City of Palo Alto
Interview Questions on the
Office of Emergency Services and Community Readiness

Interviewer: Arrietta Chakos
Interviewee/Talking points author: Douglas Moran
Date: Monday 2010 November 15

About Me

• Disaster experience
  • "Victim" in one large scale disaster (Katrina-style): 1972 Hurricane Agnes flooding in the Susquehanna River system of southern New York and Pennsylvania.
  • "Victim" in a variety of localized disaster/emergencies: 1980 Great Lakes Hurricane wind storm (Ann Arbor-Detroit), blizzards
  • In Palo Alto for the 1989 Loma Prieta quake
• Prep experience
  • Barron Park (Neighborhood) Association (BPA): member of BoD since mid-1990s
  • BPA has program of E/D Prep back into the 1980s
    • Evacuation drills
    • Resident prep booklet for Palo Alto - close liaison with FD
  • Alerting system
    • Teleminder failures
    • Agitator for improved system
  • Red Ribbon Task Force
  • PAN E-prep Committee
• Focus
  • "Residents should be prepared" is long past the point of diminishing returns.
    • Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results
    • Duplicative: many other organizations already are doing this
    • Effort should be directed where there is a better ROI
    • "should" instead of what can reasonably be expected allows govt to ignore/shirk tasks and responsibility
    • Counter-productive message inherent: Your neighbors are your enemies--they will attempt to take your supplies
  • Community: Neighbors helping neighbors
  • Govt be prepared to see residents as large pool of resources
    • Utilize
    • Facilitate/leverage

What does the city's disaster response capability look like at the present?

• Approach not that of a "winning team": Winning teams consistently think about what it takes to win in focusing their efforts, while others go through the paces.
• Silos: How to modify what they currently do in event of a disaster, constrained by what they want to do, rather than focus on where their skills would have the most impact. Example from current disaster plan (from previous City Mgr) for utilizing library staff:
  • Plan: be at the various branches so that people could return books.
  • Alt (partial): Morph children's story times into child care so that parents could work on disaster recovery. In addition to acquiring resources and leading children activities, they could also manage/monitor the activities of volunteers (staff being vetted, the volunteers not being vetted).
• Bureaucratic/unrealistic: Example: Volunteers would have to be processed through the equivalent of a labor hiring hall. Examples: HR issues for police take precedence in planning over using them effectively.
• Fiefdoms: Example: long-term refusal to rename the PANDAs to the standard name CERTs despite knowing that this disconnect will cause substantial problems in a disaster. Inference is that OES does not want the PANDAs to be able to interact with other agencies--since they wouldn't equate a PANDA to a CERT--but rather have to interact through the FD hierarchy, even though it is likely to be an extreme bottleneck/delay during an emergency or disaster.
• Consistent refusal to test and validate the alerting system (CANS/AlertSCC)
  • Example: Golden Guardian (Bio attack in SJ): I had a scenario (via RRTF) to exercise and validate various capabilities of the CANS system, but CPA wasn't interested. Most recently: The Great Shakeout (LKou prepared an example message).
  • Use of CANS/AlertSCC has consistently been an afterthought, and often come too late to be of practical value. CPA lacks processes to use effectively and has not even begun to develop the reflexes needed to use in a significant E/D.
• Consistent failure to use small emergencies to test/practice/debug: Example: Power outage after plane crash:
  • Failed to use alerting system or City web site to provide usable info to residents.
  • Putting out stop signs at at major intersection was left to the over-tax PD. Only partial accomplished. No help from FD or PANDAs (missing process, missed opportunity, still broken)
  • Time crossing town on El Camino more than doubled. In an emergency, keeping traffic flowing is critical so that emergency and other official vehicles aren't delayed. Need humans to direct traffic (CERTs?) Missing capability. Missed training opportunity.
• Ignorance and misconceptions driving planning:
  • Example: previous PD Chief saw containing panic as a prime issue driving her deployment of officers despite being informed of studies showing that panic was exceedingly rare during disasters.
  • Example: persistent belief that the best way to manage a situation is to withhold information from residents.

What would you like it to look like?

• Strategic view. Where would resources have most impact? Examples:
  • Communications: Have an MOU with cell phone providers and processes that CPA could refill fuel tanks on generators on cell phone towers.
  • Fuel: Mix of MOUs, processes and equipment to utilize fuel at various gas stations, rather than requiring it to be trucked in. Examples:
    • Modification to electrical panels to allow generators to be attached to run the pumps.
    • Capability to pump directly from the underground tanks.
  • Refrigeration (food, drugs, corpses): Example: retain/obtain refrigerated trucks, for example any making delivers to grocery stores at the time.
  • Food: Augment fire inspection of grocery stores and restaurants to document factors useful in extracting food (perishable and not) from those facilities.
• Scaling up: Attitude shift: From planning for diminished capability within existing silos to thinking about how to scale up using residents to augment or take over peripheral functions. Example, directing traffic. Example: damage triage by BPCs/CERTs (in progress). Involving identifying relevant tasks and preparing training and quick-reference guides.
• Leadership prep: Recognition that most of the disaster response agencies, such as the Red Cross, come into an area with the attitude that "This is the way that we do things, and everyone else has to adapt to us" and be prepared to mediate, ameliorate and try to reduce the resulting problems. Example: Red Cross bans pets from shelters, effectively rejecting residents. At the QuakeVille exercise, one ARC rep said that in a disaster they would arrive and take over the facility and exclude the pets. Also, that they would likely transfer all the people from the tent city to a large building, despite all the disadvantages to the "customers" of the later (lack of privacy, separation space, ...).
• In the advice to residences, shift from a family-centric view to a community-centric view. Example, advice people to combine with neighbors to share food, opening one refrigerator at a time.

Obstacles:

• Bureaucratic mindset, fiefdoms.
• "You're on your own" (YoYo) (Me: We are not a bunch of Yo-Yo's)
• Legal and CYA paralysis/inhibitions
• Current concept of PANDA program. Large remnants of it being THE program for resident involvement in E/D prep.
  • Carries dismissive attitude toward role and contribution of other groups of residents.
  • PANDAs, individuals and leadership, assert that broad range of such activities should be owned by them
    • even though they have no capabilities to do such (people, training, ...)
    • even though it conflicts with their statement mission. Example: PANDAs are expected to report to their fire station and go where they are most needed, but PANDAs claim that they also will handle the role of BPCs who are intended to stay in place on their block.

What would you consider to be that greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses in the current planning?

• An unrealistic belief and reliance on top-down command and control and communications (C3) instead of preparing people to understand their roles so that they can operate effectively and resiliently with minimal load on C3
  • Example: CPA refuses to reveal the location of planned facilities, under the rationale that some might not be opened and rejecting the argument that it would be easier for someone to go to the inactive locations and post a note telling people where the active ones are rather than trying to tell everyone where the active facilities are.
• An unrealistic expectation for plans that leads to the wrong emphasis
  • "No plan survives first contact"
  • "Plans are useless, but planning is essential" (Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, on D-Day planning)
• Planning for only worse-case scenarios. For example, excluding the use of cell-phones in all E/D plans because the system may become overloaded and the cell towers may not have power.
• Bad exercises:
  • Unchallenging/dumbed down: discourages participation
  • Tailored to actual participants, rather than factoring in that some of the expected participants will be unavailable and adapting from there
  • Successful exercises should be a mix of successful and unsuccessful components:
    • Successful part: confidence building, practice
    • Unsuccessful: avoid hubris, find out what doesn't work, where emphasis is needed/not needed
    • In-between: practice adapting (skills and attitudes)
• Gross over-estimation of capabilities of PANDAs (number who will turn out and state of their training)
• Unrealistic expectation of skill levels. Example: BPC communications procedure is based upon what could be expected of an active HAM, not of someone who engages in periodic exercises and refresher courses, or someone who has been recruited and trained during the E/D itself.
• Recruitment restricted to those willing to make substantial advanced commitment. Biggest example: PANDA training requires committing to extended sequence of classes when many of those could be stand-alone modules for PANDAs, BPCs and others. My preference is for getting people committed to what appeals to them most and then sucking them into a bigger role.

How would you assess collaboration among different agencies involved in the city’s emergency management and recovery planning? How can collaboration be improved // How would you assess links among city and community agencies involved in disaster readiness planning?

The typical "coordination" meeting involves various organizations getting up and presenting what they plan to do with the clear message that this is FYI so that other organizations

• can figure out what they will need to do to adapt to interact with the presenter.
• know what not to expect the presenter's organization to do.

Often these interactions are only at the abstract level and critical details get missed. Example: SU Hospital and PAMF reps talking about this said they had stumbled upon the fact that their facilities had small stocks of various supplies such as inoculations that would be depleted during the first day of an E/D and they were presuming that the stockpile was handled by County Health Dept, but the plans of County Health assumed that the hospitals and clinics had significant stockpiles and distributions would not be needed for days.

Do you think political leaders and their senior appointees are sufficiently concerned about community readiness and disaster recovery? How can they be better involved? // How could preparedness and recovery planning be even better prioritized by local leaders?

While there is an awareness of the importance of this topic and a willingness to label it a priority, they seem to consistently miss the opportunities and steps to make it such (lacking the "winning team" approach).

The political leaders themselves are woefully unprepared. The plan focuses on the bureaucratic/organizational aspects, and provides nothing for preparing them to be effective (eg, tutorials on the political, organizational and psychological problems faced by similar leaders in other disasters).

Besides an earthquake, what potential emergencies most worry you (b/c of their intensity or frequency, or b/c of the city’s failure to prepare for them)

Disease outbreak: Because of the number of people coming/returning to Stanford University and local companies from around the world, I expect we are going to have to deal with a SARS-like incident or worse. Although there has been some progress on distribution of medication, we are woefully unprepared to take measures to slow the spread and to reduce the burden on medical facilities, for example distribution of advice on self-triage and self-quarantine/social distancing and forms of community support to ameliorate the disruption and to reduce the need to engage in risky behavior.