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By Alison Dunn
They call themselves the "Big Seven." They are the emergency managers from seven of the country's largest cities - Boston, New York, Miami, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago. The group regularly participates in conference calls to talk about the issues they face in their own cities and to learn from each other.
Recently, we asked the "Big Seven" to answer seven questions about how they handle preparedness and response in their cities. Here's what they had to say.
Disaster Resource GUIDE:
How do you rate your city in terms
of emergency preparedness?
Carlo Boccia, Boston (BOS): We are very much ahead in some aspects, but we still need to do better in other areas. For instance, we have a very comprehensive and probably one of the most state-of-the-art evacuation and mass care/sheltering plans that exist in this country. However, we need to do a lot better in terms of the traditional emergency management responsibilities.
Joseph Bruno, New York City (NYC): We believe we're well prepared. We are an asset-rich environment. We have over 300,000 employees. We have almost 40,000 police officers and 17,000 firefighters, and then we have an enormous array of capability through our Health Department, Department of Environmental Protection, and many of the other 50 or so agencies that make up the major agencies in New York City.
Carlos Castillo, Miami-Dade (MIA):
I believe Miami-Dade County is relatively well prepared for the hazards we potentially face. Having enough resources available to ensure effectiveness in preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery is always a challenge for any emergency manager.
Barbara Childs-Pair, Washington D.C. (DC): The District of Columbia is among the most prepared jurisdictions in the United States. It was one of the first cities to receive accreditation under the Emergency Management Accreditation Program (EMAP).
Annemarie Conroy, San Francisco (SF): I would rate our city very highly in terms of preparedness. We are fortunate to have funding from Homeland Security to prepare. We have well-trained staff who are able to help us create a comprehensive preparedness program.
Ellis Stanley, Los Angeles (LA): Preparedness is always a work in progress. The City of Los Angeles has consistently been rated better than most, but one should look inward when rating the level of preparedness. Los Angeles has strong training and exercising programs, well equipped and trained professional first responders, great partnerships with NGOs, the private sector and, most importantly, with the communities and the people.
Andrew Velasquez, Chicago (CHI): We face major emergencies in the city every day and respond to them very well. At the same time we continue to refine our plans, training and exercising to ensure that we are best prepared for large-scale emergencies that might stretch our resources.
GUIDE: What are your chief
accomplishments since 9/11?
Since Hurricane Katrina?
Bruno (NYC): Clearly, one of the biggest things that we did after 9/11 was the implementation of the city-wide incident management system. No question that when 9/11 hit, and I think the perception was that management of that event needed to be stronger. Beyond that, we realized that interoperable communications were another major issue that was of concern in 9/11. We now have fully interoperable communications between all of the emergency management agencies, so that radios carry the same frequency.
Castillo (MIA): We began a focused, concerted effort to prepare for terrorism incidents in the early 1990s. As with most emergency awareness programs, however, our efforts to increase government and community awareness of WMD became more accepted following 9/11. The fact that so many fire and law enforcement personnel lost their lives in the World Trade Center towers seemed to result in the public's awareness of the dangers of our professions and the dedication of those who devote their lives to save others.
Velasquez (CHI): Currently, we are focusing a lot of our attention on all-hazards planning, radio-interoperability, cameras and special population identification and response. Since 9/11, we worked hard on and are continuing to work hard on preparing our first responders for emergencies. In the past few months we also took a hard look at how we communicate with the citizens of Chicago on emergency preparedness issues.
GUIDE: Was Hurricane Katrina a
significant enough anomaly to change the way you do business?
Boccia (BOS): Katrina was really a major lesson for us, in that it was the driving force behind the unifying of the two venues: emergency management and homeland security. We also took a major lesson from Katrina in terms of sheltering. We saw what New Orleans tried to do with the Superdome and, as I said to the political people here, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. What they tried to do was not a bad thing. They just couldn't pull it off, because the Superdome did not have the appropriate infrastructure to support a mass sheltering effort like that. We take that lesson and we work from it.
Bruno (NYC): It definitely changed what we're doing with regard to coastal planning. New York City is at risk for hurricanes. Clearly a major hurricane in New York City would be dramatic because of the intensity of the population here, our coastal regions and the number of people that live in these regions. We now assume, which we did not in the past, a 100 percent evacuation of the coastal region.
Castillo (MIA): South Florida was affected by Hurricane Katrina, albeit with much less impact than it had on the Gulf States. I firmly believe that there is no such thing as a 'natural disaster.' They are all human-generated. We can't stop the wind from blowing, but we can surely prevent it from taking lives and destroying property.
Childs-Pair (DC): The District was among the US cities tapped by FEMA to operate emergency shelters for persons who had been displaced by Hurricane Katrina. As a result of operating the shelter, there were lessons learned and gaps identified that will inform future shelter operations in the District. Additional focus will be placed on the special needs population and incorporating a special needs registry into our emergency preparedness for evacuation purposes.
GUIDE: How has Katrina impacted the way you do business with the general public?
Castillo (MIA): Hurricane Katrina raised government and public awareness of the need to incorporate the public's input in the planning process. However, in Miami-Dade, Hurricane Wilma proved to be more of a catalyst for bringing pre-existing socio-economic issues to the forefront. Hundreds were left suddenly homeless. Naturally, those without the economic means to find alternate housing turned to local, state and federal governments for assistance. Since Wilma, the county established a public-private partnership to raise funds, primarily from private sources, to help alleviate the problem.
Conroy (SF): When we look at preparedness in San Francisco, we always look at it as a two-pronged approach. Is government prepared with our first responders to deal with an emergency? Are citizens prepared? We have 14,000 Neighborhood Emergency Response Teams in San Francisco. We developed a great new website, called 72hours.org, that's had about 240,000 unique visitors since Katrina. We take every teaching opportunity there is to reach the public.
Stanley (LA): Katrina has clearly opened eyes that once were closed because many assumed that this just can't happen here. Well, guess what? Katrina was on our soil; our systems and our processes failed the public. To that end, the public more clearly understand they have a role and responsibility in the process of preparedness and have been more willing to come to the table. We are seeing an increase in participation of our neighborhood planning councils, our faith based institutions and our non-governmental organizations as we continue the process of preparedness in our city.
GUIDE: Do you have an evacuation plan to empty your city in a sufficient amount of time? Is such a plan even realistic in your city?
Boccia (BOS): When it comes to evacuation and mass care in our planning, we are way ahead in the power curve. I think the secret to our plan, and the one that should be followed by any city, is three points. The plan has to be flexible, meaning you have to be able to change it on the fly. Number two, it needs to be scalable. The same plan should be applied, and should be workable, whether you need to evacuate a couple of blocks or a small neighbourhood, or a large section of the city or the whole city. And number three, you cannot exact a plan and design a plan that addresses each and every possible occurrence.
Bruno (NYC): We realistically understand that evacuation planning is enormous. We will need all the resources, assets and personnel working in this enormous government of ours to come into action. We are also building a program with the private sector that services the special needs population in New York City, particularly in the coastal areas, and we will have access to their database of information.
Castillo (MIA): I can't imagine a scenario where it would be necessary for us to evacuate the 2.5 million residents of Miami-Dade. The county is situated in the distant end of the Florida Peninsula. Where would we go? In the case of an approaching Category 4 or 5 hurricane, more than 400,000 people would have to evacuate the coastal areas. Our evacuation preparedness message involves educating the public that it is not necessary to leave the County, simply move to a safe place outside the evacuation zones.
Velasquez (CHI): We have a very comprehensive evacuation framework that is very flexible for all hazards. We build on it and update it on a regular basis to ensure that it evolves with transportation changes within the city and in the surrounding counties. We also work closely with our regional partners from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Gary, Indiana to ensure that our plan has a regional approach.
GUIDE: What are you doing to incorporate the private sector in your plans before, during and after emergencies?
Boccia (BOS): We know that expertise exists out in the private sector that can help us out. We're funding a project at Northeastern University right now that will catalog all of the expertise that may be needed in time of an emergency. The next phase is to identify training programs that exist, so we can train people in this area to have that particular expertise.
Bruno (NYC): We have what we call Corp Net. As incidents occur in New York City, this information is passed down to the corporate sector by this network so they can utilize it in their own operations and the way they react to doing business in our city. Additionally, we have asked the private sector to register with us assets they would be willing to offer the city in the event we needed those. The specific things we are asking for are facilities, skill sets, and certain types of equipment.
Childs-Pair (DC): The District works closely with its private sector partners. Upcoming community outreach efforts will focus on the small business community. Several private sector entities, including the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area and the hotel and restaurant associations are among the organizations and agencies that are represented in the city's Emergency Operations Center (EOC).
Conroy (SF): In San Francisco, we've been working very closely with our business community, looking at how big business, big and small businesses, can work together to assist in an emergency. We told them what some of our priorities would be, and they are looking at a proposal to the city.
GUIDE: What has the pandemic threat done to your planning efforts?
Childs-Pair (DC): We held a pandemic preparedness summit in April, designed to bring together government officials, health care professionals and other stakeholders. We are currently completing development of standard operating procedures and protocols to implement the plan, as well as developing a comprehensive public education campaign.
Conroy (SF): I think everybody's pretty tuned in to the whole pandemic issue. We have a task force in San Francisco that meets regularly to talk about these different issues, work on the plan, and really make everyone aware, including employers, about the issue of a pandemic flu.
Stanley (LA): The avian flu has caused us to increase and in some cases develop plans we need to address. The sense of urgency is clear and the response has been encouraging from the standpoint of clearly suspending the disbelief of "this can't happen to us". The threat of pandemic is akin to the Y2K effort in that we hope it doesn't happen, but we are clear on the need to be ready if it does occur. We've developed a plan in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services and the State of California and we've exercised many components of it. We understand, however, that we must build in the flexibility to adapt to the unknown situations that may result from this type of emergency.
Velasquez (CHI): We have a Pandemic Influenza Planning Task Force for the City of Chicago. This group meets on a regular basis to discuss the planning for and the response to a pandemic in the city. The group is made up of key agencies, which would be responsible for managing a large-scale outbreak of a pandemic or epidemic. Our plan is currently being updated to meet the needs of a possible pandemic in the city in the most efficient and effective manner. Finally, we have also developed and implemented applications capable of tracking outbreaks by geographic areas.
About the Experts
Carlo A. Boccia is Director of the City of Boston's Office of Homeland Security. Mr. Boccia is an acknowledged and widely respected law enforcement and private security executive. He retired from the US government after more than 32 years of law enforcement, intelligence and military service. As an executive with the Drug Enforcement Administration, he supervised complex domestic and international drug/financial investigations and managed the agency's largest components. He was posted to six domestic and three foreign offices. His credits include two US Presidential and several foreign government citations, as well as the prestigious US Attorney General's award for outstanding achievement.
Joseph F. Bruno is Commissioner of New York City's Office of Emergency Management (OEM.) Commissioner Bruno's distinguished career in public service began in 1971, when he joined the City Law Department as a trial attorney. He served in various Law Department posts, including Chief of the General Litigation, Consumer Protection, and Tort divisions, until 1983, when he became First Deputy Commissioner of the New York City Fire Department. In 2004, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg appointed him to his current position. He is the fourth Commissioner to hold the position since the OEM was established in 1996.
Carlos J. Castillo is Director of the Office of Emergency Management for Miami-Dade County, Florida. He is responsible for coordinating the County's mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery for major emergencies. As OEM Director, he coordinated the County's response to the four hurricanes in 2004 and Hurricanes Dennis and Katrina in 2005. He testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform to share Miami-Dade's plans for natural and man-made disasters. Director Castillo has been a member of the Miami-Dade County Fire Department since 1981 as a firefighter and paramedic. He is also a registered nurse with cardiac and emergency department trauma-unit experience.
Barbara Childs-Pair is Director of the District of Columbia Emergency Management Agency (DCEMA). She began her career in 1973 with the Office of Civil Defense, now the DC Emergency Management Agency, as a clerk typist. During the past 30 years she has held several positions within DCEMA, including administrative aide, chief of plans and training, chief of operations and deputy director of emergency operations. She served as deputy director of the agency from 1995 to 1999 and again from 2000 to 2003. Following the events of September 11, 2001, Ms. Childs-Pair assisted with the development of the District Response Plan.
Annemarie Conroy is Executive Director of the Office of Emergency Services and Homeland Security for the City and County of San Francisco. In this capacity, she reports directly to the Mayor of San Francisco. Director Conroy is charged with the oversight of all emergency response and preparedness, training and equipping of all emergency personnel, coordination, operation and implementation of emergency plans and activities as well as coordination with federal, state and regional agencies involving emergency services and disaster relief. She is a native San Franciscan and a graduate of U.C. Berkeley and Hastings College of the Law.
Ellis M. Stanley, Sr. is the General Manager of the City of Los Angeles Emergency Preparedness Department. He began his City career in September, 1997. Prior to that, he was the Director of the Atlanta-Fulton County Emergency Management Agency since 1987. He has been the director of an emergency management program for almost 30 years, beginning in 1975 in Brunswick County, North Carolina and in Durham-Durham County, North Carolina in 1982. Mr. Stanley has also served as a County Fire Marshal, Fire and Rescue Commissioner and County Safety Officer. He is active in the emergency management profession, and was the inaugural chair of the Certified Emergency Managers Certification Commission.
Andrew Velasquez III is Executive Director of the Office of Emergency Management and Communications (OEMC) in Chicago. Mr. Velasquez is responsible for executing the City's public safety initiatives and exercises leadership over six divisions, with 1200 employees. Prior to being appointed Executive Director, Mr. Velasquez served as OEMC's Managing Deputy Director of Operations. Some of his most notable accomplishments in that capacity include the launching of a comprehensive public outreach campaign and an integrated training program for 9-1-1 call takers and dispatchers aimed at reducing the number of misuse and prank calls made to the 9-1-1 Center. |
