It's All on the Table

Joanna Hanks and Fred Williamson


 

Williamson

Hanks

Dress Rehearsal

 

Think of Hurricane Isabel as a trial run for a possible terrorist attack. The storm exposed significant flaws in Virginia’s disaster-response systems.


 

During the recent unpleasantness created by Mother Nature, yours trulies had the opportunity to serve as American Red Cross volunteers. We spent the night of the hurricane in a shelter as ARC liaisons with the Henrico County shelter-management team, 

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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Contact Information

Hanks-Williamson & Associates
P.O. Box 9637
Richmond, VA 23228

Joanna D. Hanks
(804) 512-4652
jdh@hwagroup.com

Fred Williamson
(804) 512-4653
fhw@hwagroup.com

Website: Hanks-Williamson & Associates