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coordinating meals, sleeping arrangements
(wrestling mats on the gym floor) and other needs.
The next day we helped conduct a preliminary
damage assessment in Hanover
County.
On
our travels throughout eastern Hanover,
we saw tremendous evidence of the beneficence of
the Deity, considering the circumstances. We must
have catalogued a thousand trees that fell away
from the homes and buildings they stood next to,
and another thousand that missed by only a few
feet. Many observers of hurricanes, tornadoes and
other examples of nature's nastiness over the
years have commented on their apparent
capriciousness. Folks, it could have been worse, a
lot worse.
Our
experiences also got us to wondering: Are
Virginia's disaster-response systems up to the
task of coping with a terrorist attack? After 9-11-01, anyone who doesn’t consider a terrible surprise from
the bad guys a very real possibility is out to
lunch and, hopefully, won’t bother to come back.
Having
spent years in operations centers, deciding on
school openings and closings, raising families and
engaging in other activities where learning to hit
the curve ball is a necessity, we are convinced
there are three absolute essentials to responding
to the out of the ordinary: well thought-out
plans, good information, and good communications.
Contingency
plans force you to think about what might be and
to plan out a logical response. They help you to
identify in advance, rather than in the heat of
the crisis, what resources you will need to
implement your response and, importantly, where
and how you might actually get them. They also
provide a basis for coordinating your actions with
those of others so that you can plug serious gaps
in your response and avoid duplication of scarce
resources.
Good
information falls into two general categories. The
first is what you can collect in advance to
organize the implementation of your plan. The
second is operational information that you cull
from people “on the ground,” the media, the
Web, other jurisdictions, et al, that enable you
to judge the extent of the emergency you are
dealing with and how well your planned response is
going.
Good
communications must be reliable and ubiquitous:
Everyone should be able to talk to everyone they
need to when they need to. Based on our
observations of the Isabel experience, if the
local cellular systems had gone down, central
Virginia
would have been in a world of hurt. A related
point: In the recent incident, the governor dashed
around to command centers and stayed in contact
with operational elements. But could he have
gotten in contact with the rest of us?
What
would happen if some group less random than Mother
Nature had been out to do us harm? We have
followed the governor’s announcements about the
grants the Commonwealth has received from the
Department of Homeland Security in the wake of 9-11-01.
As best we can ascertain, nearly all of the
funding has gone to buy firefighting equipment.
While it is indeed important to properly equip the
first responders, firefighting was the issue in
the past but may not be in the future. Just as the
military must guard against fighting the last war,
those preparing to fight terrorism must allocate
scarce homeland security resources to things that
will address future needs. In our opinion, some serious
funding needs to go to increasing the capabilities
of our Emergency Operations Centers.
During
our wanderings on behalf of the Red Cross, we
visited a couple of such centers and found them
far too dependent on telephones, without dedicated
telecommunications or intercommunications that
would have worked with gas masks. Both centers
were powered by generators but lacked air
conditioning that would have made it feasible to
work in protective clothing for extended periods.
Neither facility appeared to be capable of
maintaining atmospheric overpressure that would
keep out chemical or biological pollutants. Water
for coffee or washing simply came out of the
spigot. Besides these obvious shortcomings, no one
appeared to know what EOCs in other jurisdictions
were doing.
None
of these limitations were a problem during Isabel
because we knew what we were dealing with, when it
would arrive, and when it would be gone. One of
the local TV weather persons said we could play
golf by Saturday and, sure enough, on that very
day, at the golf course nearby our offices, the
parking lot was full of folks out playing mud
hockey. What if we had not known what was coming
next or when or where?
The
region’s largest lingering concern from Isabel
was getting electrical power restored and the
attendant discomforts attending that particular
outage, which, incidentally, according to our
informal surveying, was not surprising in light of
the large number of trees that Mother chose to
throw onto power lines or utility poles. Other
than the hazard of stubbing one’s toe in the
darkness or suffering TV, microwave, and hot
shower withdrawal symptoms, life went on.
Shelters
are an important part of any emergency protection
planning, of course. Here in the Greater Richmond
area we have some excellent school facilities to
use for shelters. They kept folks out of the wind
and rain and away from falling trees while
offering a warm, dry place to grab a little sleep
and a couple of hot meals from the Red Cross. How
would they perform in a terrorist attack? Not very
well, in all likelihood. They are not equipped
with counter biological systems or protective
gear.
One
small story offers a precautionary tale. When the
school/shelter in which we were assisting switched
over to generator power, the hiccup in the power
levels triggered the school bell. The “bell”
in this modern facility, delivered via the sound
system rather than the old-fashioned striker on
metal, is clear, loud and penetrating. No one, not
even the school maintenance people called in
during the height of the storm, could figure it
out. All night long, every 2.5 seconds, “Big
Ben” pealed out loudly to the immense
dissatisfaction of the 60-some souls in residence
who literally had no place else to go. Finally, in
desperation, fire department paramedics dismantled
a number of speakers, some of which were located
in 25-foot-high ceilings.
We
have built schools as places to educate our
children and our emergency operations capabilities
to deal with natural disasters. We are woefully
ill-prepared to deal with evil intent. The
Constitution assigns a high priority to government
providing for the common defense. Our military,
which excels at head-to-head combat, cannot help
much if terrorists strike the domestic population.
Nor, we would add, do we necessarily want to have
the military involved. Civilian security is a
state-level issue, and state political,
government, and business leaders had best start
giving it some serious attention if we don’t
want some historian writing years from now how
Isabel was a wake-up call that we missed.
--
October 20, 2003
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