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.
For some of the new readers here, not only is Firehouse Zen about enlightened leadership, it is about management issues and creative solutions to ongoing problems in the emergency service industry. If you are a long-time reader, you may recall our discussions in the past regarding 
Right now there is an interesting discussion on 
Just this week, not only on our relatively quiet haven of Hilton Head Island, but right here in the community in which I live (Palmetto Dunes), comes a story which has become national news. Before I knew it would be on CNN and everywhere else, I read in our 
For the past year or so, our department has been building a training facility of our own. We officially dedicated it on the 29th and christened some of the props with a little demonstration burn to wow the VIPs who came out to celebrate with us. It’s a nice facility and was designed with more than just training in mind, given our organization’s desire to find multiple uses for things. The site was designed to also be an effective staging location for after hurricanes, or to be used as a distribution center in the event of the same, and can support our semi-annual HAZMAT roundup. But to me, one of the best things is no more begging.
My final group of people who are not happy with credentialing efforts are the “outsiders”. To me, they are the ones with the most logical and compelling concerns about credentialing. Ironically, these people are often those already with some responsibility for response, or they are in the process of trying to improve the capability. In more than one case I am aware of, these efforts went about to fill a vacuum where poor or absent service existed. And interestingly enough, the people working hard to improve the service have been effectively kept out of the loop by those who guard the credentialing development process.
There used to be a day when warriors considered it less than chivalrous to take cover or to shoot from a prone position. Most of us in this millennium probably would never consider it a good idea to stand up and march forward upright into a withering hail of bullets unless we were certain we wanted to end it all right there. While Napoleonic tactics continued to be used on the battlefield well into the 1900’s, for centuries, experts in the art of warfare were aware that when fighting a battle with an enemy that had a decided advantage, less than conventional tactics had to be applied.
Recent Comments