Some Initial “Lessons Learned’ from California Wildfires

In case you haven’t seen, heard or been talked to about the wildfires in Southern California……which is truly doubtful, the numbers look like this:

_ 24 separate fires
_ Almost 500,000 acres burned (679 square miles)
_ 1,635 homes destroyed
_ Over 1 million evacuated
_ 24 Red Cross Shelters opened
_ 1 mega shelter opened at Qualcomm Stadium that housed 11,000 evacuees
_ Over 9,000 firefighters deployed
_ 1,500 National Guard Troops deployed

Initial lessons learned that I observed include:

_ The media is “disaster hungry” and is just waiting for each disaster to take a turn for the worse, and for us as managers, to fail in our jobs. There has been no let down after Katrina in media attention to disaster events. These fires have played 24/7 on CNN. Coordination of the media has appeared to have been managed well. Reports have been consistent, there have been no major controversies, the local officials have backed up the response system, and have in turn been backed up by the Governor.
**PAY SOME ATTENTION NOW to your media management plans, including regional conversations between and training for Public Information Officers.

_ Get your Chief Elected Official out front, and briefed up properly. Arnold presented well, always had current numbers, and was always very positive. Just as important, he did not second guess tactics or appear too political in his briefings.
** HAVE A CONVERSATION NOW with your elected officials about their role with the media during a disaster event. They need to understand how important it is that they speak confidently, smartly, but not for too long!

_ We have been rolling our eyes as a profession when asked “does your plan identify shelter space for all of your citizens at one time?” Well, guess what, now might be the time to take a look at this scenario. Amazingly, after the debacle at the Superdome in New Orleans, San Diego optioned to open Qualcomm Stadium as a mega shelter. Surprisingly, the 11,000 or so evacuees were sheltered with not even a shot fired, and interviews of evacuees at the stadium were mostly positive. Never underestimate the affect that demographics have on a disaster. The mayor commented after the stadium was closed as a shelter that this was the first time they had thought about utilizing the stadium, and that now he was going to make sure that a plan was drawn up for future use…… seems better lucky than good at this point!
**REVIEW YOUR SHELTER PLANS NOW and stop rolling your eyes and find worst case shelter space for all of your citizens. Consider regional agreements. Consider different demographics, Consider transportation challenges.

_ Plan for animal evacuations and their owners. I heard more interviews with animal owners, especially horse owners, going back into evacuated areas to get their horses than any other evacuees trying to get past fire crews. This is a major red flag that needs to be addressed through public animal preparedness and planning meetings. These horse owners did not have enough trailer space for all of their animals, waited too late to begin evacuating, and then made multiple trips into high hazard areas that easily could have resulted in rescue missions for emergency responders. After all of that, many did not evacuate to the designated large animal shelters that were set up, and chose to go to local fairgrounds where, they had to evacuate again.
**INVEST TIME AND MONEY NOW into some public outreach preparedness information for all of your animal owners, both companion and large animals. Pre-designate co-located and large animal shelters. Encourage large animal owners to begin their evacuation efforts 12 hours prior to mandatory. Have regional discussions on animal response resources, sheltering and preparedness.
  

Disaster Management – The Need for Managers

One issue that continues to jump out at me as I watch disaster events unfold around the country is how disaster responders somehow are pushed into the roles of disaster managers. There is a difference. The term management is defined in Webster’s as “the act or art of managing” and when you look up managing you get to my point with the definition of “to handle or direct with a degree of skill.” Managers have to have skill and experience to be effective. One of the worse fallacies that we promote in our discipline is that a great responder makes for a great manager. Nothing is further from the truth.

A great responder is just that….. skilled and trained to complete a response task. A great manager has to have more diverse skills and training to not only be able to see the “big picture,” but also be able to see a concise, clear path to an events mitigation. The diverse skills come into play for a great manager to be able to accomplish the mitigation of this event by communicating and delegating to others, his vision and goals, and then motivating them to success. He is not managing the disaster….. he is successfully managing the people who are taking care of the disaster. A great responder may see the “big picture,” but his skills are centered on mitigating the event himself. In a management position, he quickly becomes the “micro-manager” that everyone has worked for at one time or another.

A great responder can evolve into a great manager, but he has to attain management skills and then develop them through experience as a deputy or assistant. Skills such as effective communications, conflict management, situational awareness and even creative thinking are not readily learned in response trainings. Let’s get to work in developing our next cadre of great managers through management training, education, and placement. With today’s complicated disaster events, a great responder that is forced into a management position can quickly become a victim of the disaster himself.

Higher Education in Disaster Management

I am starting my third year at UNC directing their Disaster Management Certificate Program, and I here I am “blogging” for the first time and thinking about how different my views are today on higher education and how it applies to the disaster management community. I use the term community because that is how I view our discipline. We are a community of “young citizens” who are interested in disaster management and confused at the same time about exactly what the job entails. We are a community of “middle aged citizens” who are experienced and beginning to recognize that the profession is more than just SUVs with allot of lights and antennas. And finally, we are also a community of experienced steeped “elder statesmen” that actually participated in the last big transformation in disaster management from the civil defense mission of the ‘60s to our current all hazards mission. This particular segment of our community is beginning to step aside in North Carolina, and we are facing a new era of the “middle aged” folks stepping up. As the process continues, this creates space for our “young citizens” to step up as well.

This analogy leads me back to my views on higher education. I have worked at each level in our disaster management community, beginning “wide-eyed” in 1987, settling in after hurricanes Andrew and Fran in the mid-90s, and now feel that I am stepping into the beginnings of the “elder statesman” role as we see more and more of our experienced folks step aside. In the beginning, to me, education and training were one in the same. In the interim, educational classes were something that I could not attain because of the time and effort required, so training became my conduit to knowledge and educational courses were “not as useful” or practical.

Now that I am working in academia, guess what!? That’s right, the light has come on, and my years of being a “nay sayer” about the usefulness of higher education have come to an end. Academia does have a role in our profession, both the educational component, as well as the research component. This “gap” of inclusion has been part of the confusion for our “young citizens” because they are very much in tune with higher education, and are having trouble finding the connections. So, it is up to us, collectively, to pursue higher education connectivity in disaster management for the good of our order. Yes, experience is still a cornerstone of our business, but higher education has to be just as important to reflect our discipline in a professional manner. Fire, law enforcement, and even EMS have undergraduate and advanced degree opportunities across the US. It is time for disaster management to catch up and fulfill this need as well.

The community colleges have supported disaster management well in North Carolina, and continue to do so. The shortfall in our system is not having a next step to take after that associate level for disaster management. Western Carolina University has stepped up to the plate, and we now have our certificate program at UNC, but more can be done. And just as importantly, more can be done in support of these efforts by our disaster management community. I used to think that we did not need an undergraduate or advanced degree in disaster management because we learned as we worked, and what good was a framed degree going to do up on the wall. But, I am older and hopefully wiser now, and as I see our “elder statesmen” stepping aside, I realize we need that educational component to speed up the process of giving our “young citizens” the benefit of all of the work experience that we are so quickly losing. At the same time, through comprehensive higher education programs, they will be validating their grasp of this complicated and ever changing discipline that we call disaster management.

Now is the time for us to move forward and support higher education initiatives, by teaching, by attending, and by supporting attendance by our “young citizens.” I believe this will be one of the keys to our discipline evolving into a true profession.