Posted on 03/03/2006 7:07:04 PM PST by Richard Kimball
There’s an old saying that if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. I have a sinking suspicion that the solutions the government will propose for dealing with future Hurricane Katrinas will confirm the saying. I’ve been watching the coverage of Katrina, the accusations, the problems, the drownings, the recovery and everything else. Congress will have hearings, the hearings will result in modifications of our response plans, extra funding and ultimately, probably the same sad results next time around. A recent article confirms my fears. The government has funded another 2500 coordinators, and is concerned that they won’t be able to get them hired in time for the next hurricane season.
FEMA, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Fire Academy are run and staffed by bureaucrats. They are neither creative or quick moving. Since becoming the dominant force in the fire service in the U. S., the National Fire Academy has encouraged a cultural mindset that allows departments to do roughly the same thing, but requires three times as many personnel and ten times as much money. Such is the case with most government bureaucracies. In some ways, Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to FEMA. Their employment ranks will swell, they’ll get more authority, they’ll open hundreds of new offices, their budget will increase by billions, and their edicts will be fast-tracked into law. These proposed solutions will consume a lot of money and make the problem worse.
Bureaucrats are by nature defensive, careful, and like redundancy. They also like to propagate the bureaucracy. Their solution will be to add several layers of management, additional forms, a department of oversight, and require additional reports and documentation. When confronted with a crisis, they draw everything closer to the vest, centralize decision making, and inhibit independent action at lower levels. The emergency plans will get thicker, although most of them would already kill a dog if they fell off the refrigerator.
The government already has an agency that provides an excellent role model for dealing with future emergencies, but it’s doubtful FEMA will consider it as a role model for dealing with future disasters. The model is the United States Marine Corps.
Here are a few truths about emergency situations. The Marine Corps understands these truths, FEMA does not.
Any emergency plan that’s too complex to fit inside your head is not an emergency plan. The massive notebooks of emergency plans that get passed around are bureaucratic busy work. People don’t study emergency plans, and when an emergency occurs, people don’t open books and sit down for a good read.
No emergency plan survives the first encounter. Some things don’t work in real life like they do on paper. Personnel must be able to take action independently when the situation changes.
In emergencies, people work with incomplete and rapidly changing information. If they wait until they’re 90% sure of the proper solution, the situation they’re preparing for no longer exists. The designed solution will not work in the new situation. Once you’re 70% sure, move. More equipment is frequently just more garbage to get in the way. People need adequate equipment, but in most instances, organizations with big budgets are less effective because they spend too many resources on self-maintenance and fail to make good use of existing equipment.
Your logistics operations will either make you look like a genius or an idiot. Logistics is the art of getting what you need where you need it when you need it. You need the buses before the flood. You need the boats after the flood.
The emergency acts according to it’s plan, not yours. You have to adapt to the emergency, not expect the emergency to adapt to you.
Train all personnel in core competencies.
Motivate your people to be successful.
Cross-train people. Specialists are seldom of much worth in an emergency. It’s seldom that the location of the emergency requiring expertise will coincide with the location of the person having the expertise.
Maybe FEMA will figure out how to move quickly, recover from errors, react to changing situations in minutes instead of weeks, and quit basing every decision on what will look good in their annual report, but I’m not counting on it.
It took about 3 pages. You must cover bio hazard, chemical hazard, radiation hazard, electrical failure, tornado, earthquake, hurricane, broken glass, non-working toilets, shelter in place, etc.
There is a real limit to what people can grasp, and 3 pages is about it.
Then you make a list of names of who is supposed to be there so you can find out who's healthy, and who's not, when disaster hit. Very important to know what you've got to work with.
Yes, Northern Virginia gets hit with hurricanes every now and then.
In the blog, I was talking specifically about FEMA plans. New Orleans should have coordinated those on a local level. They scattered all their resources in the wind (buses underwater, inadequate provisions at Superdome, cops taking part in the looting), but FEMA has a coordinator in every jurisdiction that was supposed to have spent the last twenty years putting together and practicing the plan. For example, the NOISD bus service provider should have had one person in place with a call back list of bus drivers (preferably one of the senior dispatchers). The buses should be serviced with full tanks four days prior to expected landfall. Drivers should have specific pick up areas (generally one on their route). Other cities were prepared to receive refugees, so you dispatch the buses to specific cities, get names and contact information when they get off the bus. That way, each individual's portion of the plan is simple:
Coordinator: Notify bus drivers. Give pick up point, destination, and time to begin evacuation.
Driver: Service bus, go to pick up point, leave when loaded up, get names prior to letting people off.
Simple, fits in the brain, and follows normal procedures as closely as possible.
Do you realize that FEMA is just a shell organization to coordinate other relief efforts? They are not a first responder. They don't have staff that is trained in rescue. They are a beauracracy. They are only capable of being as efficient as your local driver's license station. 10 people do the work of two. Ask yourself this...why is it that Florida can evacuate four times without a hitch and New Orleans can't get 500,000 people out of town with three to four days notice? You could almost walk to Houston from New Orleans in that amount of time. FEMA is a joke, but so is relying on the federal government for anything. If our government was reliable in the least, those levies would have been built properly in the first place.
Absolutely. I also know where they're going. Regional managers are supposed to coordinate between different agencies. New Orleans regional manager fubared, Houston's didn't, nor did Florida's. What's taking place, though, is the slow federalization of the emergency services. Fire departments are all required to adopt the National Incident Management System now, to improve interoperability. At this time, they're funding fire departments through grants as a carrot, with a stick being to accept certain standard operating procedures. Currently, these are not particularly onerous, but they're getting more so. One example is required use of the National Incident Management Reporting System (NFIRS). These are filled out online and collected in a national database.
They also sell firefighting as being more hazardous than it actually is. This creates a "great need" for improved safety. I receive notification of all firefighters killed "in line of duty". They allow 77 year old volunteers who died from a heart attack a day after the run to be declared as line of duty. They've also listed line of duty deaths from guys having heart attacks mopping up the truck room.
Don't get me wrong, bad stuff can happen. 9/11, for example. However, if you look individually at the number of firefighters killed in the "line of duty" nationwide, annually, usually about twenty of them were killed in something other than a vehicle accident or from a heart attack. It's our dirty little secret, but firefighting is probably less dangerous than being an electrician.
You're correct. FEMA is a joke, but it's a joke that wants to have operational control over all emergency services in the US.
Currently, I train people to be firefighters. I have to meet requirements set out by FEMA, the Texas Commission on Fire Protection, Natrional Fire Protection Association standards, the International Fire Service Accredidation Congress, and OSHA requirements as adopted by the state.
Some of these requirements are not bad, but they operate on the premise that everyone is an idiot. For example, new OSHA regulations require two in, two out. That means firefighters cannot enter a fire structure, except for rescue purposes, unless four firefighters are on scene. Two then enter the structure, and two remain outside in case they need rescuing. There's very little risk in entering a structure, even alone, with a line, as long as you can see your exit point. However, because most units staff with three personnel, you have to stand by on scene until a second unit arrives, delaying attack by up to five or six minutes. My contention is that it's safer to make an initial attack earlier with two personnel inside and one out, reading the structure for collapse signs, than to stand around for six minutes waiting for the next unit. Most single family structures are a total loss after fifteen minutes of unrestricted burn time, so the additional wait makes the initial attack a moot point. Beyond that, my costs to outfit personnel have gone from $2800 to over $4,000 in the last two years because of new requirements for gear. Some of the stuff they want is just stupid. For example, new bunker coats have to have a grab handle so if you're unconscious, people can drag you out. It costs an extra $100, and is no more convenient than using the SCBA strap that's already there. They require all this new, expensive gear, then declare we have to stand in the front yard until the house is beyond saving. And all of that's because the state requires me to. The state requires me to because the feds require them to. What's the difference between that and a federalized fire department?
I guess you were in Atlanta taking cultural awareness classes while New Orleans was flooding then...all I know is that when the Doppler Radar says Category 5, I am not waiting around for FEMA to tell me what to do. I would advise that you do the same. Good luck and thank you for the work you do.
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