The 2016 National Hurricane Conference in Orlando

This is the 11th National Hurricane Conference (NHC) that I've attended in a row. I missed the 2003 and 2004 Conferences because of my involvement in the Iraq war. I enjoy the Conferences not only because of the information disseminated in the sessions and exhibits but because of the opportunity to network and meet new people in the mass care community.

Red Crosser Katherine Galifinakis (l) and I presenting at the Shelter Transition Workshop
 on Thursday, the final day of the Conference.

On Monday I participated in a day long session on the Shelter Field Guide (follow the link to the National Mass Care Strategy website to obtain an electronic copy). This class wasn't on how to be a shelter manager but on how to best utilize the Guide to solve common problems presented during sheltering. We worked in groups to solve injects involving a church that decides to shelter survivors of a large local disaster. I learned a lot about not only sheltering but how useful the Guide could be.

Al Vliet from FEMA (standing) was one of the instructors for the Shelter Field Guide Training.

Tuesday, the second day of training offered at the conference, was meteorological day for me. Three of the four sessions I attended were taught by our friends at the National Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service. The highlight of the day was the session on Atlantic hurricane forecasting taught by noted Colorado State University forecaster Phil Klotzbach (see a copy of his presentation here). Phil gave us some hints on the upcoming hurricane season but is saving his final judgment for his soon to be released April 14th forecast.

My good friend from the Salvation Army Kevin Smith (seated, near right) listens
with me to noted hurricane forecaster Phil Klotzbach.

The highlight for Wednesday was our "Voluntary Agency Rap Session." The session was well attended and the discussion was dominated by the obscure, but important, process for using the value of donated resources and volunteer hours to aid state and local jurisdictions during federally declared disasters. When the President declares an emergency under the Stafford Act the federal government helps defray select costs of the disaster (normally 75%). In some disasters the expenses are so great that some local communities are hard pressed to pay their share of the remaining 25%.

This is where the voluntary agencies can help these communities by documenting the donated resources and volunteer hours that they contribute to the response and recovery. In some disasters this contribution can mean a lot of money to the beleaguered local jurisdictions. But like everything else with the federal government when it comes to money this means documentation, documentation and more documentation. The discussion in the Rap Session was centered around how the voluntary agencies could meet this documentation requirement. An example of a form developed in Colorado to document volunteer hours is shown below.

FEMA, who must accept and validate whatever  the voluntary agencies provide, does not want to be prescriptive about how the documentation is submitted. This is understandable but leaves the voluntary agencies guessing as to how they are going to meet this requirement. Everyone needs to come up with a process that FEMA will accept, but no one wants to take the time and effort during a disaster to gather detailed information that will be denied by some FEMA Reservist in a Joint Field Office 9 months later.

Thursday, the final day of the National Hurricane Conference, offered multiple mass care workshops. My favorite, of course, was the one that I offered as a topic last December and was accepted: Shelter Transition. Shelter transition is the multi-agency process by which survivors in a congregate shelter are moved to some sort of appropriate housing.

Shelter transition is an important and vital part of concluding a mass care response and yet there is no written guidance or instructions to aid the local emergency manager in performing this task. To help fill this void the Red Cross and FEMA are creating a multiagency working group to address this issue. I will be one of the Project Leaders for this effort. I will have more to say about this project at a future date.

This year's National Hurricane Conference was a success from my point of view. I learned a lot, cemented some mass care relationships and made some new ones. My farewell to everyone as I left the last Thursday session was one that I have made many times before:

"I hope that I don't see you this summer!"

The 2014 National Hurricane Conference

The 2014 National Hurricane Conference is over and now I will have to wait until next year in Austin, TX to see all my mass care friends again. Actually, that's not true, since the Florida Governors Hurricane Conference is in 3 weeks and the National Mass Care Exercise is the week after that. April and May has abundant opportunities for the renewal of mass care friendships.

There was something missing from the 2014 NHC. As Gregg O'Ryon, Vice President for the American Red Cross, pointed out to me, the NHC wasn't helped by the movement of the GHC from Ft. Lauderdale to Orlando this year. The result was 2 hurricane conferences with 4 weeks of each other and both in hotels within spitting distance of each other on International Drive.

There was a drop in the number of Red Cross people at the NHC. The Florida Red Cross people will all be going to the GHC. There also seemed to be a shortage of Femites at the Conference (although Craig Fugate made it and gave a good speech). I could understand the shortage last year because of the sequester but we needed more FEMA mass care people at the conference. I think the reason for the continued absence of FEMA people is the lingering effects of last year's IRS Conference scandal. Getting approval to attend a conference if you're a federal employee is a giant pain in the you-know-what.

A big piece of what was missing at the NHC this year compared to the last 2 years was the absence of a hurricane impact the previous season. The 2012 NHC was filled with enthusiastic North-easterners detailing their newfound knowledge and wisdom gained from battling Tropical Storm Irene. At the 2013 NHC some of the same North-easterners returned, somewhat chastened and wiser, to recount their struggles with Hurricane Sandy (I refuse to call it a superstorm).

The big event last year was the floods in Colorado. We would have all benefited if we could have gotten some people from Colorado to talk about their sheltering issues and maybe some Red Cross people to give us a report on how their new Disaster Relief Operation structure worked out.

But we couldn't invite them because the disaster wasn't a hurricane. There's something wrong with this picture. We had Salvation Army people from Oklahoma at the NHC, and they haven't had any hurricanes there in a while, or maybe ever.

What we need at the NHC, or at least the mass care portion of the NHC, are training and workshops on the latest techniques and best practices in mass care, regardless of whether the techniques and best practices  were learned in a Rocky Mountain Flood or the National Mass Care Exercise.

I think the mass care community might be able to do something about that.

Creating a state Mass Care Services Doctrine

I have stumbled through the wreckage and tumult of emergency operations centers as the occupants try, and sometimes fail, to manage a big disaster. A recurring theme in these situations is how the inhabitants sort themselves into categories. There are those who know that they don’t know what they’re doing, who know that they are steering the boat over the falls, but see no other choice but to grip the tiller and await the outcome. The really interesting ones are those who don’t know what they’re doing, and don’t know it. They may even be riding a delusional wave of euphoria, caught up in the excitement of the disaster and think that they are doing well. The ones who know what they are doing, and know that they know what they are doing, are mixed in among the others, camouflaged by their silence, waiting in vain for someone to ask them what needs to be done. They don’t speak up because they know that unsolicited advice will be wasted. The former category can’t absorb the advice because they are already resigned to their fate, while the latter category disregard their words because they think they already have it all figured out.

In August 2004, after almost 5 years in the job, I discovered how little I really knew about coordinating mass care at the state level. Hurricane Charlie plowed into Charlotte County as a Category 4 hurricane, crossed the state and exited into the Atlantic Ocean as a Category 1 near Daytona Beach. At the State EOC we were inundated with requests from over 25 hurricane-impacted counties comprising millions of people. I know that my frantic and frustrating actions included very little productive mass care coordination. And I knew it at the time.


What is sad about this story is how hard I had worked the previous 4 years to get ready for that moment. My problem stemmed from the fact that most of my efforts were focused on procedures to make things run right in the EOC. I know now that I had a role to play in that world outside the building. After 8 storms in 16 months I started to figure out what that role was. What is also sad about this story is that there wasn't a book, manual, document or scrap of paper that explained how to do my job. The role of State Mass Care Coordinator wasn’t defined. There was no state mass care doctrine for me to learn.

One dictionary defines doctrine as “a body or system of teachings relating to a particular subject.” Doctrine could also be defined as “something that is taught.” The new National Preparedness Goal defines Mass Care Services 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.” At the national level, FEMA and the American Red Cross are responsible for coordinating the implementation of Mass Care Services in a disaster.

The American Red Cross has assembled a doctrine on providing mass care at the local level from the vast history and experience of the organization. The doctrine is written in manuals and disseminated in classroom instruction by local Chapters year round. To borrow a term from the military, this is tactical doctrine. Mass care tactical doctrine explains how trained individuals and resources arrive at the disaster area and feed, shelter and distribute relief supplies to the affected population. This doctrine works fine for the hundreds of smaller emergencies, events and disasters that occur in the nation every year.

The principle voluntary agencies that perform Mass Care Services across the nation (the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army and the Southern Baptists) struggle to deliver the level of service that the public expects during big disasters. These struggles are not necessarily the fault of the voluntary agencies. Their ability to marshal volunteers (which they have trained at their expense), equipment (which they have paid for) and salaried employees from around the nation and employ them in support of local jurisdictions during a disaster is a feat that does not always receive the appropriate recognition. But their resources are not infinite. Their capabilities and the amount of resources that they can deliver in a crisis are dependent on public support and the donated dollar. For this reason, public criticism of their actions or non-actions by elected officials caught up in the emotions of the response is never helpful.

Fortunately, our country doesn’t have to deal with catastrophic disasters very often. For most emergency managers, when the Big One comes it is their first big disaster. For those that have done it before, their previous experience may not provide a good example. And too often the local politicians decide that this event is “important” and requires their uninformed, uneducated and ill-considered usurpation of the roles for which their emergency managers have been training and preparing for a life time. Is it any wonder that we don’t do well?

We have a tactical mass care doctrine that serves us well in all disasters. What we don’t have, and what we need, is an operational mass care doctrine. Borrowing again from the military (and simplifying the concept considerably) operational doctrine is about moving the resources into place so that the tactical doctrine can be executed. We practice operational tasks infrequently. The mass care community has a lot of skilled, dedicated professionals who have worked numerous big disasters. In some cases they are the ones in the emergency operations centers who know what to do, and know that they know what to do. They understand, through harsh experience, the need for operational doctrine, although they may not phrase it in those terms.

The best and most effective way to manage a disaster, especially a Big One, is in a collaborative manner, utilizing the resources of all the agencies available in the community. This is the philosophical basis for the Whole of Community concept now being promoted by FEMA and other agencies. There are some elected officials who, when the disaster strikes, take control of all emergency management actions, arrive at decisions without consultation with their state, federal, nonprofit and private sector partners, issue directives to their partners as if they were subordinates and then micro-manage the execution of these directives. This approach can, and has, caused unnecessary suffering to the survivors who have the misfortune to live in that jurisdiction. We can only shake our heads at such actions and leave any resolution to the electoral process.

For the great, sane, majority in the rest of the nation we need a collaborative, operational Mass Care Services doctrine. The central actor in any such doctrine must be the state government. Why? Because only the Governor of the State can request federal mass care resources on behalf of the local jurisdictions. By definition, operational actions are only necessary when the local jurisdictions are overwhelmed and need additional resources. The voluntary agencies can bring in their own national assets on their own authority and frequently do so. But what if the voluntary agencies are overwhelmed? Then state and federal assets must be committed by a designated State Mass Care Coordinator trained to do the job.

I have written here before about our efforts to create a State Mass Care Coordinator’s Course (see the new State Mass Care Coordinator's Course). And the national mass care community has been able to develop some documents that explain how the collaborative process should work to coordinate mass care at the state level. These documents can be found on the National Voluntary Agencies Active in Disaster website as well as the National Mass Care Strategy website. These documents, which are the first steps towards an operational Mass Care Services doctrine, are: The Multi-Agency Feeding Plan Template, the Feeding Task Force Guidance Document, the Sheltering Guidance Aid, Household Disaster Feeding, and Federal Mass Care Resources Coordination. To further assist this training process FEMA is publishing Mass Care Resource Typing documents (read about this development here).

Finally, in furtherance of the National Mass Care Strategy, we are holding a National Mass Care Exercise annually in order to train present and future State Mass Care Coordinators from around the nation, as well as mass care workers from the federal, state, local, & voluntary agencies and private sector. The first such National Mass Care Exercise was held in Tallahassee, FL in May 2012 (read the after action report). Another National Mass Care Exercise is planned for Tallahassee in May 2013. The intent of these exercises is to give the national mass care community a chance to practice these operational procedures and train in the difficult but essential collaborative coordination processes that are essential to a successful mass care response.

Hopefully, through these actions, we can help some future State Mass Care Coordinator prepare and do a better job than I did during Hurricane Charlie in August 2004.

IAEM Conference - next year in Orlando, FL

This was an excellent Conference, not only because of the international composition of the attendance  but due to the wider scope of hazards other than hurricanes. There are people in this country who actually worry about earthquakes. Amazing.

I am thrilled that the Conference will be held in Orlando, FL next year. This will dramatically increase my odds of attendance and decrease the costs to the government of my participation .

The U.S. Air Force was well represented at the Conference and we had a respectable contingent of Army officers also on hand. There were some FEMA people on hand but not as many as at the other emergency management conferences that I attend. What also caught my eye was the number of Left Coast participants, particularly from California and Washington State. There were also a lot of local emergency managers from all over the country and its good to hear the different perspectives that they bring.

The Red Cross and Salvation  Army were well represented, with some of the usual suspects here as well as the opportunity for me to meet and interact with mass care professionals from other parts of this nation.Jeff Jellets from the Salvation Army and I gave a presentation on Tuesday on "What's New (and Important) in Mass Care." I credit Jeff for making up the sexy title.

Jeff talked about the new National Mass Care Strategic Council and their charge to develop a National Mass Care Strategy. He also promoted the Mass Care Feeding Template, available at the National VOAD site. This template was developed  by a national working group (on which I participated) to help the emergency management and mass care communities resolve some of the feeding "challenges" that were encountered in 2008 during the responses to hurricanes Gustav and Ike.

I spoke about the National Incident Management System Mass Care Working Group (MCWG), of which I am the Chairman. For the last three years we have been working on resource typing, an effort to standardize naming conventions and capability descriptions mass care resources nationwide. This effort encompasses everything from Field Kitchens and Food Distribution Vehicles to Shelter Management Teams to State Mass Care Coordinators (like me). Our first set of documents were passed to FEMA in August for approval and should be made available for public comment soon (that is, in FEMA's definition of "soon").

I brought a lot of business cards and used them and was able to expand my network of emergency management professionals, which is a lot of what these conferences are about. I attended a lot of informative workshops and speeches and broadened my base of professional knowledge, which is the second important part of these conferences. There is still a lot that I need to learn in the ever changing world of emergency management.

Tonight is the banquet where I get to walk across the stage and receive my Certified Emergency Management Certification from IAEM. I am looking forward to it. I am also looking forward to returning to Tallahassee tomorrow.