A National Mass Care Exercise - Hurricane Gispert

The draft of the new "National Mass Care Strategy" recommends that the nation conduct "an annual national Mass Care System exercise that focuses on state-to-federal coordination systems and integrating staff from key federal, NGO, faith based organizations and the private sector into an effective Mass Care Multi-Agency coordination system." The state of Florida  will conduct just such an exercise in conjunction with the annual State Hurricane Exercise in Tallahassee May 21-24, 2012.

Over 70 persons (50 of which are traveling to the site from out-of-town) from 29 different federal, state, NGO and private sector organizations representing the nation's Whole of Community will participate in the exercise as player, evaluator or controller. The focus of the exercise will be on building the state and the nation's capability to deliver Mass Care Services in furtherance of the National Preparedness Goal.

The scenario for the exercise involves the landfall of Hurricane Gispert in the Tampa Bay area as a major storm. Such an impact on a large, urban, coastal community would require a coordinated, national mass care response. The purpose of the exercise is to test the systems, processes and procedures necessary to coordinate a mass care event of this magnitude.

Many of these procedural documents are new, still in draft form, and have never been tested before. They include:
1) "The Acquisition and Employment of Federal Mass Care Resources, A State Template,"
2) "The State of Florida Multi-Agency Feeding Task Force Standard Operating Guide,"
3) "Draft Multi-Agency Sheltering Task Force Guidance Document,"
4) "Household Disaster Feeding Guidance Document."

Three of these documents are draft national templates that will be refined based on participant feedback during and after the exercise. Once refined, the documents will be made available on the National Mass Care Strategy website for use by the national mass care community.

The exercise will have 3 evaluators to ensure that the lessons learned are captured. There will be a daily and a final "hot wash" to ensure that this critical information is captured while still fresh on the participants minds. The results of these efforts will be incorporated into the After Action Report. This document will also be made available to the nation via the Web.

The ambitious nature of this exercise, both in the number of participants and the complexity of the tasks to be performed, guarantees that this endeavor will be challenging for all participants. This is the best way for us to prepare.

New from FEMA: National Preparedness System Description

Nearly three years into the Obama administration, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano and FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate are putting their stamp on the nations preparations for natural disasters and threats from terrorism. The focus on preparing the nation in the Bush administration began after 9/11 and then intensified after Katrina. The Obama Administration is not changing the direction set by the Bush Administration so much as refining it and making it more accountable in this era of diminished resources.


Earlier this Spring President Obama released the Presidential Preparedness Directive 8 (PPD 8) which laid out how the nation would prepare for disasters in the future and directed DHS and FEMA to prepare and release a set of documents within an ambitious series of deadlines over the next year. In October FEMA released the National Preparedness Goal and I commented on the document in my October blog. Earlier this month another document directed by PPD 8 was released, the National Preparedness System description.


Preparedness is all about building and maintaining capability. The new National Preparedness Goal identified the Nation’s core capabilities across five mission areas: Prevention, Protection, Mitigation, Response, and Recovery. Mass Care Services is one of fourteen core capabilities in the Response Mission Area. But what is capability? In 2007 the Bush Administration, in the National Preparedness Guidelines, defined capability as "the combination of elements required to deliver the desired outcome." The new National Preparedness System description defines capabilities as "the means to accomplish a mission, function, or objective based on the performance of related tasks, under specified conditions, to target levels of performance."


The key part of that definition is the phrase "to target levels of performance." The phrase looks like accountability, walks like accountability and smells like accountability. The people looking for this accountability are in Congress, and they have, in typical federal government fashion, thrown billions of dollars in the last decade at states and communities and fire departments and police departments and fancy emergency operations centers in an effort to build the nation's capability. And to what end? Are we more prepared? We don't know, but we sure spent a lot of money on it. 


In June of this year I wrote about creating national standards for mass care resources and how that can help to develop mass care capability. The State of Florida Mass Care & Emergency Assistance Capability Level Guide, adopted this year, makes an effort to define mass care by "related tasks, under specified conditions, to target levels of performance." To evaluate the mass care performance of a jurisdiction during an event or exercise the evaluator must compare performance against a targeted level. If the performance does not meet the target then corrective action is needed. The corrective action could be to apply for a grant for federal funds using the evaluation as justification. Or the corrective action could be to fire the mass care coordinator.


What all this really means is that target levels will drive accountability and federal dollars to jurisdictions. So who gets to decide at what levels the targets should be for a given jurisdiction?                     The federal government in Washington? How will that go over? Not too well. They tried that already with the Target Capabilities List in 2007, to much wailing and gnashing of teeth by the locals.


So let each jurisdiction set their own target levels for each core capabilities. But who's got the time for that? And that leaves the funding process open to gaming by each jurisdiction by setting high targets that need lots of federal dollars to achieve.


I am curious to see how FEMA sets this thing up. Stay tuned.

The National Preparedness Goal for Mass Care

FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate announced the publication of the National Preparedness Goal this month and "Mass Care Services" is one of the national core capabilities identified in the document. The NPG is the first of several outcomes directed by Presidential Policy Directive / PPD-8: National Preparedness, released in March of this year. Buried in PPD-8, the NPG and The National Preparedness System document (due to be released next month) is verbiage designed to better target the dwindling future stream of homeland security dollars.

With headlines like "How Far Did $635 Billion Spent on Homeland Security Go?," and Congress seeking more accountability of where the money is going, FEMA and DHS must be able to answer the following questions:

• How Prepared are we?
• Where are the shortfalls in capability?
• Who gets the priority for resources?

The previous administration tried to tackle this monster with the Targeted Capability List (TCL), among other things, to less than rave reviews from state and local emergency managers. From 2007-2009 I participated on a mass care working group assembled by the FEMA Preparedness Directorate to prepare the next version of the TCL. Called Capability Level Guidance (CLG), we developed a pretty good document for mass care. FEMA decided to hold off on publishing the document until the new PPD-8 and the NPG were released. I didn't want to wait that long. 

The problem was that there was no doctrine anywhere on coordinating mass care at the state level. There was no way that that I could objectively measure the mass care capability for the state, or to establish a standard that I could train to. The Mass Care CLG that we developed was the first and only document that fit the bill. And FEMA wanted to wait on it.

So I took the document, de-federalized it, and added some Florida specific items that wouldn't fit in a national document. The document was still 95% like the original. I worked with my mass care partners in the state to get their buy-in, and then asked the Florida Division of Emergency Management to agree to adopt it as the mass care capability standard for the State Emergency Response Team. The State of Florida Mass Care Capability Level Guidance was released in July 2011.

With the release of the NPG FEMA will get in the business of defining core capabilities. A core capability is made up of distinct critical elements necessary to achieve the National Preparedness Goal. A capability provides the means to achieve an outcome. Mission Areas - Prevention, Protection, Mitigation, Response and Recovery - are groups of core capabilities. Mass Care Services is one of the core capabilities in the Response Mission Area.

The term "mass care" is commonly understood in the emergency management community as feeding, sheltering and distribution of relief supplies to disaster survivors. Mass Care Services is defined in the National Preparedness Goal (NPG) as: "Provide life-sustaining services to the affected population with a focus on hydration, feeding, and sheltering to those who have the most need, as well as support for reunifying families."

If we want to define the amount of mass care resources that we want to pay for, then we need to define what level of outcome we want this capability to achieve. In the NPG FEMA started this process by assigning each core capability one or more performance thresholds. The preliminary (which means FEMA is amenable to modification) targets for Mass Care Services are:

"1. Move and deliver resources and capabilities to meet the needs of disaster survivors, including
individuals with access and functional needs and others who may be considered to be at-risk.
2. Establish, staff, and equip emergency shelters and other temporary housing options (including
accessible housing) for the affected population.
3. Move from congregate care to non-congregate care alternatives and provide relocation assistance or
interim housing solutions for families unable to return to their pre-disaster homes."

As the NPG makes clear: "The capability targets - the performance threshold(s) for each core capability - will guide our allocation of resources in support of our national preparedness."

The mass care community needs to be involved in this discussion about capability. We can start by understanding the National Preparedness Goal. Next up, next month, is the release of the National Preparedness System. This document will provide more detail about defining and measuring capability.