How Florida saved southern Mississippi after Katrina

I am still amazed at how few people across this nation are familiar with the amazing and historic story of how the state of Florida, at the request of Governor Haley Barbour, assumed emergency management responsibility for the six southern counties of Mississippi before Hurricane Katrina had even exited their state. Under the direction of then Director of Emergency Management Craig Fugate Florida moved over 6,000 local and state responders into the affected counties and purchased in excess of $180 million of supplies for the affected counties.

I participated in this event and wrote an account of what I saw that was published in the Orlando Sentinel when I returned. This past week I have been posting pictures in social media to educate the public that New Orleans and Louisiana weren't the only places affected by Hurricane Katrina. Someone needs to write a book about what Florida did in Mississippi after Katrina and I have that task on my list of "Things to Do."

My friend Rand Napoli, at the direction of Craig Fugate, led the initial "Task Force Florida" element down I-10 into southern Mississippi in the early hours of August 30th, 2005, the day after Katrina impacted the coast. Rand allowed me to publish the following pictures and an account of those hectic first few days:

Rand Naopli and Jeanne Pincha-Tulley, the Incident Command for Calif. Task Force 3, our U.S. Forest Service logistics partners, discuss plans in front of the Florida Mobile Command Vehicle.

"Task Force Florida search and rescue teams, firefighters, law enforcement, ambulance transport capability and Florida Forest Service assets left long before sunup on the 30th and were on the ground and rescuing folks in Biloxi and Gulfport mid-day on the 30th. Everything that we had staged in and around Tallahassee that was meant for the Florida panhandle (which is where we thought Katrina might make landfall) went with us to MS."

Morning briefing for fire and Emergency Medical Service crews headed
to rural areas to treat survivors and provide water.

"The search and rescue task forces were directed to drop off in Biloxi and Gulfport and got to work while the command team and other assets continued on to Stennis. We had been told that FEMA and the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) would be meeting us there and they would have their command established. It was several days before FEMA and MEMA had an operational presence on the ground in southern Mississippi."

"Beginning the morning of Day 2 (August 31st), we sent dozens of units (usually a Fire Engine and an ambulance together) loaded with as much water and commodities as they could carry out into the 6 counties to treat survivors as needed and to leave water for them."

"The plan was to stay for a few days, do primary search, treat any injuries and other medical issues we found, distribute the water and other commodities that we brought and come home when MEMA and FEMA were able to take over. That didn’t happen very quickly, and Task Force Florida turned into the Florida Area Command and stayed for months"

Some of the 300 trucks of water, ice and commodities that were staged at the Stennis Space Center and then distributed into the affected areas in the first days of the Florida Area Command.. 

"It became obvious immediately when we arrived that this was a long term event and that’s when I advised leadership at the Florida State EOC on a satellite call late that first night that southern Mississippi was hit much worse than even the folks at MEMA and FEMA realized (not to mention that the nation's focus was on New Orleans) and “we needed a bigger boat,” lots more people and that this would be a long term deployment."

Because of Rand's phone call and other reports from the area, Mike DeLorenzo, the State Emergency Response Team Chief, and I spoke after the morning briefing September 1st at the Florida State EOC. Mike told me that there were considerable human services problems in the affected area and that he was going to recommend to Craig Fugate that I be deployed to the Florida Area Command at the Stennis Space Center to coordinate the mass care response.

Later that morning I was directed to proceed to Mississippi. I recruited two other employees from my Department, Peter Newman and Candace Bunker, to come with me. We left Tallahassee on the morning of September 2nd and arrived at Stennis that afternoon into the middle of a catastrophic event, with instructions to try and make things better.

We immediately had our hands full. But that's another story. I guess I'll talk about it when I write the book.

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.

What I learned in the 2013 National Mass Care Exercise

The 2013 National Mass Care Exercise, held in Tallahassee, FL from May 20-24, 2013, brought together 60 federal, state, local, nongovernmental (NGO) and private sector mass care practitioners. We struggled to respond to two hurricanes and three impacts on the state. We tried out several well thought through plans and operational procedures. Like last year's exercise, some things worked and some things didn't. 

But because of last year's exercise, we executed our plans and procedures better this year. And next year we will do even better.

A draft of the Exercise After Action Report has been prepared and circulated to the participants for their comments. Our goal is to have the Report finalized and posted to the National Mass Care Strategy web site by July 1.

In the meantime, however, I can let you know what I learned. First, I learned that to write state mass care doctrine, train people to that doctrine, and then exercise that doctrine simultaneously is difficult for the exercise organizers and confusing for the participants. 

In a previous post I talked about creating a state Mass Care Services Doctrine. We've come a long way on the last 10 years toward standardizing the way we coordinate mass care at the state level. FEMA has put some of this process into a course, which I talked about in a previous post, but we need to get this course adopted by EMI and get federal, state, NGO and private sector mass care practitioners trained in the process. The exercise would be more effective if all the participants had the benefit of this course as a common baseline of understanding of the state mass care coordination process. I am going to push to make that happen.

The second big thing I learned in this exercise was how to forecast long term feeding and sheltering requirements for a hurricane. The exciting part about this was that we developed simple and effective formulas to make these estimates, and this process can easily taught and widely adopted in the mass care community. 

Forecasting future mass care requirements is an important part of the state mass care coordination process. The state does not have an on hand inventory of mass care resources that can be doled out to counties and the voluntary agencies when the requests roll in after the disaster. These resources must be either purchased by the state or requested from FEMA, a process that can take days or longer. This delay in fulfilling the request means that survivors on the ground in the impact area are doing without. This means that I can be requesting resources before the storm has even hit.

What? Requesting resources before the storm has even hit? You could order too much or too little. That's wasteful and in efficient. As Craig Fugate taught us many years ago, there are 3 ways to respond to a disaster: Cheap, Efficient or Fast. You have to choose one. Our political leaders and the public want Fast, which is inefficient and expensive. You want Fast? Then you project the type, kind and quantity of mass care resources that will be in short supply after the disaster and order them before the disaster so that they will be on hand when the public needs them.

Doing that has got to be hard. You're right, it is hard. But as a result of the 2013 National Mass Care Exercise we made a lot of progress toward figuring out how to make those forecasts for feeding and sheltering.

Forklifts, big trailers and Hurricane Sandy

I am sure that New York City and the American Red Cross aren't resting on their laurels about how perfectly they played their response to Hurricane Sandy. Emergency management is logistics, and doing logistics in a big city is tough. After two weeks spent in NYC during the Sandy response, I feel like FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, who recounted his response to a reporter's question about how he knew so much about emergency management by saying: "I've been doing this for so long that I've made every possible mistake and learned from it."

While in NYC I had the great opportunity to work with the Red Cross Disaster Relief Operation and the highly professional NYC Office of Emergency Management. I saw both organizations making mistakes with the exceptional clarity of one who has made the same damn mistakes myself. And some more than once.

A lot of people have years and decades of disaster experience but very few have experience in disasters dealing with millions of people. And of those who have experience in such disasters, most were operating at the street or shelter level, and not in the big emergency operations centers. I have spent most of my emergency management career working in the big EOCs, places full of so much information and so little clarity about what is really happening to those people working in the cold or the heat in the affected areas.

My job in the EOC, when boiled down to its essential essence, is to make sure the people in the street and shelter have the right kind of resource, with the right capability, in the right quantity, at the right time. This sounds simple but its not easy.

The responders in the affected area are worrying about Right Now. Right Now could be the next minute, or the next hour or Today. For them, long range planning is Tomorrow. At the State EOC in Tallahassee I can't do anything Right Now. If you need something Right Now, and that resource is already positioned in the Logistic Staging Area (LSA), I can arrange to have it delivered to you tomorrow. We can't deliver it to you Right Now because all the vehicles at the LSA are out delivering resources that were requested yesterday.

If the resource you need is not in the LSA, then I have to go get it. This means that I have to arrange for the State to buy it or request FEMA to provide it. This can take 48-96 hours, at best. And if you need it Right Now, 48-96 hours sounds like Next Year. Therefore, my time horizon is never Right Now, but is focused on what I anticipate the people in the field are going to need 48-96 hours from now.

That means that I am in the prediction business. In small disasters any errors in my predictions are usually small. In big disasters the errors in my predictions have the potential to be very large. And the question is rarely about WHAT we need but rather HOW MANY. That is why I have spent many years trying to devise ways to predict the quantity of resources that we would need in a big disaster.  One of the best ways to improve predictions is to make them a collective judgment of the stakeholders involved. In Florida, we do that on the daily state mass care conference call.

What happens in big disasters is that the people in the EOCs are stuck in Right Now and aren't thinking about the next 48-96 hours. The reason they are stuck in Right Now is that they are understaffed for the size of the disaster. The reason that they are understaffed is they don't know what they don't know. You don't know what you need in a big disaster until you experience one. But big disasters don't happen that often, so few people have the experience required to deal with the more complex issues presented.

In 2009 the State of Florida ran a catastrophic hurricane exercise to test our new catastrophic hurricane plan. This was Craig Fugate's last exercise as Florida's EM Director. I was the State Mass Care Coordinator in the exercise and I was overwhelmed by the quantity and complexity of the problems that I had to address. At one point, I needed to be in 3 critical meetings at the same time. I learned that I was understaffed for the size of the disaster and needed to plan to do something about it should the real event happen.

Which brings me to forklifts and big trailers. The biggest and most impressive lesson that I learned while responding to the 8 hurricanes that hit Florida in a 16 month period during 2004 and 2005 was the critical importance of having lots of big trailers and forklifts.

In big disasters involving millions of people you need to fill the big 48 ft or 53 ft trailers and direct them to a staging area near to or within the disaster area. The staging area is important because when you order the trailer loads (48-96 hours in advance) you may not know the ultimate destination for the load.

This is the most effective way to get large quantities of "stuff" to large quantities of people in a big disaster. In the 2 weeks that I spent in NYC I didn't see or hear about people using lots of big trailers and forklifts. They were using a lot of straight trucks and unloading the cargo by hand. This technique works just fine in little disasters. In big disasters you need big trailers to push the supplies as far forward into the affected area as possible and then unload them using pre-positioned forklifts.

I spoke to several people about why they didn't use more forklifts and they said that they tried. There are thousands of forklifts in NYC but they aren't where they need them for the disaster. And moving forklifts around is H-A-R-D. They're heavy and don't travel very fast.

That is why I advised the American Red Cross to get a national forklift contract for use in big disasters such as Sandy. We used these contractors in Florida to position forklifts at over 70 Point of Distribution (POD) sites in Dade and Broward Counties after Hurricane Wilma in 2005. The contractors carried the forklifts in on flat bed trailers and dropped them off at the POD locations and field kitchen sites.

Another important reason to have the capability to quickly pre-position forklifts is that in a big disaster big trailers become a critical shortage item. In 2004 the Florida SERT and FEMA disrupted commerce in the Eastern United States because we rented every available trailer and filled them with disaster supplies. We needed the forklifts to empty the trailers at the field sites because we needed the empty trailer in order to go back and get more disaster supplies. And when you are trying to empty thousands of big trailers, you need a lot of forklifts.

Finally, to make this system work you need tractors to move the trailers to the field sites. The big "linehaul" tractors with the sleeper cabins are great to move trailers inter-city but don't serve as well positioning trailers in the city. The linehaul tractors move the freight from origin to the LSAs. The "city" tractors make the short trips from the LSA to the field site.  You can contract for a fleet of city tractors with drivers and a dispatcher at the LSA to make sure the supplies get to the right place at the right time.

Boy, this all sounds expensive, you must say. But in a $30 billion or $50 billion or $100 billion disaster these costs are chump change.

Besides, there are 3 types of disaster responses: Efficient, Cheap or Quick. You have to choose one. The public and our elected officials demand that it be Quick. Our job is to make it happen.

FEMA, Catastrophes, and the Whole of Community

During one of the recent Snowmageddon's FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate was severely chastised by a Good Morning America interviewer because he wasn't rushing federal resources to rescue stranded motorists. On the other end of the spectrum are web sites proclaiming that Craig is erecting "FEMA camps" to house citizens who resist federal agents sent to seize their guns (Yes, these sites are there, I saw them).


We have a long way to go on educating the general public about roles and responsibilities in a disaster but after almost two years in charge Craig has finally found the button at FEMA that gets everyone in the organization's attention. He pushed that button and now everyone at FEMA is talking Catastrophes and Whole of Community.


Whole of Community is a concept and a philosophy that goes to the heart of roles and responsibilities in a disaster. Whole of Community means that when a disaster strikes everyone in the community has a role, and everyone must take responsibility for some part of the response and recovery. The more severe the event, i.e. when a disaster becomes a catastrophe, the greater the roles and responsibilities of the individual citizens. In other words, if you are waiting for FEMA to come and pull your car out of a snowdrift, what will be your response when nothing is left of your entire city but rubble and survivors?


The old joke in emergency management says that a disaster is when a tree falls on your neighbor's house, and a catastrophe is when a tree falls on YOUR house. Very few people have experience in catastrophic events. When I was in Hancock County, MS, a few days after Katrina, I ran into someone from the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. He had come to Florida in 2004 to help us on the hurricanes and we were in Mississippi returning the favor. I asked him what happened, and he said they had a plan, but the extent of Katrina's damage had overwhelmed it.


I have heard Craig Fugate many times define an emergency as an event where the responders outnumber the survivors and a disaster as where the survivors outnumber the responders. A catastrophe is where the event overwhelms the plan. The only thing worse than a disaster overwhelming your plan is entering a disaster without any plan at all.

How many jurisdictions today have a catastrophic plan? I don't know, but I don't think very many. The state of Florida has an excellent catastrophic plan. I know, I helped write the mass care feeding and sheltering annex to the plan. Hundreds of local, state and federal workers participated in the development of this plan over a period of several years. The process was one of the most educational and informative periods of my emergency management career.

The person who drove us to write Florida's catastrophic plan? Craig Fugate.

And now Craig wants us all, from small town to big city, from sea to shining sea, to start thinking about catastrophes, and how we can get the whole of the community to pitch in and help when one may happen. I am an emergency manager in one of the most high risk states in the Union. I think about catastrophes all the time, and what I have to do to get ready should one suddenly arrive.

But that's just me.

The Survivor Directed Response

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. 

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.