Creating national standards for mass care resources

Since November 2008 I have been the Chairman of FEMA's National Incident Management (NIMS) Mass Care Working Group. The task of the Working Group has been to create national standards for mass care resources. Mass care has various definitions but the common view encompasses disaster feeding, sheltering and distribution of relief supplies. Most mass care in a disaster is done by voluntary organizations like the Red Cross, the Salvation Army and the Southern Baptists. For this reason, these organizations are well represented on the Working Group.

We meet three or four times a year and our meeting this week was in Nashville, TN. Participant travel costs for these meetings are paid by the FEMA contractor for the project. The contractor also documents our meetings and makes sure that the documents we produce are spelled correctly and in the format that FEMA prefers.

At these meetings, and at monthly conference calls in between, we struggle to perform a sort of alchemy; the creation of something valuable from an assortment of otherwise disconnected information. FEMA calls this process "resource typing." The resources selected for this process are either personnel, teams, or equipment. Teams consist of personnel and sometimes equipment. Equipment sometimes has a crew. Some teams or crew members require personnel qualifications. Some don't. Sorting all this out can be confusing because the rules aren't clear and in some cases, no one has done this before.

Resource typing is all about capability. A bigger machine has more capability to pump water than a smaller machine. One person, by virtue of education or experience or both, can have more capability than another. Capability is important because the purpose of resource typing is to help emergency managers request resources in the event of a disaster. We "type" a resource by dividing the capability into 3, 4, or 5 levels. A Type 1 has more capability than a Type 2 or a Type 3.

For example, field kitchens are used in disaster feeding because they can produce meals in an impacted area that has no water or electricity. The kitchens are pulled into the area inside large trailers and are established in an open area like a parking lot. A Type 2 kitchen can serve 20 thousand meals a day while a Type 3 kitchen can serve 10 thousand.

In addition to field kitchens, we have resource typed mobile kitchens (like a Salvation Army canteen), a Food Service Delivery Vehicle (like a Red Cross Emergency Response Vehicle), a shelter management team and a donations warehouse management team. We have also typed personnel qualification sheets called Job Titles. We typed my job, a State Mass Care Coordinator, as well as a Shelter Manager 1, 2 and 3.

Today we approved these documents and asked the contractor to prepare and submit them to FEMA. We are already working on typing additional resources. One that we are still working on is a Temporary Child Care Team.

I believe that the work we do is important and the documents we create are desperately needed in states and communities across the nation. Creating these documents has been an educational experience for me, as well as the other members of the Working Group. It's a pleasure to work with people who are experts in their field and share the same desire to improve the nations ability to repond in a disaster.

SLOSH, MEOW and MOM - more from the GHC

At the first afternoon workshop I attended the Regional Evacuation Study Roundtable for the Northeast Florida and East Central Regions. Using federal and state funds from the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, $29 million was spent to generate the first simultaneous regional evacuation study for the entire coastline of the state of Florida. These studies are important for state and local planners to plan for hurricane evacuations.

SLOSH stands for Sea Lake Overland Surge from Hurricanes. SLOSH provides a graphical representation on how far inland the water from a hurricane is expected to penetrate. $24 million of the cost of the study was devoted to flying an airplane along every inch of the state's coastline and using a laser to calculate the height of the coastal counties. This digital data was stored in an extremely LARGE database and would be the basis for the SLOSH calculations.

The SLOSH are too complicated for me to go into here. Suffice to say, the depth of the surge at any given point on a coastal county depends on not only the elevation of that location but on the size, intensity, forward speed and direction of movement of the hurricane. Therefore, they fed this data into a supercomputer for a few days and ran hundreds of hurricanes with a combination of the different variables for each hurricane. MEOW stands for the Maximum Envelope of Winds for each of those hurricanes.

To be safe, the SLOSH maps produced for use by local and state planners shows the MOM, or Maximum of Maximums of all the different hurricanes run through the computer. These maps show the depth of the penetration and the depth of the water at each location, among other things.

This is an extremely simplified version of a very complex subject. Since the release of the products to the counties last year, planners have been trying to digest the enormous volume of data that the studies provide. Planners will use this info to make Plans to evacuate and shelter everyone based on the forecast provided by the National Hurricane Center.

Governor's Hurricane Conference - Part 2

Thursday at the Governor's Hurricane Conference is a day of workshops. My first workshop of the day was my own - I was the speaker. With the scary title "Latest Developments in Resource Typing for Mass Care," I was curious as to who would show up. When I saw that my presentation was scheduled to compete with the workshop entitled "American Red Cross Roundtable," I wondered if anyone would come at all. My concern came from the fact that I expected my audience to be mostly Red Cross people.

Fortunately, there were people at the conference who weren't scared by the title but were actually interested. "Resource Typing" is a fancy term that comes from the National Incident Management System (NIMS). NIMS defines a resource as personnel, equipment or supplies. When a disaster strikes there is an immediate demand for more resources. Emergency Managers in the affected area request resources from outside the affected area. Resource Typing identifies common items that are requested in a disaster, provides a uniform description of the resource, and categorizes them by Type, or capability. A Type 1 resource has more capability than a Type 2 resource.

I have been the Chairman of the NIMS Mass Care Working Group since 2008. FEMA assembled in this group the subject matter experts necessary to resource type resources needed to perform mass care. Most of the members of the work group come from the voluntary agencies usually involved in mass care feeding and sheltering: the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Southern Baptists and the Adventists.

The purpose of my presentation was to spread the word about what we are doing in the world of resource typing and mass care. The process has been long and laborious, but we are ready to submit some resource typing documents to FEMA for approval and distribution to the emergency management community for their use.

At the Governor's Hurricane Conference in Ft. Lauderdale

This is the 25th Aniversary of the Governor's Hurricane Conference. I have lost count of how many of these conferences I have attended, but I know I have been to at least ten. I enjoy this conference because I get to see a lot of people in the Florida emergency management community that I don't get to see the rest of the year.

Besides the fact that this is the 25th anniversary of the conference, we have a lot of firsts for the conference this year. This is the first conference for the new Director of the Divison of Emergency Management, Bryan Koon. This is also the first conference for our new Governor, Rick Scott.

The first speaker of the afternoon opening session was Governor Bob Martinez, who was the Governor of Florida when the first conference was held. Bryan Koon spoke next and mentioned that the last hurricane conference he attended, in Rhode Island, was three hours long. Florida's five day conference and training sessions gives him a new perspective. Bryan says that he enjoys his job. That's good. He will have some trials in his future.

Governor Scott is a much different public speaker than Governor Crist. I heard Governor Crist speak at the State EOC and at this Conference many times. All his speeches were the same, and emphasized what a great job we were doing. Thus, I did not find them very memorable.

Governor Scott's first speech was memorable. He made a number of comments that weren't in his prepared remarks. He told funny stories. He made mistakes reading his presentation. And best of all, he kept it short. Like Bryan Koon, he may have to endure some emergency related trials as a part of his job in the future.

Tomorrow I have a speaking engagement first thing. I am looking forward to it.

Day 4 at the National Hurricane Conference

This has clearly been one of the best National Hurricane Conferences that I have attended in the last decade. The presentations that I have attended have been high quality and with timely topics. The presentations, plus the opportunity to interact with professionals around the country, make this an excellent conference for emergency managers.

Curt Sommerhoff, the Emergency Mangement Director for Miami-Dade County, gave an outstanding presentation on the county's sheltering program and a new program that they are piloting for FEMA. This pilot involves identifying faith based and community organizations that provide some kind of service in a disaster. This is a perfect example of Craig Fugate's Whole of Community concept. Craig says to "plan for the real, not for the easy."

Mark Askey, FEMA Mass Care, talked about the beginning of the discussion towards development of a national Mass Care Strategy. FEMA, the Red Cross and the Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (VOAD) are going to lead the effort. Look in the near future for VOAD to publish a web site where everyone can first, know about this effort and second, have an opportunity to contribute to the development of this strategy.

I rushed back from lunch to listen to Marcie Roth, FEMA's functional needs guru. This is a controversial topic, and Marcie gets to travel around the country telling emergency managers what they don't want to hear. She had some breaking news: FEMA will soon release an Information Bulletin on how jurisdictions can apply for Homeland Security grants to meet their functional needs requirements in general population sheltering.

Many emergency managers are still in denial about how we must change our operational procedures to meet with this federal guidance. Others have moved beyond Denial and are mired in Grief about the whole thing. Others, like me, have passed beyond these two stages and have arrived at Resignation. We know we have to do it, we just don't know how.

Eventually we will get beyond this issue and move on to another. The planning effort we have undertaken in Florida will get us there, just not by the start of this hurricane season.

Day 3 of the National Hurricane Conference

The National Hurricane Conference is more than training, general sessions and workshops. Emergency Management, like most other efforts of human endeavor, works more effectively if the actors are operating as a team and have established some level of personal relationship prior to the disaster. I have been to many hurricane conferences and the value of this particular conference is the opportunity to engage and establish relationships with emergency managers across the nation and the world.

The mass care community is a subset of the emergency management world and I spend most of my free time at the conference connecting and reconnecting with the members of this community. Most of the people in this mass care world are members of the American Red Cross and Mass Care Femites who are former members of the Red Cross. There is a smaller group from other nongovernmental mass care agencies like the Southern Baptist Convention and the Salvation Army. Finally, there are state and local employees who have mass care as a principal responsibility. There are very few of these, and frequently I am the only one.

During coffee breaks, sessions at the bar and over meals, there is a lively exchange of mass care developments and best practices. I hear lots of gossip from all the different agencies, frequently after being sworn to secrecy. Since I am utterly dependent on them all during a disaster, their secrets are safe with me. We talk about current, past and even future disasters, mostly while reading our Blackberries.

This morning I attended my breakthrough session, the one that makes the entire trip worthwhile. A woman from Louisiana talked about a program that was started there in 2006 as a result of hurricane Katrina. The program identifies and trains volunteers who will provide Personal Assistance Services to individuals with functional needs in general population shelters. These services are for people who need assistance with tasks associated with daily living. Finding out about this program has literally saved me months of work. I was wondering how we were going to create such a program in Florida, and here was the lady with the road map.