SCTF1 Personnel performing search training at SCFA US&R site in Columbia, SC

I reported to work this morning and caught this news as I walked in the door.  This quake was reported as being an 8.8 and is also the cause of a tsunami that is expected to strike various nations in the Pacific basin.  I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this over the next few days and since I’m not a “news” blog, I’d suggest keeping an eye on this from our other FireEMSblog partners who are.  Here’s the article from Reuters.

While I have been hearing reports that Chile’s infrastructure is significantly more robust than Haiti’s was prior to the quake, an 8.8 magnitude quake can’t be good for anything requiring stability, so once daylight hits there, I’m sure we’ll hear a lot more.  As far as US&R assets, I’m sure we’ll also be hearing about requests for those although just like before, I think Haiti was an anomaly in the deployment of any American teams other than the ones who are contracted through USAID (so if you are a FEMA or State team not on that very short roster, I wouldn’t be packing my bags quite yet).  However, I felt pretty stupid the last time when I said, “oh, no, only teams assigned through USAID go to disasters out of country”, and a day later all kinds of teams were getting put on standby.  Never say never, I guess; Just goes to show you there really aren’t any experts in emergency service management.

Keep these folks in our prayers.  They’ll need them.

My Grandfather "Smokey", my sister Colleen, and Smokey Bear. Unknown which cousin is in Grandpop's arm.

Trust is the mortar, the bond between power and responsibility.  Without empowerment, people are unable to act on their vision.  Give someone power and they are free to create all kinds of possibilities.  And in turn, if you give someone power and they squander those opportunities, those with power are reluctant to share it again.

There are several reasons why “leaders” fail to empower others, some of which involve the hesitancy to trust others to use the power wisely.  There may have been a precipitating event to foster this mistrust, or a cumulative effect may have occurred.  There are those who distrust others based on perception.

Take, for example, those who mistrust others because of outward appearances.  If you come into my place of business to get a job and don’t look professional, if I’m trying hard to convey a professional appearance, then you shouldn’t be surprised if it requires me a moment to trust in you.  Dressing the part goes a long way toward opening doors; in fact, it opens more doors than closes them.  But this is just the beginning: speaking my language- not just English, but using intellect and knowing the jargon- permits me to believe I can trust in you that you know what I know.  Using logic permits me to believe that you are mature and understanding of the options, and thus, maybe trustworthy.  None of this in and of itself should establish your credibility; you may dress like a slob and be a genius.  You may not have good English skills and yet have an amazing amount of information to share.  You may be one of those crazy artists who isn’t very logical, but has an excellent abstract way of looking at a problem.  But each of these things allows me a good feeling that I can take as: this person understands that what I think is important, they think is important.

Now while you can dress the part and talk the talk, that doesn’t make you trustworthy.  That’s the realm of the con man.  That gets you in the door.  The essential element is that once I allow you to open the door, you prove that the small amount of trust I hand over to you is nurtured and used appropriately.  Furthermore, if I permit you this trust, if something goes wrong, instead of stepping away from the situation, you own it and work to resolve it, I’m more willing to at least extend you a certain amount of trust again.

It’s completely give and take and it requires a certain amount of credit and repayment.  But given that transactional experience, a partnership between people is formed and the bond increases, just as mortar cures over time.

Right now in Haiti, for the survival of their nation, true leaders must come to the forefront.  They have an opportunity to rebuild their nation and make it strong.  There was a lot of work to be done before the disaster and the squandered trust between the “leadership” and the people is certainly a problem.  But when I know for fact that a lot of work is needed to restore their infrastructure, that indicates to me many opportunities for people to shine, to show others their devotion to hard work, to innovation, and to creativity.  If the leaders really desire change for the better, they need to foster a new generation of Haitians with power to improve their economy and their standard of life.  And while the disaster is only a week or so old, and the devastation so close at hand, it makes it difficult to focus on the future, but the future is there and waiting.  Once the fog lifts, enlightened leaders should seek those who desire a strong nation and employ them to rebuild it.

In this nation as well, there are those of us who are sick and tired of the two party system, the system that seems to be all about itself and not about us, and desire leaders who don’t give in to the rhetoric of the ultra-left or ultra-right.  There are those of us who simply desire to do right by each other, to look out for one another and not see things in the extremes but in shades of gray, because we all have value, and we should all be able to engage our dreams, but not at the expense of others’ dreams.

In your particular environment, insure that those around you are given the trust they need to succeed, and if you are in the position that someone entrusts you, make the most of it.  Insure you give back what you receive, and share that power as well, and create opportunities for others, and work together to make each other stronger.  Together we are greater than the sum of our parts.  That’s what synergy is all about.  Given the right amount of trust and taking responsibility for our actions (or our failures), we can grow and we can achieve excellence.

The information went on by telling  us that “they divided the city in 25 sectors across the most affected area. Search Operations runs during day time only due to Security issues. Rescue Operations continue during the night when and only when live victims are found”.  The UN sounds like they are handling much of the logistical coordination as well, which makes sense because they already had a presence there.  Transportation to missions are provided by United Nations vehicles and the UN provides force protection with Military Police for the teams.

From this report, it sounds like New York TF 1, Florida TFs 1 and 2, Virginia 1, California 2, and Colorado 1 are working in country, as well as teams from Jamaica, Costa Rica, Salvador, Peru, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Luxemburg, Canada, Russia, Spain, China, France, Iceland, St. Domingo, Mexico, Netherlands, the UK and Colombia.

SC-TF1 US&R working in St. Tammany Parish, LA after Katrina.

I’m sure everyone out there continues to keep an eye on Haiti.  I’m not easily shocked, yet even I have been amazed at some of the scenes from down there.  Every time I see another bit of news, I want to go hug my children and remind myself how fortunate we are.

When friends and family see the situation there, not knowing how US&R deployments really work, I get asked if SC-TF1 is going.  Each time, I have taken that opportunity to explain the workings (and separation) between the USAID/DART assets and domestic response (FEMA US&R and State US&R assets) and how “task forces just aren’t sent to international disasters through FEMA”.  Of course, by saying “never”, something I NEVER thought I’d see in all of my years working in this business is occurring: the cooperation and coordination of FEMA with EMAC for the possibility (note I said, “possibility”, not “probability”) of State US&R Task Forces being deployed along with FEMA-sanctioned assets to an international disaster.

But all that being said, in watching the events unfolding, I continue to try to get my head around the response and it frankly has been a challenge.  With any disaster, there needs to be an attack plan, but in most cases, these plans hinge on some basic tenets of organization, none of these which seem to apply in Haiti.  Having been hit by several prior disasters recently, the country was already in extremis and the current situation obviously doesn’t improve things.

I have already heard from my sources that the teams that are there are working under heavy force protection.  Any of us that thought operating in New Orleans post-Katrina was sketchy, one look at the situation in Haiti makes us understand that at least we had the force of law SOMEWHERE on our side.  Reports have indicated that aside from the overwhelming number of missions and dangerous conditions, another part of the reason that engaging missions is problematic is because there simply isn’t any way to get the equipment from the airport to the disaster: roads were bad to begin with, there’s only one active runway at the airport, and there’s no machinery to off-load equipment and supplies.  Once the materials do happen to get onto the ground, no matter what conventions you try to apply for allocating the resources, there isn’t any guarantee the locals will comply with it anyway.

So for this disaster, there are other “sub-disasters” that make it much more dire, and even the media isn’t astute enough to understand it.  This situation is going to get MUCH worse before it gets better, because there’s no way to effectively get the help to where it needs to go, and if it did get there, there’s no guarantee that it will be applied to the right area anyway (unless you count “at gunpoint” as an effective means of allocating resources).

While equipment and supplies are arriving, we could just send everything we have to the area, but without the people who know how to work it, the equipment is useless.  While one friend of mine said to this, “If you gave me a concrete cutting saw, I could probably figure it out”; I mentioned to him that if you didn’t know water was an important part in making the saw blade cut more effectively, failing to do something as simple as that might mean the difference between extricating someone with one blade or a half-dozen blades.  It occurs to me that there are nuances of working with our US&R tools that are completely lost on the uninitiated.  I said this the other day: “It’s the definition between an organized US&R resource and ‘mobs with shovels’”.

My point is, after all this rambling, is that this is very much a teachable moment for everyone, just as I hoped Katrina and other disaster have been.  Even for some of my non-emergency service readers out there, there is an extremely important lesson to be learned: Every community must understand its vulnerabilities and the potential for disaster, and plan accordingly.

The caveat to this is, that despite the presence of a written plan, you can have every contingency covered and discussed, if you don’t understand and practice the plan, it isn’t worth the paper it is written on (Anybody remember Katrina?).

It is imperative that elected officials along with those of us who serve the public safety sector of our respective communities (AND the citizens living in those communities) understand what likely scenarios can occur, know where the vulnerable populations exist, and understand what resources are needed.

For responders: If those resources aren’t readily available, it is then incumbent upon us all to know where to get those resources, how to legally obtain and use them, and even more important, when and how to call them.

For the elected officials: It requires insistence on development of these plans as well as FUNDING to support the plans.

For non-responder citizens: Maybe you should understand that you have a part in this as well, to insure you are prepared to go it alone for at least 72 hours and maybe have some ability to rely on your own preparedness and not look to government for the total solution.  Try checking out the recommendations here at the FEMA website.

So without too much further delay, maybe this is a moment for all of you (elected officials, responders, and citizens) to dig out your volumes of plans and look through them and begin to understand not only what is in them, but at least what your part in that plan will be if, God forbid, you have to utilize them.   While we here in the United States are subject to the same disasters as other nations, at least here, there is the force of law to keep this type of situation from getting out of hand (note the sarcasm).  My suggestion: have a plan, support it, practice it, and if things go badly, USE IT.

Stay safe and let’s keep the responders as well as the citizens of Haiti in our prayers.

SC-TF1, GA, and MD-TF2 working with St. Bernard, LA at Katrina

Since there seems to be a huge lean forward from people who want to know more about US&R, and since US&R is (and has been) one of my main projects for over twenty years, I figure I’ll take the opportunity to point you all in some directions for information, as well as provide some useful links other than the standard FEMA sites.  I’ll start off with one or two and add some more as time permits.

Also, if I have missed a good link (or source), please add it, because any errors or omissions are likely just my failure to remember someone while sitting here for a moment, rather than deliberate exclusion.

I’ll start of course with my baby: the South Carolina US&R Task Force, which is a state-sponsored NIMS Type 1 equivalent US&R Task Force.  Our deployment to St. Tammany and St. Bernard Parishes during Hurricane Katrina established us on the map as a viable response asset.  While I am no longer the Director of this organization but serve as Deputy Director in an advisory role, it is still my pride and joy.

There is another US&R project of which I am very fond: the State Urban Search and Rescue Alliance, better known by its acronym, “SUSAR”.  This began as a consortium of 19 states, including Puerto Rico, meeting for the first time in July 2005 at the South Carolina Fire Academy in Columbia, SC.  Now it has representatives from over 41 states and we have earned the consideration by many other affiliated organizations as we help to advocate for these state teams which previously had no voice.

One Firefighter Nation there are several US&R “social” groups: Urban Search and Rescue, of course; USAR/FEMA; and USAR.  You can join into the discussions there and say your piece, or at least get to meet other like-minded individuals.  There is also the Cancel The Engine site on there, which has a lot of rockbreakers hanging out looking for something to tear up.

I’ll take the time to add some more later, but if you have a link near and dear to you, feel free to add it on a comment, and if it is appropriate, I’ll add it in.

South Carolina US&R Task Force at Vigilant Guard

As is always the case in times like these, fire and emergency service providers stand ready to send whatever relief is necessary to aid the survivors of disasters.   While we continue to keep the residents and visitors to Haiti in our thoughts and prayers, an open letter to the fire and emergency service community from FEMA Deputy Administrator Richard Serino reminds the response community that self-deployment to the disaster areas is not advisable.  For a number of reasons, there needs to be a coordinated response so that well-meaning people and resources don’t ultimately overwhelm what is already bedlam.

While it may seem counterintuitive to some not to send EVERYTHING to the region, I’m reminded of the scenario that presents itself in football when the defensive end is told repeatedly, “Seal the ends and don’t let anyone out” and after being told that twenty times (and having no backs running around the end), he decides to “get involved” and leaves his assigned area, only to be left in the dust by a screen or a reverse.  His job was to protect the flanks from just such a move, and failing that, this weakness was not only recognized by the offense, but exploited.

It is imperative that we take this opportunity to recognize that these disasters also affect our own communities, and this is the time when increased education of your customers is important: what to do if something like this happens here, who will respond, what your capabilities are and how you plan to address your needs in a disaster, and so on.  This is the time when you contact your representatives and reinforce to them that we have emergency operation plans in place and resources, and educate local responders what to do and how to obtain these resources.

Most importantly, someone needs to be watching the outside, anticipating that at any time, events can also happen at home.  In that event, teams selected to move into the Caribbean to aid Haiti may need reinforcement back in their home jurisdictions and we should be ready to help in those situations as well.

Everyone has a part on the team.  Take this unfortunate situation and at least turn it into a “teachable moment”.  If you fail to do this while it is fresh in the minds of the public, I can reassure you, look at past disasters and see how fast those moments faded from view.  We can prevent death and injury often by educating people as to what we do and how to get us when they need us.  But in order to do all of this, we need support, not just during the disasters, but in the times in between.

Keep our fellow US&R teams in your prayers as well as the citizens and other responders in this most distressing of situations and make sure we are ready if anything else goes down on our watch.

In their latest issue of Disaster Research, there is an article regarding government response and recovery and the increase in governmental partnerships with faith- and community-based organizations to assist in cleaning up catastrophes.  In the recent past, we have seen ineffective response from certain portions of government that have assumed responsibility for this service at the local, state and federal levels.  I don’t think anyone who works in our field and  is taken seriously about their views on the subject feels like “government” alone can deliver an entire package of assistance to a disaster-stricken community.  However, there is plenty of debate about how to most effectively coordinate assistance in the wake of a calamity.

Of all things in our industry, our frustration with failure of some politicians to continue to apply heat (and funding) to the problem BEFORE disaster strikes is only compounded by the political “outrage” when disaster occurs and we are accused with not properly preparing in advance (still with limited or no budget or legislative action on our behalf).

In an answer to some of these challenges, some state and local governments are forming coalitions that guide organizations providing emergency response. Missouri, Florida, Texas, and a few others have, according to a recent article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, begun to develop alliances between emergency managers and NGOs.

There are many discussions regarding the potential for blurred church and state separation which can’t even begin to be adequately addressed in a short blog post.  However, those issues aside, NGOs over the past decade have been efficiently providing disaster recovery assistance and have been successful in finding resources that governmental bodies can’t seem to scare up.

This discussion doesn’t also begin to factor in the entire over-reliance on “outside” help in the event of disaster.  This was a point made by Alan Kirschenbaum in earlier works referring to the growth of the disaster response community that seem to be related to the decline in perception of individual responsibility for preparedness.

While this all has some serious discussion ahead of it, I have less of a problem with this type of assistance than I do with pseudo-qualified responders self deploying to events with little or no capability or self-sufficiency.  I think there are plenty of avenues for a person with altruistic motives to get involved with an organized response; it’s the poseurs and con-men I’m interested in keeping away.

I’m open to some observations on the subject.  I think if managed correctly, these NGOs have access to resources currently limited to those of us charged with response, and we should take advantage of creative partnerships, as the organizations I am affliliated have already done.  Look around your community and identify capability that lies outside of the conventional response.  You’ll be surprised by the resources that lie out there and I think you’ll find that instead of spending essential funds on assets that already exist, you can find better uses for that money in areas that are currently underserved.

I was thinking about the use of RFID, or “radio frequency identification” for you non-geeks out there.  Now while we have discussed the use of RFID for personnel accountability (which you could embed in your credential we have been beating on about over the last month and I have decided to let rest for a bit), where as you pass through a checkpoint at an incident, the RFID chip would log you in, plus pertinent data, and make it much easier to manage the locations of your valuable assets (that would be your people).

But another application that private industry and the military have used RFID for is for logistics management.  For a while I have gone on in our department about the use of bar coding to produce a reliable determination of asset location (if you can’t scan the code, the item is obviously not there).  But in the case of RFID, what I was thinking is that you could have a portal- like at the bay doors- that would scan your vehicle, with all of the RFID-chipped tools and assorted equipment, and tell you what was there and what wasn’t.  While you were at it, you could actually tell WHICH item it was; for example, the generator on your engine is Acme Fire Department Generator #3.  Well, Generator #3 is due for maintenance.  Or Generator #3 was swapped out at your last preventative maintenance cycle and you actually have Generator #21.  And your Maintenance/Logistics folks just happen to be looking for Generator #21 because it has to have a whatsit retrofitted.  You see where I’m going with this?  You could actually know if Engine 1 went out the door with everything on it or not.

If your department is anything like my department, and your firefighters anything like my firefighters, you are asking, “isn’t this going to be expensive to replace when we break the chip?”  You all know that if you put a firefighter in an empty locked room with two ball bearings he will break one and lose the other.  Well, if this stuff is ruggedized enough for the military, it’s likely that it will last at least a week in a fire station.

The sad part is, like I said, this is stuff that has been out there for a while.  But do YOU know about it?  Can you advocate for change and improvement if you don’t know what kind of change and improvement we are capable of?  What other ideas do you see being used in everyday life that have an application to our jobs?

When a man will say that a project is a waste of time, yet take credit for it when the project is being hailed by the media, that, my friends, is a hypocrite.  Likewise, there are “leaders” in this world who like to trumpet their budget cuts and their saving of taxpayer funds, despite being warned that their efforts could prove dangerous, but when things do go badly, they slip free of any blame, and those people are also hypocrites.

When a man will make claims that he has accomplished something spectacular, but won’t permit scrutiny of his claims, is that man a hypocrite?  Shouldn’t we, if we have indeed done an amazing deed, be willing to permit people to look into our claims, to see just what it is that we have done and how we can replicate that “success”?  Hypocrisy is claiming you are all about something, when really you are not; so if you make claims of expertise, shouldn’t you expect critical review of your work?  If it is truly what it is, it will stand up to the examination.

When people go around pretending to be leaders by making claims of their honesty, they should in fact be honest.  If they are about being a good steward of taxpayer funds, they too, should be actually doing just that.  If they think that their cost-cutting efforts are actually beneficial to the community and they prove to be wrong, they should be willing to take that heat.  And when we say we are professionals in what we do, we should permit others to review our works and determine if they hold up to a critical examination of the content.

Change freightens the entrenched and the hypocritical; the entrenched because of their anticipation of loss and the hypocrites, because they will be exposed for what they are when the light of truth shines in.  If you are one who embraces change, it’s probably because you know you don’t have anything to lose.  If you are what you are and you do what you do, and you practiced your art and you learned from the masters, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from change.

In 1984, things were relatively easy.  I only had to worry about coming to work and making sure my Captain was okay with the things I did, and making sure I didn’t screw anything up.  So long as I did what I was told and tried not to overthink things too much, I could blend in with the team and work together, not worrying too much about how my individual issues affected anyone else. 

When I was hired in 1982 I already had some experience in rescue and I was already a certified EMT.  So in 1984, with my prior experience and the two additional years, I had some credibility that I brought to the team.  My job was to drive the squad, which in our department, carried all the rescue and medical tools we had in those days.  If we had a structure fire, I would slide over to drive the ladder truck instead and my officer would drive the squad.  The rest of the crew was on the engine.  That was pretty much the extent of my decisionmaking responsibility.

In 1984, we hadn’t embraced the computer as a tool.  Alarm and routine information was entered by hand into the station log book, so one of my most important tools was one of those Bic multi-color pens.  Alarms could be entered in red, other stuff in black or blue, and I can’t even remember why we used green, but we did.  Now that was technology.  Things changed in 1985.

By the end of 1984, we had the beginnings of huge changes.  We were adding fire stations and personnel.  The numbers of occupancies in our jurisdiction were growing by leaps and bounds.  We were going through Fire Chiefs as fast as they could be replaced as our commission was being challenged on issues.  We unionized and I was elected the Vice-President of the local.

But my main focus was on the changes in the national industry, because they intrigued me.  As the guy who brought in updated rescue technology from my previous department, I struck forward with the effort to train personnel in confined space entry and rope rescue, in advanced extrication techniques and in the techniques used for structural and trench collapses (when I went through Rescue I and II in Montgomery County, PA in 1981, we were creating tripods, gantries, and a-frames from hemp rope and timber, but the technology went through the roof in a matter of four years).  I got involved on a deeper level and at times, took a lot of heat for it from my colleagues and my superiors as well (nothing like being teased with “Calling Dr. Mick, calling Dr. Mick” because you decide to get your paramedic; ah, but those were the days).

I talked about Heifetz and Linsky in an earlier post and their observation that with change, there is danger.  If you are an agent of change, you will undergo attacks and even character assassination (or ACTUAL assassination: just ask MLK and Gandhi) because you represent a shift from what is comfortable and safe, to unstable and experimental.

Now that we have global access and reach we can share ideas that can both be widely popular and widely challenged.  We have a much more diverse audience and what seems to be understood as a logical solution to an issue may not even be feasible in a different culture or under a different circumstance.  To us, what may be the obvious might be the unreal.  Therefore, it is our responsibility, no matter how surreal the situation, to at least listen and try to comprehend, in an effort to achieve understanding.

That all being said, we all, from our differing viewpoints, carry a responsibility to accept what is right – and by right I mean understood to be realistic and applicable as a result of scientific evaluation and confirmation of our theory, as well as what is right by our fellow man – and not rely on innuendo and supposition.  But when we confirm something to be fact, we need to appreciate it for the change it represents, and regardless of our views on the subject, consider embracing change for the sake of doing what is truly right; that is, what is considered efficacious and for the betterment of our fellow human beings.

Just because someone claims to be the expert, or has insinuated that they should be followed as a result of their experience, fails to understand that what is accepted today is not necessarily the reality, nor is it the ultimate.  Things change.  When someone makes spurious claims, they should back them up with evidence.  Evidence isn’t someone saying “this happened”, evidence requires substantiated proof.

Things have changed a lot since 1984.  We now have expectations in the emergency service field that require us to challenge the people who say “this is true” not for challenging their authority, but to prove that what it is we take for gospel is correct, and that the service we provide based upon those theories are accurate and for the best of the people we serve.  Failing to operate in a transparent manner is only asking for trouble.   We have to accept criticism for what it is and understand that if we put emotion aside, there might be a grain of truth in what is being said.  By being introspective and realizing our faults, we achieve enlightenment. ‘Nuff said.