The paradigm is shifting in emergency response and emergency managers must incorporate this shift in their plans and operational procedures. I call this change the Survivor Directed Response. In a speech last April I heard Craig Fugate, the FEMA Administrator, counsel us to stop treating the public as a liability and start relying on them as an asset. I think the public will go beyond the asset/liability category to actually directing the actions that we will take during the response.
How can this be? In previous disasters media reports have forced emergency managers to take actions they had not planned or anticipated. As an emergency manager, we know that we are in big trouble when our disaster is the lead story on all the cable networks. Our problems intensify when our disaster is not only the lead story on television, but occupies most of the airtime. The final confirmation of the catastrophic nature of our calamity is the report that Anderson Cooper or Katie Couric has arrived in the impact area to tell the nation and the world how well our response is progressing.
Anderson Cooper: Well, Sir, can you tell me how things have been going here at Ground Zero of the disaster?
Member of the Public: Things are going terribly. I don't know who's directing this response, but they should all be taken out and shot.
Anderson Cooper: There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Things don't sound quite as good out here in the disaster area as they try to make it seem in the far off Capital City.
The power of social media means that the public doesn't need Anderson Cooper to help them voice their concerns. In the Snow-calypse of 2010 the Mayor of Newark was directing his Public Works response based on input from his Twitter feed. Essentially, the individuals in the jurisdiction most affected by the disaster were directing the response. Hopefully, His Honor wasn't issuing orders directly to snow plow drivers.
In catastrophic planning there is nothing with a greater potential for a survivor directed response than mass care, the provision of food and shelter. FEMA's new State Mass Care Coordinator's Course (coming soon to a venue near you) and the draft Mass Care and Emergency Assistance Capability Level Guidance begin to address this issue.
In 2007 and 2008 Florida incorporated elements of a survivor directed response into our catastrophic mass care plan, although I didn't call it that at the time. The whole state was involved in catastrophic planning under a FEMA sponsored project called Hurricane Ono. The scenario used to develop the plan was suitably horrible: a category 5 hurricane striking Miami, Ft. Lauderdale and West Palm Beach.
Facing the grim realities of 6.5 million people packed at the end of a peninsula between a swamp and an ocean, we offered the survivors three choices for shelter. The first choice was to take a tent, cook stove, food and water and camp on the survivor's property with the reptiles and the insects. The second choice was to stay at the overcrowded, noisy, smelly public shelters in the impact area. The third choice was to board a waiting bus and travel to the land of air conditioning and flush toilets.
A lot of people, including Craig, who was the State Director at the time, fought me on providing resources for the third choice. The message of New Orleans was fresh in every one's mind, that if the people left, then they would never come back. My argument was that we couldn't feed and shelter that many people under those conditions. Some of them had to leave.
"You can't force them to leave," many shouted back at me.
"I'm not forcing anyone to do anything," I replied. "They're going to be demanding to leave."
Anderson Cooper will be right there, amplifying their demands. The survivors will be telling us on Facebook and Twitter that they are ready to go, and where to come to pick them up. I just hope that when the time comes, that we are listening.
Craig Fugate also advised us to "plan for what is hard." The hard part in all this is figuring out what the survivors will do before they even know it themselves. How many will take the tent and the cook stove? How many will stay in the shelter? How many will get on the bus?
I need to figure this out several days in advance because I need to know how many buses to order so that they will arrive when they are needed. When the people decide that they are ready to leave they will expect the buses to be there. After all, they are directing the response.
Showing posts with label Florida emergency management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Florida emergency management. Show all posts
Monday, January 03, 2011
Saturday, November 20, 2010
A national mass care strategy
Last month FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate and American Red Cross President Gail McGovern signed a Memorandum of Agreement between the two organizations. The MOA provides a framework for the planning and conduct of feeding and sheltering of survivors in the event of a disaster.
In addition to the American Red Cross, Craig wisely invited representatives from other faith based and voluntary agencies involved in disasters to the signing ceremony. Craig charged them all to come up with a new national mass care strategy. Craig didn't consult with me about whether we needed a new national mass care strategy, but if he had, I would have said yes.
A strategy lays out a plan or method for achieving a specific goal or result. In my mind, I can think of no more important national mass care goal that being able to feed and shelter the survivors of a catastrophic event. I say this because I can think of a number of very plausible disasters (a number of which are in my home state of Florida) where the nation would have a difficult time feeding and sheltering the citizens impacted by the disaster.
The problem is not with the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Southern Baptist Convention or any of the other faith based or voluntary agencies that get involved with mass care during a disaster. These organizations are supported by the donations of the American people and these donations are able to sustain a disaster feeding and sheltering capability that works in most disasters.
But what about those disasters where the national resources of the faith based and voluntary community are brought to bear on a single catastrophic disaster, and those resources aren't enough? What happens then?
The resources of the state and federal governments would have to augment the resources of the voluntary community. Unfortunately, because we don't have to do that very often, we aren't very good at it. Figuring out what is needed, ordering it, and then getting it to the right place at the right time is not easy. I had to do just that in 2004 during Hurricanes Charley, Francis, Ivan and Jeanne, and I can vouch for the difficulty of the task.
Even though no one had ever trained me how to coordinate mass care at the state level, I had four hurricanes in six weeks to figure out how to do it. I did a lot better on the fourth hurricane than I did on the first one.
A new national mass care strategy needs to focus on increasing mass care capability at the state level. To do this we must train state mass care coordinators to perform their role in a catastrophic event. This role involves performing an important series of steps should a big event strike their state: define the scale of the disaster, estimate the state mass care requirements for that size disaster, determine the mass care resources that the voluntary agencies are able to provide, and request the resources needed to meet any shortfalls from other states or the federal government.
Right now, few state mass care coordinators exist that can perform that role. FEMA is preparing a course to teach state mass care coordinators how to perform these tasks. The course will be completed by the end of this year and presented to select state mass care coordinators at the beginning of next year.
A new national mass care strategy must include as a goal the training of state mass care coordinators in all the FEMA Regions. Once they are trained, we need to plan and conduct exercises that allow these coordinators to practice their new skills in realistic situations.
If this is done, they won't have to learn their jobs on the fly in the midst of their first big disaster, like I did. Furthermore, they will be trained and ready to deploy to assist other states when an big event occurs. The state of Florida, for one, will sure be able to use them.
In addition to the American Red Cross, Craig wisely invited representatives from other faith based and voluntary agencies involved in disasters to the signing ceremony. Craig charged them all to come up with a new national mass care strategy. Craig didn't consult with me about whether we needed a new national mass care strategy, but if he had, I would have said yes.
A strategy lays out a plan or method for achieving a specific goal or result. In my mind, I can think of no more important national mass care goal that being able to feed and shelter the survivors of a catastrophic event. I say this because I can think of a number of very plausible disasters (a number of which are in my home state of Florida) where the nation would have a difficult time feeding and sheltering the citizens impacted by the disaster.
The problem is not with the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Southern Baptist Convention or any of the other faith based or voluntary agencies that get involved with mass care during a disaster. These organizations are supported by the donations of the American people and these donations are able to sustain a disaster feeding and sheltering capability that works in most disasters.
But what about those disasters where the national resources of the faith based and voluntary community are brought to bear on a single catastrophic disaster, and those resources aren't enough? What happens then?
The resources of the state and federal governments would have to augment the resources of the voluntary community. Unfortunately, because we don't have to do that very often, we aren't very good at it. Figuring out what is needed, ordering it, and then getting it to the right place at the right time is not easy. I had to do just that in 2004 during Hurricanes Charley, Francis, Ivan and Jeanne, and I can vouch for the difficulty of the task.
Even though no one had ever trained me how to coordinate mass care at the state level, I had four hurricanes in six weeks to figure out how to do it. I did a lot better on the fourth hurricane than I did on the first one.
A new national mass care strategy needs to focus on increasing mass care capability at the state level. To do this we must train state mass care coordinators to perform their role in a catastrophic event. This role involves performing an important series of steps should a big event strike their state: define the scale of the disaster, estimate the state mass care requirements for that size disaster, determine the mass care resources that the voluntary agencies are able to provide, and request the resources needed to meet any shortfalls from other states or the federal government.
Right now, few state mass care coordinators exist that can perform that role. FEMA is preparing a course to teach state mass care coordinators how to perform these tasks. The course will be completed by the end of this year and presented to select state mass care coordinators at the beginning of next year.
A new national mass care strategy must include as a goal the training of state mass care coordinators in all the FEMA Regions. Once they are trained, we need to plan and conduct exercises that allow these coordinators to practice their new skills in realistic situations.
If this is done, they won't have to learn their jobs on the fly in the midst of their first big disaster, like I did. Furthermore, they will be trained and ready to deploy to assist other states when an big event occurs. The state of Florida, for one, will sure be able to use them.
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