Preparing for the worst
Just as New York’s physical landscape was catastrophically altered by the events of Sept. 11, so was the psychic landscape of America’s cities and counties. Local governments that had terrorism response plans prior to the attacks are now reviewing their preparedness, and those without plans are taking the first hurried steps to produce them.
It is a monumental task, but locals are not as far behind the curve as one might imagine. Many of the nation’s larger cities began planning and training years ago, and they — along with state and federal agencies — can provide guidance and technical assistance for others.
Answering the major questions
A terrorism response plan is developed as part of a community’s overall emergency management plan, with contingencies for manmade disasters as opposed to natural ones. It makes sense, then, that planning for terrorism begins with a review of existing protocols.
“It is appropriate for cities to review their existing emergency response and recovery plans and then seek out best practices from cities of comparable size or the next level of government, like a county or a district or a state,” says Marcus Aurelius, emergency management coordinator for Phoenix. “That gives them an understanding of the kinds of programs already in existence and how they could incorporate those into their local practice.”
Communities that are starting from scratch or from outdated plans can begin their planning process by contacting their states for assistance, says John Clark, emergency management director for Oklahoma City. “Every state has an Office of Emergency Management, and they have several planning courses and planning templates that can be fit to individual jurisdictions,” he notes.
Traditionally, the review process is a function of the community’s emergency manager,” Aurelius says. “By ‘emergency manager’ I mean a stand-alone emergency manager or someone (e.g., the sheriff, the police chief, the fire chief or, in some cases, the public works person) with that assigned function. He puts together the initial planning, and that is reviewed by city management to ensure that they know what the practices are and what the responsibilities associated with [them] are.”
Planning will address four major questions:
- What is the city’s critical infrastructure (e.g., water, electricity, fuel, communications)?
- What are the threats to that infrastructure?
- How vulnerable is the community to those threats?
- What is the community’s risk (e.g., how likely is it to sustain a major loss)?
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Once those factors are identified, the emergency manager can begin planning for response and assessing the community’s resources for equipment and personnel. Input from department heads is critical at both stages, Clark says.
“Your three big players are police, fire and public works,” Clark notes. “But you’re going to [need input] from other departments like transit, water, wastewater, information technology, animal welfare and airports. Oklahoma City has 26 departments, and I requested information from all of them.”
Clark and Aurelius both note that department heads should supply a list of department positions, arranged in a chain of succession. As was demonstrated at the World Trade Center, the risk of injury or death for first or even second responders is high, and it is critical for incident commanders to know who is in charge at all times.
“Sometimes, departments really don’t want to [determine succession],” Clark says. “They have two or three or more people on the same lateral level, and they really don’t want to choose someone. But [the emergency manager] has to know that line because, if someone is killed in the event [or out of town], someone’s got to take their place. Continuity of government is imperative; the government has to go on, regardless of what happens.”
Setting up response and responders
Identifying risks is the first step in establishing an Incident Command System (ICS, a protocol for responding to an event and resolving it), and risks will differ from community to community. For one city, major risks may come in the form of an airport or sports stadium, where large numbers of people gather at once; for another, the greatest risk may be a warehouse of volatile chemicals in an industrial area.
Based on logistics and the type of attack that can be expected — incendiary, biological or chemical — emergency managers have to plan for response, determining Emergency Support Functions (ESFs), including the type and quantity of equipment and personnel needed to manage the event.
Initially, managers have to look at home and determine their community’s response limitations. If resources are lacking, they can fill the gaps through coordination with other agencies and through mutual-aid agreements. For example, if a community needs a particular piece of equipment, it might turn first to the county, then to the state and then to Federal Emergency Management Agency to perform a search, Clark says.
It may not be necessary to purchase all the equipment. Mutual-aid agreements have become commonplace in emergency management, and they provide a means for neighboring jurisdictions and private entities to formalize offers of technical assistance, equipment and specialty personnel in the event of a disaster. However, communities should not assume that aid is forthcoming without an agreement; they need to finalize the agreements and keep them on file as part of the emergency management plan, Clark notes.
As the ICS is developed, the universe of ESFs and assisting parties will grow, and it is important to measure the impact of new players on the plan as a whole. According to Joseph Waeckerle, former EMS director for Kansas City, Mo., the ICS should connect jurisdictions horizontally (across departments, with neighboring communities, and with private and non-profit organizations) and vertically (with state and federal agencies).
Most cities should already be familiar with state and federal networking, Aurelius says. “If you have an emergency response and recovery plan, you know who you can reach out to and who your contacts are at different levels,” he notes. “You’re supposed to be going to meetings and dealing with your team members so that you have a relationship.”
However, a terrorism annex will require emergency managers to expand that network. (At last count, approximately 40 federal agencies had some role in domestic terrorism preparedness.) “Start networking with the alphabets in the federal organization: DOJ, DOD, DOE, DOT,” Aurelius says. “Because, in one way or another, they could descend on you to provide assistance, and you need to know how they will fit into the local echelon.”
Training is a must
The name of the game is Planning, but it is a losing proposition unless the players read and practice the final product. “People have to read the plan,” Clark says. “They have to know what’s in it. If something happens, it’s too late to start reading.”
Emergency managers can help ensure preparedness by formalizing training, says Billy Zwerschke, president of the International Association of Emergency Managers, based in Falls Church, Va. “If you don’t do an exercise, they won’t read it,” he warns.
Many local governments already are familiar with emergency response training provided through the Emergency Management Institute, based in Emmitsburg, Md. Ann Simank, a council member in Oklahoma City, credits EMI training for her city’s preparedness in the 1994 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building. “That training was invaluable,” she says, noting that it included all municipal department heads, representatives of the school system and local business leaders.
Oklahoma City later participated in training specific to terrorism, provided by the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Justice (see “The NLD Roots” on page 21). That week-long event focused on preparation for response to weapons of mass destruction, Clark says. “The five major areas of study were awareness, ICS, operations, hazmat and hospital-provider,” he explains. “It involved police, fire, public works, city officials, the mayor, the city council, hospitals, doctors, nurses, EMS — everyone. I invited over 350 people from all of the jurisdictions in and around Oklahoma City to participate.”
Like Oklahoma City, Minneapolis participated in federally sponsored training in 1998. A follow-up field exercise in 1999 involved 200 “victims” across Minneapolis and St. Paul, as well as an Emergency Operations Center exercise for the Minneapolis mayor and city council. As a result, the city identified several deficiencies, especially in communications, equipment and decontamination procedures, says Dick Turner, deputy fire chief for Minneapolis. Since then, the city has staged “some sort of exercise every year,” he notes.
Oklahoma City practices regularly as well. “You really need to do that, whether the sessions are tabletops or full field functional exercises,” he notes. “You ought to make your mistakes in those exercises and not in the real deal.”
The DOD/DOJ program emphasizes training the trainer — meaning that personnel who are trained in those sessions are then certified to instruct others in their communities. Those certified personnel are excellent resources for local governments seeking training assistance, Clark says. For a list of certified trainers in a particular area, emergency managers can contact their state Office of Emergency Management. For additional details about the Domestic Preparedness Program, they can contact DOJ by calling (800) 368-6498 or by logging on to www.ojp.usdoj.gov/odp.
Communications, health care top concerns
As cities and counties train for terrorism response, a list of universal weaknesses has begun to emerge. Already, communications and health care have been identified as critical support functions in desperate need of attention.
“Communications is a serious problem,” Aurelius notes. “We’re fortunate in Phoenix because our fire department dispatches for about 20 different cities in the immediate area, so there are common frequencies. But that’s not the case in other places. So communications is an absolute nightmare for most.”
Among the unlucky is Oklahoma City, where agencies are using different frequencies. “I can’t talk to hardly any of the suburbs,” Clark says. “Police can’t talk to fire; fire can’t talk to public works; we can’t talk to the ambulances.”
Having recently passed a bond issue to address the problem, the city is in the process of developing an 800 Megahertz communications system for the area. However, that points up another problem, Clark says. “Cities have to have redundant systems,” he notes. “Even when we get the new system, it can go down. We need backup systems. That is a problem for everybody, including Oklahoma City.”
Backup of another sort is the major problem for health care. Over the years, hospitals have honed their staffs and capacity according to average numbers of patients and types of traumas typically seen. “There is no surge capacity left in the local communities,” Waeckerle explains.
Perhaps because of that, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is funding the development of Metropolitan Medical Response Systems (MMRSs) in several cities. Similar to an ICS, the MMRS establishes a protocol for cities and medical personnel to manage a mass-casualty event. Minneapolis, Phoenix and Oklahoma City have participated in the MMRS program, and they will incorporate the resulting protocols into their overall emergency response and recovery plans.
Cost is measured in more than dollars
Of course, funding any type of emergency response is difficult, and terrorism response can be especially expensive. Pharmaceuticals, protective suits, breathing apparatuses and communication gear — just to name a few of the items needed — carry hefty price tags, and some of them have to be replenished after one use. (Pharmaceuticals have to be replaced when they are used or expire, and decontamination suits, which can cost thousands of dollars each, are designed for one-time use.)
Cities that participated in federally sponsored training received money for equipment purchases, but they will retain the cost of ongoing training and equipment maintenance. According to Aurelius, the federal government remains the most likely source of funding for any community that is planning or outfitting a terrorism response plan. Resources have been bolstered with the recent allocation of billions of dollars for terrorism preparedness.
Although funding is an open question for most communities, local governments cannot afford to ignore the changing landscape. The resources for helping them create or revise their plans are available — for free — from a variety of sources, including neighboring jurisdictions, states and the federal government (see “Getting Started” on page 22).
Scott Baltic, a Chicago-based freelancer, contributed to this article.
The NLD roots
The Defense Against Weapons of Mass Destruction Act of 1996, otherwise known as the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici (NLD) legislation, called for a nationwide effort to train first responders for response to terrorist incidents involving weapons of mass destruction. In 1997, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) began offering that training under the auspices of the NLD Domestic Preparedness Program.
Selecting 120 cities, based primarily on size, the DOD provided a week of training, delivered locally, that focused on first response and hospital preparedness. It also provided a six-hour Senior Officials Workshop for each city””s mayor and cabinet. The week’s finale was a day-long tabletop exercise. (Trainers prepared during that initial week were dispatched to instruct additional personnel in the city, leading up to a second phase of training: a full field exercise.)
At the same time, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) was establishing its own, much smaller, training program for EMTs, firefighters and, later, police. The DOJ and DOD programs merged last year, and DOJ now spearheads all response training.
At the time of the merger, 68 of the 120 cities had completed their training. Thirty-seven others had received partial training, and the remaining 15 had received no training. Chris Rizzuto, a spokesman for DOJ’s Office of Domestic Preparedness, says training for those cities will take another two years to complete.
Getting started
Online resources:
- Federal Emergency Management Agency,
www.fema.gov/pte.htm - International Association of Emergency Managers,
www.iaem.com - U.S. Department of Justice,
www.ojp.usdoj.gov/terrorism/whats_new.htm - U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,
www.epa.gov/swercepp/cntr-ter.html - The Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies provides a list of cities that have received training under the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici Domestic Preparedness Program. It also provides a breakdown of federal agencies that have provided funding for terrorism response measures. CNS,
cns.miis.edu/research/cbw/120city.htm. -
Publications:
- “Ataxia: The Chemical and Biological Terrorism Threat and the US Response,” by Amy Smithson and Leslie-Anne Levy, can be ordered at www.stimson.org.
- “Chemical and Biological Terrorism: Research and Development to Improve Civilian Medical Response,” published by the National Academies Press. This and other NAP counter-terrorism reports can be read at www.nap.edu/terror.
- “Domestic Terrorism: Resources for Local Government,” published by the National League of Cities, can be downloaded at www.nlc.org.
- “Volume I, Domestic Preparedness Program in the Defense Against Weapons of Mass Destruction,” the Department of Defense Report to Congress. It is available for viewing at www.defenselink.mil/pubs/domestic/toc.html.
