Canton on Emergency Management

08/31/2023

08/30/2023

What Qualifies You to Be an Emergency Manager?

The recent fires in Maui, Hawaii, have highlighted a major problem with emergency management that we continue to ignore. It raises once again the basic question of what qualifies a person to be an emergency manager.

On the morning of August 8, a combination of high winds and downed power lines resulted in a series of fires on the islands of Maui and Hawaii, with the worst hitting the town of Lāhainā on Maui. Loss of power and the high rate of advance of the fires disrupted communications, making warning and evacuation extremely difficult. Before it was over the fires would claim over 115 lives, with 388 people confirmed missing as of this writing, making the third deadliest fire in US history.
One of the major controversies that have emerged from the disaster is the decision by the Maui emergency management administrator to not activate the island’s emergency warning sirens. His decision was based primarily on concerns that the sirens were used primarily for tsunami warnings and activation would cause people to move to higher ground, directly into the path of the fires. He also noted that sirens were primarily on the coast, and few were in the affected fire areas. His decision is being investigated by the state’s Attorney General and criticism over it contributed to his resignation citing health concerns.

Whether his decision not to activate the sirens was sound is not the issue, however. Instead, the question that has arisen is whether the administrator was qualified to make the decision. Note that the argument is not over his competence but about his qualifications. Prior to accepting the position, the administrator had never received any formal training in emergency management or held a position as an emergency manager. His position prior to appointment had been as the mayor’s chief of staff.
In response to this criticism, the administrator pointed out that he had been present for activations of the emergency operations center in his capacity as chief of staff, taken numerous online courses, and had been selected in a civil service process involving 40 other candidates, a civil service exam, and interviews by a panel of experts including seasoned emergency managers. At the time of the crisis, he had held his position as administrator since 2017.

So, was the Maui emergency management administrator qualified for the job or not?

I think the better question is by what standard are we qualified to judge him, given that we have never defined any qualifications for the position.For years now we have danced around the issue of a competency framework that defines the minimum qualifications for various positions in emergency management. We have developed academic curricula that may or not be adequate for our needs. We have a hodge podge of certifications, some respected, some not, but no single certification that can serve as a minimum qualification for employment. We have not developed entry level positions and career paths to develop future emergency managers. In short, we have not identified anything resembling a generally accepted set of minimum requirements for any emergency management position, let alone attempted to meet those needed to formally define what we do as a profession.

Traditionally, our focus has been on response and, indeed, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook continues to define the position of emergency management director solely in terms of response, ignoring the emphasis on comprehensive emergency management that dates to 1978. The problem is that competency in emergency response does not equate to competency in emergency management.

Emergency management has been growing more and more complex due to changes in our operating environment and evolving doctrine, placing more demands on emergency managers. Our role has shifted from the operational to the strategic, from being technicians to being managers. More and more the demand is for risk assessment and analysis and the anticipation of the unexpected. Our job is to build the framework for community resilience and that means having a working knowledge of the research that constitutes our specialized body of knowledge about how people and institutions react to disaster. It means understanding that response alone is not effective without mitigation, which defines our operational environment, and recovery which defines our desired end state. It means developing the ability to work with non-responders to develop long-term strategies.

The problem is that we are our own worst enemy. For example, although the Occupational Outlook Handbook suggests a typical entry level education requirement of a bachelor's degree for the position of emergency management director, but we have spent years arguing whether a degree should be required for certification. We have seen the emergence over the past fifty plus years of an academic discipline that has contributed immensely to our ability to deal with crisis, yet we continue to resist making an understanding of this specialized body of knowledge a requirement for entry to our field. Indeed, we have no mechanism for restricting someone from identifying themselves as an emergency manager because we have refused to take the steps to formal classify what we do as a profession.

Whether this resistance is the result of the attitude, “I couldn’t meet that requirement, so it’s a bad one,” or because of the need to preserve post-retirement jobs or for some other ill-defined reason is moot. The real issue is that so long as we do not define minimum qualifications for emergency management positions and do what is necessary to define ourselves as a profession that can restrict access to those who do not meet those qualifications, we will continue to see positions filled by people with little or no qualifications for the jobs they hold. And there will be absolutely nothing we can do about it.

Posted by Lucien Canton on 08/30/2023 | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/26/2023

07/25/2023

Functional Annexes: The Backbone of Your Emergency Plan

In my last two articles I briefly discussed the basic plan and hazard-specific annexes and problems I have encountered in helping to develop emergency plans. Each is important and an essential element of a good emergency operations plan. However, I would argue that they would be ineffective without the support provided by functional annexes.

Why are functional annexes so essential? Where the basic plan contains the overall strategy and concept of operations of how the organization will respond to a crisis, functional annexes describe how that strategy will be implemented. The basic plan describes the “what” while the functional annexes provide the “how”. Where the hazard-specific annexes address agent generated needs, functional annexes form the basis of all-hazards planning by detailing how the organization will deal with the response generated needs common to most disasters.

Unfortunately, functional annexes are often overlooked. It’s been my experience that limited funding for emergency planning is more often applied to “updating” the basic plan than to refining functional annexes. While basic plans should be regularly reviewed and updated as needed, the rarely require substantial changes and an update usually results in some minor changes and reformatting. The money spent on going through the entire planning process and developing a “new and improved” basic plan would, in many cases, be better spent on developing a process to update functional annexes.

Part of the reason for this neglect is that each annex requires a major planning effort with input from multiple agencies and organizations. Since this planning is usually the responsibility of the lead agency, the level of effort and quality of output is dependent on the commitment of that lead agency. Further, functional annexes are dependent on the existence of departmental plans, standard operating procedures (SOP), and field operations guides to implement the tasks specified in the annex, something that also requires commitment on the part of the lead agency.

In preparing a functional annex, try to keep two things in mind. The first is that the annex is not a SOP. It does not provide the user a high level of detail but instead should incorporate by reference existing SOPs and operational guidelines. Consider, for example, a functional annex for something as complex as resource management. Including the process for ordering and distributing urgently needed supplies would expand the annex to the point where the EOP becomes a multi-volume set. Further this process may change in response to new procedures or changes in technology. The same could be said of tracking financial data such as overtime and equipment costs.
The second thing to keep in mind is the needs of the user. Write for the user, not the reviewer. Commonly used topics like scope and purpose may serve to satisfy a reviewer who is not familiar with the plan or the planning process, but they are meaningless to a user in a time of crisis. They will skip over this stuff to get to the information they need. Indeed, an early study by Thomas Drabek suggested that users rarely refer to plans in a time of crisis. Keep it simple and focus on essential information.

Your functional annexes should, at a minimum, answer the following questions:

What are the main tasks I must accomplish? What do I need to do and why is this important? Who is dependent on my accomplishing my assigned tasks? You should distinguish between high priority and immediate tasks and those for which the user has responsibility but are not of immediate urgency.
Who’s in charge? The basic plan identified a lead agency for this annex, but the user needs to know specifically who from that agency will be the principal coordinator.
What authority do I have? Who can make decisions to commit resources? Is it the representative at the emergency operations center, the lead at the department operations center, or the department head? Certain functions, particularly those related to financial obligations, often require specific delegations of authority. Who has these or how to obtain them are critical to the user’s ability to perform their tasks.
What resources do I have? The basic plan usually includes a list of support agencies but normally does not specify why they are in support. The annex should include this information and specific points of contact for the resource. Resources are not limited to just supporting agencies. Our EOC in San Francisco included a computer with specific software requested by the city attorney, two dispatch consoles to support police and fire departments, and a specialized radio system allowing communications with aerial assets provided through the sheriff’s department. Also be aware of resources that might be sensitive and not included in the annex. For example, on client I worked with maintained kidnap and ransom insurance that included provisions for a trained hostage negotiator. We need not include this in our kidnap annex for security reasons but did include it in training for coordinators assigned to implement the annex.
On whom do I depend? This question is often overlooked. We do not operate in a vacuum and there are inherent expectations that everything will go as planned. This is often a forlorn hope in a disaster so it is critical that dependencies that can affect assigned tasks are known up front.

I don’t want to leave you with the impression that any component of the emergency plan is more important than the others. They are intended to work together and address the needs of a crisis. The basic plan provides the overall concept of operations, the functional annexes address the response generated needs likely to be encountered in most disasters, and the hazard-specific annexes fine tune the methodologies of the functional annexes to address the agent generated needs of a particular hazard. What I do suggest, however, is that we expend a lot of effort focusing on the basic plan but often neglect the other annexes. The result is that we can easily fall prey to what Dr Erik auf der Heide refers to as the “paper plan syndrome”, the belief that just because we have a good basic plan, we are ready for crisis.

Posted by Lucien Canton on 07/25/2023 | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/27/2023

Hazard Specific Annexes: A Misunderstood Tool

In my recent article on planning (Who’s Going to Use Your Plan?), I wrote how many planners misunderstand how to use hazard specific annexes to address the agent generated needs of specific disasters. This confusion stems from failing to understand that “all-hazards planning” does not mean “plan for everything” but rather to develop plans and strategies that can be adapted to unexpected circumstances. At the same time, it does not mean we cannot make use of what information we have about specific hazards to begin adapting our all-hazards plan to the unique demands of those hazards prior to their occurrence.

Basic emergency management theory recognizes that there needs generated by disasters that tend to remain relatively constant from disaster to disaster and for which we can therefore plan. These are, to an extent, independent of the hazard that generated them. For example, while we may need to adjust plans slightly to adapt to specific circumstances, we generally conduct feeding and sheltering operations in the same manner. These disaster-generated needs form the bulk of our detailed planning and are summarized in the basic plan and developed more fully in functional annexes.

In addition to disaster generated needs, there are agent generated needs that are specific to the hazard causing the disaster that may force us to make major modifications to our plans. The hazard specific annex is an attempt to identify those required modifications as much as possible and develop strategies for addressing them before a disaster occurs.

I wrote in my previous article that the hazard specific annex is, in essence, a contingency plan. While this is true in the generic sense, I think it gives a false impression of what the hazard specific annex is and may be the reason so many are poorly written. The hazard specific annex is not a plan that directs operations but rather a strategy that provides a starting point for dealing with a specific crisis. That strategy builds on previous planning and organizational structure and cannot be implemented separately from those elements.

For example, the functional annex may identify specific shelter locations and the priority for opening them. However, if some are in an area of expected flooding, the hazard-specific annex for flooding might negate the use those shelters, identify alternatives, or alter the priority. A key point is this: the annex identifies a potential problem and offers possible solutions but the decision of what will be done rests with the crisis management team based on their assessment of the situation. The hazard specific annex is a tool, not a directive.

Unfortunately, many planners approach the hazard specific annex as a plan and feel the need to include information found elsewhere in the operations plan. For example, many of the annexes I have reviewed spend a great deal of time describing the specific hazard, many times just copying data from the hazard analysis section found in the basic plan. The implication is that the annex is to be read separately rather than build on the rest of the plan. I submit that anyone turning to a hazard specific annex in a crisis will have no interest in this information but instead is seeking guidance on what they should do.

So, what should be in a hazard specific annex? The starting point for a useful annex is not any of the generic nonsense you usually find in them such as scope, concept of operations, etc. Nor is it a summary of the history of the hazard and technical data related to the potential impact. Remember who is using this annex and why. The starting point of the annex is the assumptions you are making about the impact of the hazard. For example, we have a lot of information on potential road closures in the San Francisco Bay Area after an earthquake. This will impact our ability to move resources in or evacuate people out of the affected area. Locally it might hinder our ability to open shelters or deploy emergency equipment. Our major assumption is therefore that we will be isolated and unable to access mutual aid and that this isolation may extend to individual neighborhoods.

Once the assumptions on the potential impact of the disaster are identified, the question becomes, “how do these assumptions affect my existing plans?” For example, do they affect my ability to provide public warning because widespread power outages are expected? Do they affect the ability of departments to perform tasks as expected under the operational plan because of the loss of key facilities? What key facilities will be isolated or unavailable due to flooding? Once you can identify what needs to be modified in your current plans, you are able to suggest alternate strategies to modify them.

If this process sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the same planning process we use all the time. The point I’m trying to make is that this planning is all done behind the scenes and should be transparent to the person reading the hazard specific annex. The assumptions tell the reader what problems they may encounter. If an assumption is not valid (e.g., a key transportation route was not affected as expected), thats good. If it is valid, they have suggested strategies to consider. Either way, they are cued to consider a potential problem that might have been overlooked.

The disaster specific annex is not a stand-alone document. Reference can be made to other annexes in the operations plan, to contingency plans, or to departmental plans. The important thing is to keep the annex short and focused on the issue: what do I need to do differently in this situation? If you can maintain this focus on the needs of the user, your hazard specific annex becomes an extremely useful tool in a crisis rather than a useless appendage to your plan.

Posted by Lucien Canton on 06/27/2023 | Permalink | Comments (0)

05/30/2023

Who’s Going to Use Your Plan?

Over my thirty-plus years as an emergency manager I’ve had the opportunity to review numerous emergency plans from a variety of organizations, ranging from small communities and federal agencies in the public sector to private sector companies in a variety of industries. After a while you notice a sameness to them, not surprising as most organizations follow the one-size-fits-all guidance from the federal government. Don’t misunderstand, I’m not against standardization per se and have even encouraged it in many cases. However, many of the plans I’ve reviewed seem to have a common feature: they will be largely useless in an actual crisis.

In his book Mission Improbable: Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster, sociologist Lee Clarke describes plans as “rationality badges” used by organizations to demonstrate that they are in control of a crisis, regardless of their actual level of preparedness. Writing in Disaster Response: Principles of Preparation and Coordination, Erik Auf der Heide devotes an entire chapter to the “paper plan syndrome”, the assumption that because a plan exists, an organization is prepared for crisis. In our rush towards standardization, we have made the development of a “good” emergency operations plan (EOP) the central focus and measurement of our planning rather recognizing that it is a tool we use to coordinate the activities of our crisis management team. If your plan cannot be used by those charged with managing a crisis, you’re not ready, no matter how pretty your plan is.

Why are so many plans useless? I can point to many, many reasons: internal inconsistencies, duplication, excessive length, missing or hard to find critical information, no buy in from key stakeholders – the list is endless. But it all comes down to a simple concept: plans are not written with the end user in mind. Instead, plans are written to please a potential reviewer such as the public, a board of directors, or funding authorities such as state or federal agencies. This results in a plan that contains information not needed by the end user but may be needed to demonstrate that the organization is conformant with specific requirements.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. The base plan is a brief description of the way an organization will approach a crisis. It is a concept of operation that describes overall strategy, relationships, responsibilities, and authorities. It should be brief and contain only essential information. yet many of the plans I have reviewed contain a lengthy description of the incident command system (ICS) to demonstrate that the organization is using ICS. Given that the implementation of ICS includes training for key personnel, the question is, “Who is going to use this?” Personnel who have been trained won’t need it. I submit that someone responding under the plan who is not familiar with ICS will not have time to read this part of the plan and would probably find it inadequate in that it isn’t task specific. If the intent was really to address lack of training, there are better ways of dealing with this problem such is just-in-time training or initial orientations.

One of the problems that I’ve encountered is that planners are not always conversant with emergency management principles and tend to create confusion when creating annexes to the base plan. A key concept in developing your emergency plan is understanding the difference between response generated and agent generated needs. Response generated needs tend to remain relatively consistent among crises while agent generated needs are created by the specific type of crisis. Functional annexes address response generated needs while hazard specific annexes address agent generated needs.

This seems a simple concept, yet I have seen many plans where hazard specific annexes recapitulate much of the information already covered in functional annexes. The problem arises when the separate annexes contradict each other instead of being mutually supportive or completely change the original concept contained in the functional annex. This usually happens when the hazard specific annex is created by a separate planning group and the annex is not vetted for consistency with the rest of the plan. At best it requires the user to switch back and forth between annexes; at worst it creates confusion and the possibility for conflict. Hazard specific annexes are essentially contingency plans based on specific assumptions and should build on the concepts and authorities already identified in functional annexes. Like the base plan, they provide a strategy for dealing with a specific type of incident and are not intended to be separate plans.

Don’t fall into the paper plan syndrome trap. Remember that the EOP doesn’t have to be a single volume that incorporates all the worlds knowledge. Demonstrating conformance with standards can be done through other evidence such as supporting plans, training records, and exercise after-action reports. Detailed information can be included in departmental plans, field operations guides, or manuals. Keep your EOP lean enough that the users can find the information they need without wading through extraneous information that could be better covered elsewhere. The plan is just a tool; it’s your crisis management team that is the important element in dealing with disaster. Make their job a bit easier by giving them a plan they can actually use.

Posted by Lucien Canton on 05/30/2023 | Permalink | Comments (0)

04/30/2023

Rethinking the Emergency Operations Center: Five Points to Consider

Besides earthquakes and fires, California can have very severe rainstorms. This is normally not a problem for San Francisco but 1997 was one of the worst El Nino years we experienced, with all California counties receiving federal disaster declarations. In San Francisco concern over a potential hillside collapse that might require evacuation of a residential neighborhood, a closed major highway that stranded motorists in the city, and a large homeless population at risk for hypothermia prompted the decision to open a series of emergency shelters.

Like many jurisdictions, we had always assumed our emergency operations center would accommodate all our key personnel. However, when we included supporting agencies, voluntary agencies, and community groups, our shelter branch alone numbered over 50 people, completely filling our operations room. If we had also needed to respond to the hillside collapse, we would have exceeded the capacity of our EOC.

This highlights one of the dichotomies of our current approach to EOC’s. Establishing a permanent EOC, even one of modest size, is expensive, not only in initial construction and equipping but in upkeep and maintenance. This limits the size of many EOCs to one that is sufficient for small emergencies but totally inadequate for major disasters.

Add to this the fact that many of us have rarely considered how many people will need to be accommodated in the EOC. This is partly because many EOCs are activated for local events and emergencies that seldom go for more than a few hours, serving more as command posts supporting tactical operations rather than operational coordination. Our exercises run for a few hours and rarely involve shift changes or activation of alternate sites. This creates a false expectation that EOC staffing will be of a manageable size and all functions will be able to be performed there.

The reality of a major disaster will be quite different. All the senior department heads who were too busy to come to an exercise? They’ll be there looking over the shoulders of the department representatives you trained. Community organizations and business leaders will all want access to your information. Representatives from state and federal agencies, liaison officers from mutual aid agencies, teams from volunteer agencies, the list is endless. And don’t forget the media. This won’t be just the local reporters with whom you probably have a good working relationship; we’re talking about national media who have no interest beyond getting a story that plays well on the national news channels, preferably one that highlights your perceived failures.

Think I’m overstating the problem? Following the loss of their EOC on September 11^th, the New York Office of Emergency Management established a new EOC on a vacant pier. The original EOC was designed to house 68 local agencies. I couldn’t find figures for how many people were at Pier 92 but the company that provided the emergency management software supporting the EOC reported more than 1,700 users, representing over 150 federal, state, and local agencies, as well as public and private companies. Could your EOC handle even a fraction of these people?

I’m not suggesting that we eliminate EOCs completely nor am I in favor of building mega-EOCs that might never be used. I am suggesting, however, that we should seriously consider how we can use them more effectively and what other facilities will be needed to support response operations. We need to accept several key facts that we tend to ignore:

The organizational chart we put in the Emergency Operations Plan is not how the EOC will be staffed. Have you ever counted how many people it would take to fill those neat little boxes? Your organization probably doesn’t have enough people on the payroll to do it. Similarly, the teams and positions described in the multiple resource typing documents issued by FEMA probably won’t be there. Be realistic in your planning and who you actually need in your EOC.
The EOC is a point of coordination, not necessarily where work is performed. This, of course, depends on the size of your organization and how you plan to use your EOC, but we already recognize this concept using department operations centers (DOCs). Teams may be more effective if collocated with the lead agency with supporting coordination done through their representative at the EOC. Alternatively, they may need to operate from a location separate from the main EOC.
The EOC may be where you initiate operations before moving to an alternate site capable of housing more personnel. You need to identify alternate sites and exercise your ability to activate and conduct operations from these sites. During the COVID emergency, the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management established an operations center at their alternate site at the Moscone Convention Center that housed over 400 city workers and representatives of city government.
With decentralized operations, technology becomes critical, both for sharing a common operating picture and creating ad hoc task forces to deal with emerging problems. Parallel communications systems and multiple options for internet access are essential.
Databases are more important than hardware. This was a key lesson learned from September 11^th. Hardware can be replaced relatively quickly, either through purchase or through personal laptops, tablets, and cellular phones. Plan for both access and connectivity rather than stockpiling hardware

Remember that what makes emergency managers so effective is our ability to react quickly to the unexpected by creating ad hoc task forces and adapting plans as needed to solve the problem. Plan your response to maximize this ability and don’t get too attached to a single facility. An EOC is not a building; it’s the EOC team that makes the difference in a crisis.

Posted by Lucien Canton on 04/30/2023 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Canton on Emergency Management

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What Qualifies You to Be an Emergency Manager?

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Functional Annexes: The Backbone of Your Emergency Plan

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Hazard Specific Annexes: A Misunderstood Tool

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Who’s Going to Use Your Plan?

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Rethinking the Emergency Operations Center: Five Points to Consider

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