Even If You’re Small
Disasters don’t always pick on someone their own size, so even small departments need an emergency operations plan.
DISASTER MANAGEMENT
The town of Fairport Harbor, Ohio, population 3,400, has its fair share of hazards to worry about—and a department of just 3 full-time and 28 part-time firefighters (including a part-time chief) to do a lot of the worrying.
With a department that size, it took a couple of years to write a comprehensive emergency plan. But through a system of priorities, the job did get done, with the most likely events covered first.
Situated on two navigable waterways—Lake Erie and the Grand River—Fairport Harbor faces possible emergencies ranging from rapid-water ice rescue to blizzards and tornadoes (lacking Doppler radar, the area can’t foresee severe weather coming across the lake) to hazardous materials. Although mostly residential, the town has enough industry to bring in organic peroxides, magnesium, and plastics. One small plant offloads anhydrous ammonia from railroad cars for rebottling. And there’s a natural gas substation that steps transmission down from high to low pressure.
The most likely emergencies will differ in other communities, but almost any kind of event could happen almost anywhere. A civil disturbance could occur in any place where there’s a picket line, demonstration, or school board meeting. Thousands of communities are located within 100 miles of a fault in the earth that could cause a tremor. The next time a contractor works on a water line, you could have a cave-in. Haz-mats may not be used on a large scale in your community, but very likely at least one vehicle carrying a hazardous chemical travels through every single day. And regardless of your proximity to an airport, your community could be the next victim of a major airplane crash.
Absorbents Aircraft Ambulances American Red Cross Animal warden Attorney, city Barricades Board-up service Boats Bomb squad Building inspector Bulldozers Buses Carry-alls Camera Chain saw Chemtrec Chlorine kits Circular saws City officials Clergy Compressed air Construction equipment Coroner Council members
County officials Cutting torches Demolition equipment Diesel fuel Diking materials Disaster services agency Divers
Electric company Environmental agencies Evacuation centers Fencing materials Film
Fire departments Food
Four-wheel-drive vehicles
Fuel supplies
Gasoline
Gas companies
Generators
Gravel and stone
Haz-mat teams
Ham radio teams
Health department
Heaters, portable
Helicopters
Ice
Manager or mayor Morgue
National Guard
National Response Center
Newspapers
Photographers and video tape Physicians Portable toilets Psychologists/psychiatrists Radio stations Refrigerated trailers Salvation Army Sand
Sheriff’s department Snowmobiles Soda ash State police Streets department Telephone company Television stations Tow trucks Water department Weather Bureau
Figure 1. First Questions
What is the chain of command?
Who can officially declare the situation a disaster?
Where can an emergency operations center be located?
How are the other departments within the municipality activated?
Who can request mutual aid and within what geographical limitations?
What types of reports and forms will be needed?
When will the disaster services agency be called to assist?
What state and federal laws apply?
What state and federal assistance or aid is available?
What communications, such as ham radio, are available?
Who has the authority to request the use of private property such as bulldozers, trucks, cranes, private ambulances, and buses?
Are municipal or school buses available for evacuation, how are they activated, and who will drive them?
If necessary, where will residents be evacuated to?
Who will be the public information officer and issue press releases?
Where will food for personnel be obtained?
Where will water (drinking and raw) be obtained if the distribution system is disrupted?
What is available for post-incident stress counseling for personnel who respond to the crisis?
Emergency operations planning is nothing more than assessing the likelihood of an incident occurring in your area and drawing up a plan for handling it. The process need not be complicated; Fairport Harbor’s plan covers each possibility in outline form in two to three pages.
A few hours of research gave us the information we needed to plan for blizzards. A lot of it was from books; we also called a local television station and talked to chiefs from neighboring departments to get some background on problems caused by past blizzards. We found, for instance, that power was lost, which alerted us to the need for a back-up method of notifying our part-time firefighters.
Who’s going to do all this work? The smart fire chief of any department, especially a small one, will use all officers and any other personnel who have the interest or talent. This requires proper delegation of both responsibility and authority for a part of the overall plan. I’m a firm believer in not just passing out gold badges and titles to officers, but expecting them to carry their weight in all aspects of a small department’s management and planning.
To be most effective, though, the fire department shouldn’t conduct emergency operations planning on its own. When disaster strikes, it’s very likely that other departments will be involved. If local elected and appointed officials don’t see the need for a plan, educate them. If they’re reluctant, ask them if they know where to seek shelter if an earthquake occurs. Do they know when and where to obtain outside help? Does the police chief know which are the 20 police departments closest to the community? Do public works officials know where to get 50 tons of soda ash on an hour’s notice at 2 a.m.? Who has the authority to incur emergency purchases? If they don’t know the answers, the need for planning should quickly become clear.
The first question to answer is: Who’s in charge? In Ohio, the answer is easy. The state fire code reads: “The fire chief or his authorized representative shall be in charge at the scene of a fire or emergency involving the protection of life and/or property, and shall remain in charge until such authority is relinquished.”
The same may not apply in your state, however. In fact, some communities’ disaster plans list different officials in charge for different types of disasters, depending on what problems the event will create.
Even with Ohio’s fire code, proper handling of a disaster requires a cooperative effort on the part of every official and department involved. The command portion of the emergency operations plan which I wrote for Fairport Harbor reads: “While the state fire code places the responsibility for life and/or property on the shoulders of the fire chief … I expect that all emergency operations will be a coordinated effort between this department and all other village officials. . . . Whenever possible, decisions should be discussed with the mayor, police chief, and others concerned, as a movement or placement of apparatus by the fire department could affect all other village departments.”
Once it’s decided who will be in charge, the questions listed in Figure 1 on the opposite page must be addressed.
A small department has limited resources, so before planning for individual categories, you need to decide priorities. This is made easier by a survey such as that in Figure 2 at right. For each type of potential disaster, determine if it’s very possible, possible, or remotely possible. Then begin planning with the ones in the first category, and work your way through all three lists.
As described in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s materials on the Integrated Emergency Management System, your plan for each potential event should cover four phases:
- Mitigation—Steps that can be taken to minimize the effects before the event ever occurs, such as public education and adoption of building, fire, and zoning codes.
- Preparedness—Steps that make the community ready to handle a disaster, such as writing contingency plans, training, and setting up a system to warn or alert residents.
- Response—Steps designed for handling the actual incident, such as activating the warning system, assembling response personnel, evacuating, extinguishing fires, searching for survivors, and setting up emergency shelters.
- Recovery—Steps taken to return the community to its predisaster status, such as repairing structures and restoring utilities.
The plan should be flexible and easy to understand. There should be some latitude for the individuals involved to make reasonable deviations to meet specific situations that arise. The book should include as an appendix a resource list similar to that shown in blue at the edge of pages 39 and 40, except that your actual list will include the name of the company or individual who will provide each resource, along with business and afterhours telephone numbers.
You also have to consider the domino effect of any given disaster. Should an earthquake strike your area, aftershocks, building collapse, power failure, telephone failure, natural gas line leaks, and a host of other problems could soon follow. Your earthquake plan doesn’t have to have its own plan for each of these, but it should note these other possibilities and make reference to the appropriate plans elsewhere in the book.
It’s important to note that writing a plan, in itself, doesn’t end the mission. You must read and reread it, train with it, remember it, and update it when necessary. To have a paper plan without training would be the same as reading how to raise a 35-foot ladder, but never actually trying to raise it until your first fire.
Each year, 5,000 people pour into Fairport Harbor for a summer festival, so the fire department trained in a mass casualty drill with the help of eight mutual aid departments from the county. The drill simulated an amusement ride falling down.
We also remembered the plan when we got a report of a leaking drum at a trucking terminal. As the plan mandated, we closed a major highway through town until we were able to identify the substance. We called in the county haz-mat team, and phoned Chemtrec (the Chemical Transportation Emergency Center of the Chemical Manufacturers’ Association), and the chemical’s manufacturer.
FEMA’s Disaster Planning Guidelines for Fire Chiefs was a great aid in doing the planning. It’s now out of print, but the International Association of Fire Chiefs has published a companion and successor volume under contract with FEMA; it’s entitled Fire Service Emergency Management Handbook. Several other FEMA publications can help in disaster planning: Emergency Planning Course (publication number SM61); State and Local Emergency Operations Plans (CPG1-8); Disaster Operations Guide: A Handbook for Local Government (CPG1-6); and Hazardous Materials Emergency Planning (NRT-1).
Like prefire planning, emergency operations planning is an extremely important function of all fire departments. With planning, training on the final product, and periodic reviews and updating, even the smallest department can be prepared to handle an unusual emergency properly.
