How to manage 4 Mass Care Task Forces at once

A FEMA friend who works in mass care emailed me recently with her comments about the Mass Care Task Force White Paper. "This is all very interesting," she said, "but none of the states in my Region have the personnel to set up even one of these Task Forces."

I saw from her comment that she had failed to grasp a key tenet of the White Paper. No state has the organic capacity to set up one or even multiple mass care task forces in a large disaster: not even Florida. As the White Paper clearly states on page 3, "Additional staff must be requisitioned prior to a Noticed Event or immediately after a No-Notice Event." And people with the necessary skill sets are only available out-of-state.

Which is why one of the objectives of the National Mass Care Exercise that we are holding in Tallahassee May 19-22, 2014 is to practice bringing in mass care staff from other states and integrating them into our State mass care operation. This year we are bringing to the Exercise mass care practitioners from multiple states, Femites from multiple Regions, and mass care voluntary agency staff from across the nation. Our Goal is to practice and refine the State Mass Care/Emergency Assistance process that I have outlined in a prior blog.

In fact, we have so many people coming we are going to establish 4 mass care task forces for the exercise: Sheltering, Feeding, Distribution of Emergency Supplies and Reunification. A big question for this exercise will be how the State Mass Care Coordinator (that would be me) will be able to coordinate the activities of the 4 Task Forces. As an experiment, we came up with the organization chart below.

This chart is NOT a hierarchy of command but a diagram showing the recommended flow of information (up & down). In modern parlance, the State Mass Care Coordinator only has so much bandwidth. The information flowing to/from the State Mass Care Coordinator must be controlled so that he/she doesn't become overwhelmed.

When we expanded to 4 task forces we created a Mass Care Task Force Coordinator position. Yes, we have that power. This new position will manage the flow of information between the SMCC and the 4 Task Force Leaders. We will have to see how it works.

As I said when I first showed this chart to the planning team: At the end of the exercise we will be able to say: "Well, at least we now know THAT way doesn't work."

FEMA releases Mass Care Resource Typing documents for public comment

I have written before about my part time job as the Chairman of the NIMS Mass Care Working Group and our efforts to classify and define mass care resources (equipment, personnel and teams) according to the capability that they can deliver (See Creating National Standards for Mass Care Resources). Since November 2008 our Working Group has struggled to put together documentds for FEMA to approve and disseminate to the nation. This classification process is called "Resource Typing."

For reasons that I don't want to get into our Working Group has been unable to share these documents with anyone outside FEMA. Today, FEMA released the documents for public comment. (They can be found at this link, http://www.fema.gov/national-incident-management-system/national-incident-management-system-alert-01-12). With that single act, the FEMA Administrator increased mass care capability in the nation by one notch, or even two. The Mass Care Community can raise the mass care capability bar a few more notches by reading the documents and then spreading word of their existence throughout the Community.

The Resource Typing documents are an excellent source of information on mass care operations for the nation. One document types mass care equipment (like Field Kitchens) and teams (like Shelter Management Teams). Another document types Job Titles and Position Qualifications (like State Mass Care Coordinator - my personal favorite - and Shelter Manager).  Additional documents are still in the hopper awaiting approval and hopefully they will be released from captivity soon.

I am very proud of our Working Group and the products that we were able to produce and deliver to the nation. These documents are now out for Public Comment. Comment on them.

What I learned from TS Debby

My friend Chuck Hagan, Logistics Chief for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, says that if you can still count the number of disasters you've worked, then you haven't been in the business that long. With the aid of the National Hurricane Center website, I figured out that Tropical Storm Debby was the 34th storm that I have worked. Of those 34 storms, 19 were Tropical Storms and 15 were hurricanes. I guess that means that 17 years in the disaster business isn't that long.

I learn something from every disaster and I learned a lot from Debby. What is disturbing to me is that I keep relearning the same lessons. You can't say that it's "just" a tropical storm or "just" a category 1 hurricane. This is where my experience screws me up, where I remember all those tropical storms and category 1 hurricanes that unrolled uneventfully while I sat bored in the state EOC. Every storm is unique. Every disaster is different in some important way.

Every storm is unique. Every disaster is different. We should put those phrases on a poster and post them in every EOC.

Let's go back to fundamental meteorology (I completed 2 1/2 days of meteorology classes at the Governor's Hurricane Conference in May. I guess I didn't listen well).  Tropical cyclones generate four principal threats: surge, wind, tornadoes and flooding. The Saffir-Simpson Category of a storm categorizes the hazard from only one of the threats: wind. For each storm we also need to analyze the potential for damage from surge, tornadoes and flooding.

This was the rainfall forecast we received in the State EOC from the State Meteorologist on Monday afternoon, June 25th: "Locally heavy rainfall of potentially up to 6-12 inches over North Florida, 4-8 inches in Central Florida, and 3-5 inches across South Florida through the next few days will lead to flooding of some areas. Isolated storm total amounts may reach up to 25 inches in North Florida."

This was two sentences in a very complete and detailed report (Note: I am not blaming the meteorologist). The main focus, as with all tropical systems, was on the track and the potential for surge. I wasn't the only one focusing on the wrong thing. Later in the week, during a county conference call with the National Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service Offices, I heard a County Emergency Manager ask where the eye of the storm would impact the coast. The NHC forecaster correctly noted that the threat from Debby was not from the eye but from the intense rain bands many miles from the center of the storm.

The key phrase of the week, of the entire storm was: " Isolated storm total amounts may reach up to 25 inches in North Florida." Somehow, I don't remember that phrase. 25 inches of rain anywhere is going to cause problems. I started to get a clue Monday night while watching the Weather Channel, when the on-air meteorologist started talking about the "unbelievable" amounts of rain that was falling in "isolated" areas of North Florida.


Suwannee County, at the intersection of I-75 and I-10, with a County seat in Live Oak, was one of those isolated areas receiving an unbelievable amount of water. At 6 A.M. on June 26 Suwannee County, which had partially activated at 3 A.M., delivered a two sentence situation report to the State EOC: "Suwannee County is evacuating many many houses within the County as well as City of Live Oak, US Hwy 90 and Pine is waist deep... We are contacting local air boat owners and school bus persons to assist with evacuations."


That got my attention. I looked up US Hwy 90 and Pine St on the map and realized that it was in the center of the city.


Does any of this sound familiar? How about Irene, you people in the Northeast? While the World focused on the eye of Irene heading for the coast of New Jersey and downtown NYC, the enormous rain bands in advance of the storm began to drop a record breaking amount of rain on the inland states from Pennsylvania to Vermont. A NOAA forecaster at this year's National Hurricane Conference pointed out that that the ensuing rainfall amounts were accurately forecast 5 days in advance, when Irene was sitting on the Bahamas. The forecast also noted that these same areas of the mid-Atlantic and New England had already received considerable rainfall.


Yet, later in the Conference, a Vermont emergency manager described his surprise when an idyllic stream rose in fury at Irene's assault and inundated his County EOC. I shook my head at him at the time. Now I'm shaking my head at myself.

Every storm is unique. Every disaster is different.

The Mother of All State Mass Care Exercises

Last December we invited a bunch of mass care people around the country to come to our Florida State Hurricane exercise in May and play in our mass care sandbox. In April, when we realized that most of them were going to show up, we scrambled to accommodate them. I didn't want to turn anyone away.

Ultimately, 64 people participated in the mass care portion of the State's Hurricane Gispert exercise. Over 50 of the participants came from out of state (some from as far away as California and Arizona). These 64 people came from 26 federal state, voluntary agency, private sector and academic organizations. The scenario was for a major hurricane to strike the Tampa Bay Region. If this was a real event, we would need about that many people from all those organizations to coordinate the mass care response to the high standard that the Governor and the public expect. In all the hurricanes and disasters we had done, both real and practice, we had never practiced a mass care response that large - which was why we did it.

Needless to say, some things went well and some things didn't. We all learned a lot. It's hard to bring together 50 people, no matter how good they are or how much they know, who have never worked together before, and put them in a organization and a system that is untried and untested, and not expect problems. I had spent several years thinking and talking to people about how we would organize something this big and I thought that I had a good plan. My plan lasted about 2 hours into the exercise.

Despite the problems we encountered the exercise was a tremendous success.  We got the job done, even if it was ugly. Come to think of it, that's a good summary for a lot of disasters many of us have worked. The After Action Report is now available online: Florida Hurricane Exercise 2012, Mass Care After Action Report. I recommend it to you.

We also developed and tested a document to assist states in acquiring mass care resources from the federal government. The document was posted online today and is called Acquisition and Employment of Federal Mass Care Resources: A Guidance Document. I recommend this document to you also.

A state template for integrating federal mass care resources

I meet with representatives today from the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Florida Baptists, the Florida Division of Emergency Management, FEMA and the FEMA mass care contractor CH2MHill at the FSU Turnbull Conference Center here in Tallahassee. The purpose of the exercise was to develop a national state template of operational procedures for the reception of FEMA contracted mass care resources and the integration of these resources into the existing voluntary agency mass care infrastructure. Such operational procedures do not currently exist in the nation and must be developed with the cooperation of the various state, federal and voluntary mass care agencies involved.

The State of Florida faces a number of very plausible scenarios that would require mass care support in excess of the available national resources of the voluntary agencies. Furthermore, the state cannot assume that the full national capacity of the voluntary agencies will be available. Some portion of this capacity will be held in reserve for other disasters, and/or available resources may already be committed to prior events.

Requested federal mass care resources are deployed under the direction and control of FEMA in response to specific requirements identified by the state. In order to ensure the timely and efficient employment of these resources, State ESF 6, as the state lead for mass care, must have a thorough understanding of what type of information must be provided, when this information must be submitted, and how these federal resources will be integrated into the existing voluntary agency mass care infrastructure in the impacted area.

Development of the operational procedures will be conducted in a four-phase operation to include a Facilitated Discussion and a Tabletop Exercise, with the assistance of the Center for Disaster Risk Policy at Florida State University. The outcome will be an operational procedures document developed by the relevant stakeholders and tested in a tabletop exercise. This document will be validated in the 2012 State Hurricane Exercise and then distributed to the FEMA Regions for use as a Best Practices document.