on a Thursday night: “We think that we’re going to have to evacuate Lake City. We need you to open up some shelters.”

 A picture of me briefing the State EOC in 2006. Dave Halstead (r) is walking behind me.

Lake City is the Seat for Colombia County and sits astride the intersection of Interstates 75 & 10 about an hour West of Jacksonville. I had visited the county and city many times, mostly gazing at the scenery through a car window on trips from Tallahassee to Gainesville, Winter Park or Jacksonville. Sometimes we would stop there for a rest break or to grab a sandwich.

Now they were telling me that they were afraid that Lake City was going to burn down. And they wanted me to help them do something about it.

I had now been the State Mass Care Coordinator for over 7 years. As I liked to say in presentations, I had worked 8 hurricanes in 16 months and 4 in six weeks, and I’d have to be pretty damn stupid not to figure out what I was supposed to be doing by the 3^rd or 4^th hurricane.

But did they just say that Lake City is going to burn down? Lake City?

I have a vivid memory of this moment. I was standing in the middle of the EOC. They hadn’t even let me get to my workstation. As I was digesting this message I looked up and saw 6 or 8 people in a semi-circle around me, all with an air of expectation.

I realized that they’ve been waiting for me to arrive and solve this problem. And their expectations were not of days, or hours or even minutes, but right then. Lake City was fixing to burn down, and Mike Whitehead needed to deliver a shelter plan for the inhabitants. Immediately.

My problem was that not only did I not have a plan, I had never envisioned the possibility of this event ever occurring.

I needed a map. The EOC had large (8 feet tall by 6 feet wide) maps positioned on the walls so that one was always nearby. I walked over to the nearest map, my entourage following me. In 2004, during the response to Hurricane Ivan, a picture flashed up on one of the 5 giant screens in the EOC showing that a portion of the Interstate 10 bridge had dropped into Pensacola Bay, and I had walked over to the same map, wondering how we were going to get supplies into Pensacola.

Someone asked me, ”Should we call the Red Cross?”

“No,” I replied immediately. “We’re the State. We can’t call the Red Cross to open a shelter. A County has to call them and request them to open a shelter.”

I stared at the map. Which County? I followed Interstate 75 on the map south from Lake City to the next big city: Gainesville. Alachua County.

I turned to Roy Dunn, standing beside me. “Call Alachua County and ask them to open up a shelter.”

Then I called Karen Hagan, our Red Cross State Liaison, told her what was happening, and asked her to come into the EOC.

The Red Cross got the shelter open. The State Fire Marshall staged every available structural firefighter they could contact on the north side of Lake City. And about 1 AM we got word in the State EOC that the wind had stopped, and the Bugaboo fire had decided to go to bed after all. And so did we.

Shelter reporting

After 15 years as a State Mass Care Coordinator there is no topic more likely to launch me into an intense argumentative state than shelter reporting. Even as I write now I must pause frequently and take deep breaths. I was wondering why I haven’t written about it before and my emotional reaction at even reading the topic makes me understand why. I know from personal experience that many other mass care practitioners feel the same way.

Shelter reporting during disasters is the process of identifying which facilities are open to host survivors who need “a safe, secure and accessible place” to spend the night and tallying the number of persons who are in each facility. In many disasters no shelters are opened and the shelter population is zero. During the evacuation for Hurricane Frances in 2004 120,000 persons were in 384 shelters in 56 counties, a Florida record that still stands.

So why all the trauma and angst over a simple little report? Because it’s not simple and it’s not little and most of the time the report is all screwed up.

When I started as the Mass Care Coordinator in Florida in November 1999 the Division of Emergency Management had a Lotus Notes database that was the platform for all the emergency messages entered by the State Emergency Response Team and the counties. The Lotus Notes platform had a separate database used for shelter reporting. All 67 counties in the state submitted their identified shelters to the state electronically and the 67 separate files were poured into this database.

One of my jobs during a disaster was to go into the database and open the shelters that were open, enter in the populations and close the shelters that were closed. This was a lot harder that it sounds.

Like everything else in my Mass Care Coordinator job there wasn’t a manual handy entitled “Shelter Reporting” that I could us as a reference. So we came up with a system and then improved upon that system through trial and error.

There were lots of errors.

In my mass care brilliance and urge to simplify complex problems I decided that the simple solution was to tell all 67 counties the information that we needed and then stand back and wait for them to comply. You can imagine the results. I wrote up the shelter reporting instructions to the counties on a one page document and developed state ESF6 procedures that when a disaster started we were to fax (FAX!!!) the document to each of the affected counties. I also put in the procedure that if the counties didn’t respond to our fax then we were to call them and give them a gentle nudge.

“Hello, this is Mike Whitehead up at the State EOC. Can I talk to whoever does your shelter reporting? Did you get our fax? No?”

We were fortunate when we started that the disasters didn’t involve a lot of counties. But the process was laborious, labor intensive and had to be repeated. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

We were also fortunate that the Lotus Notes database was easy to use. I could take the average state worker that volunteered to come in and help us during activations and in five minutes show them how to access the database and update the populations. Then I would give them the list of counties they were responsible for, a phone, a chair and a computer and step away with confidence that the job would get done.

I also learned that the constituency for shelter numbers during a disaster was wide and deep. As I accumulated days in the EOC as a mass care coordinator I could not help but notice that I would be questioned about the shelter count by one or more persons within 5 minutes of my arrival in the morning at the EOC. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

I’m not saying that the report isn’t necessary. Over the years I have come to believe in the importance of accurate shelter reporting. The number of shelters and the populations within those shelters is the single, best indicator of the level of distress that the particular jurisdiction is enduring from the disaster.

Governor Bush, in a way, made my shelter reporting problem both harder and easier by mandating that the list of open shelters in the Lotus Notes database be placed on a web site for everyone on the Internet to see. Then when I walked into the EOC I could respond to everyone’s shelter question by saying, “Go look on the website.”

In fact, I stood before packed EOCs and showed them on the gigantic screen behind me the button that would take them to the shelter count webpage.

“No one should ever have to ask me what the shelter count is,” I would intone in my most firm, this-is-the-real-truth voice. “The best information we have is up there on the web site. Go to the site and look it up.”

Of course, for the rest of the day, friends and strangers alike would stop me as I strolled through the EOC and ask, “What’s the shelter count?”

During the six (long) weeks of the 2004 hurricane season, in addition to all the other problems that I had, my time was consumed by the shelter reporting issue. My weary answer of “Go look on the website” to the never ending queries that greeted me EVERY SINGLE DAY of the 42 day 2004 hurricane season was rewarded with the response. “I did. But are those numbers right?”

So. We had enough problems getting the simple facts straight and now you want to bring this into the mix? What is good? What is bad? What is right? What is wrong? What do I look like? A philosophy teacher?

Pause in writing to take more deep breaths.

Patience, grasshopper. Does anyone ever really step into the same river twice? The water that I step into today is different than the water I stepped into yesterday.

Governor’s aides aren’t into philosophy. They don’t understand why the shelter number submitted to them this morning is different than the shelter number handed to them for the Governor’s noon hurricane briefing at the EOC. Or why the shelter number in the Red Cross news release is different than either of the numbers previously submitted to the Guv.

Sometime during the 2004 hurricane season (or it may have been the 2005 season, it all starts to blur together now) I was summoned from my critical mass care coordination duties on the EOC floor to another room in the building to appear before Governor Bush himself. This was the only time that I was asked to speak to the Governor on any topic, emergency management or otherwise. I was accompanied on this mission by my friend Ray Runo from the Department of Health. Ray was responsible for gathering the information on the special needs shelters, which he submitted daily to the ESF6 staff, who entered the information into the Lotus Notes database.

The Governor was very polite. He wanted to know why the shelter numbers were in conflict. This was a very reasonable question and Ray and I gave very reasonable answers. I told him that the database gave the best information that we had at the time and as soon as we got better information we updated the database.

“So what do I have to do to see the current shelter count?” Jeb asked me.

“The shelter count is available to everyone on our website,” I replied.

“Really? I didn’t know I could get this on a website.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied. “You ordered that this was to be done and we did it.”

Maybe he forgot. Governors are busy men and make lots of decisions. Anyway, he was happy and we were happy and Ray and I returned to our more pressing duties.

The net result was that after 42 days of intense shelter reporting practice we were able to work the kinks out of the system and were able to claim that Florida had the best shelter reporting of all the disasters in the history of humanity. Or words to that effect.

A big breakthrough came when (I’m not sure exactly where in the chronology this happened) we discovered that the Red Cross was also collecting shelter numbers for the shelters they operated (the great majority) on a database operated at the Capital Area Chapter right there in Tallahassee. Duh. Chris Floyd, the Emergency Services Director for the Chapter, gave us access to his website (Tallytown.com, I still remember that) and we manually transferred the Red Cross data into our Lotus Notes database.

Yes, that was a duplication of effort by much easier than faxing all the counties and calling them when they didn’t respond.

In 2006, after we had worked through much toil and travail to develop a serviceable and easy to operate real-time shelter reporting system, Florida decided that they were going to discontinue the Lotus Notes database and move to a different system. Good grief, said Charlie Brown.

That was about the time that I heard about the National Shelter System. And how I came to hear about the OTHER National Shelter System. How can the nation have two National Shelter Systems? Wouldn’t that cause confusion? Wouldn’t that make the already difficult job of coming up with one, correct shelter population count for a disaster even more difficult?

Well, that’s what happened.

I have been reminded (just last week, in fact) of how sensitive this topic is to many people. In fact, we have a saying in the national mass care community: do not discuss religion, politics or the National Shelter System(s) at the dinner table. (Actually, I’m not sure if we actually have this saying but if we don’t, we should.)

Once upon a time, in the dark days after Hurricane Katrina, the American Red Cross created a National Shelter System so that the nation would never again have the problem of not knowing how many people were being sheltered across this great land. Money was invested to create a web-based software system that could be utilized by Red Cross staff and volunteers across the nation.

After the Red Cross system was created, deployed and in use FEMA decided to spend money to create a web based system to track how many people were being sheltered across this great land. FEMA decided to call this system the National Shelter System.

I only bring this up because in 2007 I was searching to replace our beloved, battle-tested and easy-to-use Lotus Notes system that the State was going to take away from us. The way I saw it, we had 3 choices: 1) Buy a new system, 2) use the Red Cross NSS, or 3) use the FEMA NSS.

After investigation I came up with the following information: 1) the state had little if any money to spend on shelter databases, 2) the Red Cross system was deployed and in use by staff and volunteers across the nation, 3) the FEMA NSS was still in development, housed within the armor plated Department of Homeland Security firewall and had formidable login and password requirements.

And so it came to pass in 2008 that my friend Omar Abou-Samra from Red Cross National Headquarters and I got down to figuring out how the State of Florida would adopt the Red Cross NSS as our shelter system of record. The only issue appeared to be our requirement that our open shelters be posted on a website.

The lawyers got involved (always a bad sign) but they drafted a disclaimer for us to put on our site. With that our Information Technology people took a data feed from the Red Cross NSS and put it on our website. This happened in July 2008 just in time for us to utilize it for the shelters that were opened across the state as a result of Tropical Storm Fay. This is the system that the state of Florida still uses today.

I tell this story to show everyone that shelter reporting can be done right. The reason that it’s done so well now in Florida is that we had an inordinate amount of time in 2004 and 2005 to keep practicing until we got it right. The rest of the nation shouldn't have to endure the same ordeals that we did in order to get a simple, little report right..

Right now at Red Cross Headquarters we are finalizing the new Shelter Standards and Procedures doctrine. A significant amount of effort has gone into making sure that we get the shelter reporting procedures right. I’ve seen what we’ve done so far and it looks pretty good.

That means that there’s hope.

How to start a disaster response

Last year I heard a series of presentations from some first responders on the April 17, 2013 West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion. The blast killed 11 firefighters at the scene and injured 200 of the 2,800 inhabitants of the town. The presenters, from the police, fire and emergency medical disciplines, assumed leadership positions when they arrived on scene and described the actions that they took at the first large disaster of their lives. The week of December 7-11 the American Red Cross assembled a team of 18 people in Denver, Colorado to draft a reference guide for local Red Cross employees and volunteers to use when they have to respond, as those men did in West, Texas, to the first large disaster of their lives.

When FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate was a State Director in Florida I heard him define the difference between an emergency and a disaster. At most emergencies, like a house fire or an automobile accident, the first responders outnumber the survivors. When an event happens, and the survivors outnumber the responders, then you have a disaster. Across the nation the Red Cross responds to emergencies every day.  In 2015, Red Cross disaster workers responded to 176 large U.S. disasters – more than each of the past three years.

Not everyone with the responsibility to recognize and react to a growing disaster has the benefit of having done it before. The first responders in West, Texas didn’t, and many of the Red Cross employees and volunteers on the ground during those 176 disasters didn’t either.

I knew and had served on disasters with a good number of the Team that assembled in the Drury Hotel in Denver. Before we could start we had to define the problem that we were addressing, the solution to the problem and the intended audience for whatever document we ended up producing. As was to be expected from such a diverse and experienced group, we had significant disagreements. Fortunately, we were joined by some experienced facilitators who had ample experience corralling ornery and rambunctious groups like us.

This wall was used by the Team to determine the target audience for our Field Operations Guide.

This week in Denver was one of the highlights of my mass care career and I felt fortunate to have been in the room with such a knowledgeable and dedicated group of mass care professionals. In particular, I learned a lot. I learned a lot about how to establish and operate a Red Cross Disaster Relief Operation. The most rewarding part of the week was that I was able to use my hard earned knowledge and experience to contribute to the effort that we were all making.

After five long days, working in groups, we were able to assemble a rough draft of over 100 pages. The target audience for this Field Operations Guide is the Regional Disaster Officer and Disaster Program Manager at the front line of the Red Cross disaster response hierarchy. The Guide is a series of checklists and job aids by function: Job Director, Operations, Planning, Logistics, Finance and External Relations. It’s a good product and we were all pleased with the result.

The draft has now been turned over to the doctrine staff at Red Cross National Headquarters, who will use their superior command of the English language to transform our scribblings into readable prose, with all the periods and commas in the right place. Once they have finished their magic the draft will go out to a wider audience for comment. The intent is to get this product completed and out to the field by spring.

If that sounds ambitious, it is. But we think that we can get it done.

Toward a catastrophic mass care response capability

I don't normally write controversial blog posts but this one will generate disagreement among my friends in the mass care community.

I want to talk about what we, as a nation, have to do to build a catastrophic mass care response capability. The two biggest disasters that we had in the last decade, Katrina and Sandy, revealed some significant mass care response issues that I don't think have been adequately addressed.

Since I'm not writing a book (yet) on catastrophic mass care response I'm going to focus on one issue in this response: Operational Coordination of Mass Care Services. "Operational Coordination" is the technical term for the capability to manage the resources brought into the disaster area. 

In a large disaster these resources would require thousands of 53' trailers. When the emergency managers of the affected jurisdictions start screaming for everything in the world and "the world" shows up, you need a lot of people on hand to tell the trucks where to go.

In a gross oversimplification (for clarity) of operational coordination during emergencies, everyone is either working in a multi-agency coordination system (i.e. an emergency operations center) or an incident command. A county EOC would acquire resources for one or more incident commands. When I helped coordinate mass care at the State EOC in Florida we acquired resources (personnel. equipment, teams and supplies) for county EOCs, state incident commands or voluntary agency incident commands (like the Salvation Army or Red Cross).

The Maryland State Emergency Operations Center during the response to Hurricane Sandy.

 When the Category 5 hurricane hits Miami (and it will) the state mass care team will have to decide what mass care resources are required (and in what quantities) and who will provide these resources, whether it be local, state, federal, voluntary agency or private sector. The process for achieving this task requires complex coordination. To be effective the mass care team needs a common understanding of the process and detailed, rehearsed procedures.

During the National Mass Care Exercises we conducted in Tallahassee from 2012-14 and in Texas in 2015 we worked to develop and rehearse this process. We, the national mass care community, are going to continue this process during the 2016 National Mass Care Exercise in Kansas City.

So we're working on fixing the problem of identifying mass care resources by type, kind and quantity and deploying them into the disaster area. But once we've ACQUIRED these resources in a catastrophic event the question becomes who is going to EMPLOY those resources?

The state mass care team isn't going to employ them. The counties and municipalities will be overwhelmed, and their EOCs will be focused on what they always are focused on: police, fire, medical and debris removal. In some hurricane prone states the locals and/or states establish evacuation shelters (at times in coordination with the Red Cross). But the post-event short term shelters are almost always managed by the Red Cross.

FEMA doesn't have a mass care capability except in certain narrow circumstances (see Federal Mass Care Resource Coordination). And no, providing truckloads of bottled water and shelf stable meals is not mass care but logistics. FEMA does logistics very well.

Mass Care is more than evacuation shelters and bottled water.The capabilities to feed hot meals in the community, shelter for weeks, distribute emergency supplies and help reunify families live almost exclusively within the voluntary agencies. And there are only three mass care voluntary agencies able to mobilize national resources to bring a significant mass care capability to bear in a catastrophic event: the Southern Baptists, the Salvation Army and the American Red Cross.

In the mass care arena (these agencies also bring significant recovery resources) the Baptists have an enormous national capability in field kitchens while the Salvation Army has significant feeding capabilities with their canteens and field kitchens. The Red Cross Disaster Relief Operation is the only mass care "incident command" that acquires and employs resources in the four mass care activity areas: feeding, sheltering, distribution of relief supplies and reunification.

The American Red Cross Disaster Relief Operation in Manhattan during the response to Hurricane Sandy.

The cheapest investment, as a nation, that we can make in our catastrophic mass care response capability is to improve the ability of the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Organization to manage the enormous amount of mass care resources that must be employed in a large scale event. There. I said it.

In discussions that I've had with individuals that I know and respect my suggestion provokes an emotional reaction. 

"That won't work. The Red Cross can't manage mass care in a catastrophic event."

And I reply: "What are the other choices? FEMA? The Counties? The State?"

A staggering quantity of mass care resources will be requested and will flow into south Florida (or whatever the disaster area happens to be) after a catastrophic hurricane. They must be managed and employed in a coherent fashion. 

The Red Cross has the capability to employ these resources but right now lacks the CAPACITY to do so in such a large event. In my view the solution is to take those actions necessary to increase the capacity of the Disaster Relief Operation to manage large events.

And FEMA has to help the Red Cross to do this.

Once upon a time ... a mass care story

Once upon a time, in the land of hurricanes, King Craig Fugate brought together all the emergency managers and all  the voluntary agencies and the private sector and even some Femites to devise a plan to save the kingdom from the evil Big One that they all knew would some day threaten their very existence. Just as all good stories have a villain, so must all good emergency plans have a scenario. The scenario offered up was called Hurricane Ono, a Category 5 hurricane that struck southeast Florida, rampaged across the peninsula to Tampa, renewed strength in the Gulf and hit the state again in the Panhandle. As an added prize, the scenario included a failure of the Herbert Hoover dike around Lake Okeechobee, with the total inundation of the adjacent communities.

The Evil Stepmother who first presented this scenario to the assembled State Emergency Response Team (SERT) in Tallahassee in 2007 was Carla Boyce, at that time the SERT's Plans Chief (and now an Important Person at FEMA Headquarters). Her presentation had a profound affect on me. In one way or the other most of my thoughts and actions in emergency management and mass care since that moment have been directed toward preparing for such an event.

We worked on the plan for two years. We brought in some smart people from the Red Cross, Salvation Army and the Southern Baptists with hard earned experience and I learned a lot of mass care from them. We spent a lot of time trying to answer some pretty basic questions. How many meals per day would we need to produce and distribute? Who would provide them? How many shelter teams would we need? Where would they come from?

I remember thinking that the mass care community has been doing this for a long time. Why haven't they come up with a standard process to make these kinds of calculations? I mean, we were coming up with astronomical meal and shelter requirements. How do we know these numbers are right? We didn't, and still don't. Plus, I had a nagging problem that wasn't solved in the plan. When you ask for the WORLD and the WORLD shows up, you're going to need a helluva lot of people to tell all those trucks where to go.

We tested our plan, using the Hurricane Ono scenario, during the May 2009 State Hurricane Suiter Exercise. This was the last State Exercise for King Craig. He had been nominated, but not yet confirmed, as the new Director of FEMA during the time of the exercise. For some reason we had massive, and unprecedented, participation from FEMA Region 4 during that exercise.

Hurricane Ike, which had struck Texas in September of 2008, had already had an influence on the plan and the 2009 exercise. The disaster feeding in Texas during Ike, according to multiple, conflicting reports, had been ugly. I had a number of long conversations with FEMA, state and voluntary agency participants with first hand knowledge of the events. The root cause of the problem was a lack of coordination.

I was determined to do whatever I could to make sure that such a problem did not happen in Florida. In January 2009 I emailed Lynn Crabb, at that time the lead for Mass Care at Red Cross Headquarters, that we needed to get the mass care voluntary agencies together with FEMA and the states (well, at LEAST Florida) and do a "Vulcan mind meld" to resolve this problem. Mickey Caison, the disaster lead for the Southern Baptists, had the same idea and was in a better position to do something about it.

At Mickey's behest, FEMA Headquarters Mass Care assembled a team of subject matter experts from multiple stakeholders on a series of conference calls with the objective of creating a Multi-Agency Feeding Plan Template. I was fortunate to be a part of these conference calls, which ultimately grew to over 40 participants. This document was the first big step toward creating some kind of state mass care doctrine.

Before the Feeding Plan Template was even finished I drafted a State of Florida Multi-Agency Feeding Plan and sent it out to all of our stakeholders for comments. What was significant about this plan was that we included the private sector food suppliers (Sysco & US Foods) in the planning process. As a result, and as was my intention, Florida published the first Multi-Agency Feeding Plan in the nation.

I rushed to get the plan completed because I wanted to test the plan during the 2009 Hurricane Suiter Exercise. There was just one problem. Both the Feeding Plan Template and the State Feeding Plan called for the creation, under specified circumstances, of a Multi-Agency Feeding Task Force (FTF). What was a FTF supposed to do? The Plan wasn't real clear about that. Some kind of multi-agency coordination involving feeding. We think.

So I decided that we were going to establish a FTF during the 2009 Hurricane Suiter Exercise. I was able to round up a bunch of smart guys who knew a lot about their little piece of disaster feeding and I put them all in a room on the third floor of the building next door to the EOC during the exercise. I got Rick Hinrichs from the San Diego Chapter of the Red Cross, and Fritz Wilson from the Florida Baptists, and Kevin Smith from the Florida Division of the Salvation Army, among others. The hardest part was to get Sysco and US Foods to agree to be in the same room together. They eyed each other during the exercise until they realized that we could generate more business than either one could handle.

We all learned a lot about how we should and shouldn't coordinate mass care at a state EOC during the 2009 Hurricane Suiter Exercise. I learned that no matter how smart I thought I was, that no matter how much knowledge and experience that I had coordinating mass care at the state level, and no matter how hard I was prepared to work at getting my job done right, I couldn't be in three different critical EOC meetings at the same time. And we learned that a feeding task force was a good idea but wouldn't be effective unless it had an operational procedure that defined internal TF roles, tasks and processes.

I had participated in a dozen state hurricane exercises and I had learned more in the 2009 exercise than I had in all the other exercises put together. I was eager to do it again in 2010. But the Deepwater Horizon disaster blew the 2010 exercise out of the water and the EOC Continuity of Operations exercise scheduled for 2010 was rescheduled for 2011. In the Fall of 2011 I started thinking about what kind of mass care exercise we needed to have in 2012.

Another big thing that I learned from the 2009 exercise was that when the Big One hit Florida we would need a lot of help in the EOC. And we couldn't fill the gap by grabbing state workers off the street and thrusting them in the EOC in half-day increments like we did in 2004-2005. We needed people who knew mass care and were able to step into an EOC and be effective with some preliminary training.

Where could we get these kind of people? The voluntary agencies, like the Red Cross, didn't train their people to perform these roles. Neither did the Salvation Army. There were few, if any, State Mass Care Coordinators out there. And those that had the experience were on the hurricane prone coastal states and not likely candidates to be released to come help me during hurricane season.

The big disaster event in 2011 was Tropical Storm Irene. I benefited from an EMAC deployment to New Jersey during Irene. When I returned to work I developed a Power Point presentation saying that Florida was going to hold a National Mass Care Exercise in Tallahassee in conjunction with the State Hurricane Exercise in May 2012. I emailed this presentation to everyone I knew in the national mass care community and said that anyone willing to pay their way to Tallahassee was welcome to play in my sandbox.

But who I really wanted to come to the Exercise were my state counterparts and I knew that they wouldn't be lining up to come because they had no money. I contacted Waddy Gonzalez, the head of FEMA Mass Care, and explained how I was doing him a BIG FAVOR by putting on this National Mass Care Exercise, and was helping him do his job of increasing mass care capability in the states. All he had to do was find the money to pay for some state people to come to the exercise. Waddy, to his great credit, came up with the money for 5 state people to attend.

Thus we were able to get the participation of Wendy Stewart from Georgia, Daniel Porth from Arizona, Dennis Dura from New Jersey, Dante Glinecki from Missouri and Ed Lyons from Arkansas. Ultimately we were able to get 64 participants from 26 federal, state, nongovernmental, private sector and academic agencies. Arguably, this was the largest mass care exercise ever conducted in the nation.

I had no budget and no staff available to make this happen. Fortunately, I had lots of friends in the mass care community who saw the inherent benefits to the nation of the exercise and agreed to help. Jono Anzalone with FEMA Region VII (now with the Red Cross) volunteered to be the Lead Controller for the Exercise and offered Cory Fast and Kam Kennedy from his staff to help with the project. Ryan Logan, the Mass Care Lead for FEMA Region IV (also now with the Red Cross) pitched in to help with the planning for the exercise. More people, too many to name here (I'll forget somebody and be in trouble) were instrumental in the success of the exercise.

As more and more people started saying that they were coming I started to get worried. How was I going to productively utilize all these people? And a bigger problem, where was I going to put them all? They wouldn't fit in the EOC.

Based on feedback from the 2009 exercise we updated the State Feeding Plan and drafted a Feeding Task Force (FTF) Standard Operating Guide (SOG). One of our objectives for the 2012 exercise was to test the new plan and to establish a Feeding TF to test the new SOG. So why not set up a Sheltering TF? And as the number of participants grew higher we added on a Distribution of Relief Supplies TF. And I had to scramble with the Florida Division of Emergency Management Exercise people to find rooms for these TFs within easy walking distance of the State EOC. In the end, this was good preparation for us because we would need to do the same thing if the Big One were ever to happen.

The 2012 Hurricane Gispert Exercise was a success, but not because we did everything perfectly. We allocated a lot of resources to capturing the lessons we were learning and we had a long list of things that we screwed up. Some of the horde of people who arrived were put to work as Evaluators and Kam Kennedy was assigned to be in charge of Documentation. To that end, we had Hot Wash meetings at the end of each day and Kam made everyone do daily written critiques. All of the information that she collected was put into the After Action Report (AAR).

A significant source of the problems we encountered in the exercise was that what we were trying to do was hard and few participants had the training or the experience to have a clear idea of what we were trying to accomplish. In essence, we were simultaneously trying to create, train and exercise state mass care doctrine to 60 people in 4 days. Doing that is really hard, in case you were wondering.

I was thrilled at what we were able to learn in 4 days. And the best part was that 5 state mass care people were able to take hard earned knowledge and experience back to their states. Dennis Dura, from New Jersey, participated in the exercise and put what he learned to good use 5 months later when Hurricane Sandy struck his state. Furthermore, as a result of the contacts he made at the exercise, he was able to bring Daniel Porth from Arizona to New Jersey for the Sandy response.

Once we got the Exercise AAR completed and posted to the Internet on July 1 I set to work translating the lessons learned into new state plans and procedures. The State of Florida does not do sheltering but supports county and municipality shelter operations. The state has never had a Multi-Agency Shelter Support  Plan but the myriad issues with functional needs support in general population shelters and the complex problems with transitioning shelter survivors to appropriate housing made it seem like a good idea at the time.  The New Shelter Support Plan, of course, would establish criteria for the activation of a Shelter Task Force. Sheltering wasn't really an area of my expertise. So I had to pester some smart people who knew what they were talking about, like Rick Schofield of the Red Cross, in order to get the document written.

The 2012 Exercise revealed that a Shelter TF without a Shelter Plan or an operational procedure was about as much good as a beached whale. So to get ready for the 2013 Exercise we had to write (and coordinate) a Shelter Support Plan, a Shelter TF operational procedure, a revised ESF 6 operational procedure, and updates to the Feeding Plan and Feeding TF operational procedure. I had a lot of work to do.

As usual, real life gets in the way of our dreams. In June we had Tropical Storm Debby and in August Tropical Storm Issac. Then I deployed in response to Sandy for 3 weeks in November. As a consequence we didn't complete the updates and rewrites of all the plans and procedures until April, a month before the exercise.

Ahh, the exercise. I had to round up the usual suspects again to help me put on this big exercise for which I still had no staff or budget. The grim reality that I faced was of my two biggest partners, the Red Cross was in the middle of re-engineering and FEMA was battling the Sequester. But we got it done.

We got state mass care people from big states and little states from all corners of the country: Larry Shine from Texas, Tracy McBroom from California (now with the Red Cross), Sue Bush from Washington and Dwayne Hubert from Maine. The Sequester cut down on the number of Femites in attendance but we had the same wide representation from agencies representing the Whole of the National Mass Care Community. We learned a lot and gave a lot of people some good training. Once again, Kam Kennedy helped document the lessons learned that were included in the 2013 National Mass Care Exercise After Action Report.

Now, once again, I am updating plans and procedures to reflect what we learned. We are going to hold the Exercise in Tallahassee one more time in 2014 but are looking to give somebody else an opportunity to shine (and do some of the work). California has shown interest in hosting the Exercise in 2015 and Texas in 2016.

But, and to the point of this epistle, to get where we need to be we need to implement the National Mass Care Strategy. The Strategy emphasizes the standardization of mass care terminology, procedures and processes. Holding these national exercises allows the mass care community to come together and sort out the process of how we coordinate mass care at the state level. As you can tell from the story that I just related, the process of building a state mass care doctrine didn't start until 2009.

To make these National Mass Care Exercises more effective in building national mass care capability we need to give the participants additional training and preparation before they arrive at the exercise. An unfortunate number of the participants in the 2012 and 2013 exercises looked like High School football players at an NFL game. They had neither the training nor the experience to perform at a high level in that environment. And this wasn't their fault. The agencies involved need to do better at building the capability to provide the right people with the right skills.

The U.S. Army has a course called the Command & General Staff College to prepare senior captains and majors to be staff officers and planners. At the end of the course they select a few of the elite graduates to take additional training in high-level planning. At the end of this extra training these officers are sent out to regular assignments in the Army, a resource to be harvested in need. And when a 4 star general has a need for planners for an important operation, these officers are plucked from whatever job they have and collected at the 4 star's headquarters. They work 20 hours a day for 2 weeks writing and briefing a plan for the 4 star. Then they go back to their regular jobs.

The Army calls these planners Jedi Knights.

The mass care community needs to build their own cadre of mass care Jedi Knights. And the American Red Cross, as the True Leader of mass care in the nation, needs to be the agency to lead the way and set the example in this regard.

The new State Mass Care Coordinator's Course

In August 2004 I had been the Mass Care Coordinator for the State of Florida for over four and a half years but I was in that most dangerous of positions for an emergency manager: I thought I knew how to do my job when I really didn't. In my defense, there was no book or manual or even course that outlined how to coordinate mass care at the state level. FEMA offered a course on Community Mass Care but I had not taken it or even known of its existence. Everyone who knew anything about mass care had learned it from the Red Cross, coming up through the ranks first as a volunteer and then as an Red Cross employee. Some of these people had moved on to jobs in FEMA. I had one of the very few state mass care jobs in the nation but I had never worked or volunteered for the Red Cross.

In August-September 2004 I received Bachelor's, Master's and Doctorate degrees in state mass care in a six week period. My instructors in this intensive training course were named Charlie, Francis, Ivan and Jeanne, plus a series a excellent liaisons that Red Cross National Headquarters had the sense to send to Tallahassee to help me out.

Charlie crossed the state as a hurricane and our State EOC crumbled under the demands of 25 counties screaming for help at the same time. I was also overwhelmed, and remember talking with a land line on one ear, a cell phone on the other, and three people standing behind me waiting to talk. I requested help through the interstate Emergency Management Assistance Compact. I naively thought that there were other state mass care coordinators in the hinterlands ready to come to my aid. No one replied because there weren't any there.

In 2005 Florida was hit with four more storms, and I topped off that experience my spending two weeks in southern Mississippi after Katrina, coordinating the human services response in the six southern counties. Hurricane Wilma was one of the great untold mass care success stories of the last decade. After 8 storms in 16 months we had figured out what we were supposed to do. In January 2006, reflecting on what happened the last two years, I decided that I needed to try and share what I had learned with the other states. This turned out to be much more difficult than I imagined.

Almost five and a half years later we are finally getting there, thanks to some help from some key people in FEMA and the voluntary agencies. I helped a little bit, too. My dream of sharing what I learned in 2004-2005 has finally come true in the form of FEMA's new State Mass Care Coordinator's Planning and Operations Course. We have been working on this course for a year and a half. The pilot was delivered in Atlantic City, New Jersey in early May. We made some revisions based on that experience and are delivering the retooled course here in Tallahassee this week to 30 people from FEMA Region IV states.

The doctrinal foundation for this course comes from two documents: FEMA's Comprehensive Preparedness Guide (CPG) 101, Developing and Maintaining Emergency Operations Plans, and the State of Florida's Mass Care & Emergency Assistance Capability Level Guide (CLG). The Florida CLG was recently adopted by the Florida State Emergency Response Team, making Florida the only state in the nation to have such a document. I encourage other states to look at this document and adapt it for the circumstances of their own state.

The NIMS Mass Care Working Group, of which I am a member and Chairman, consists of national experts on mass care assembled by FEMA for the purpose of resource typing.  "Resource typing is the categorization and description of response resources that are commonly exchanged in disasters through mutual aid agreements." After two and a half years of work our Working Group is about to turn over to FEMA (hopefully for release soon as interim guidance) two documents that categorize commonly used mass care personnel, teams and equipment. In one of these documents is the Job Title and description of a State Mass Care Coordinator. One of the training requirements listed in this Job Title is the State Mass Care Coordinator's Planning & Operations Course.

Hopefully, by the end of the year, the State Mass Care Coordinator job, which hardly existed in the nation six years ago, will have a nationally approved Job Title and description, and a national course to prepare individuals to perform in this position. Having the opportunity to train to perform in an emergency management position is much easier than trying to figure out how to do the job in the middle of a disaster.

I know from personal experience.