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MISSOURI DIVISION |
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PROCEEDINGS OF THE SEPTEMBER 2000 POST EARTHQUAKE HIGHWAY RESPONSE AND RECOVERY SEMINAR HELD IN ST. LOUIS MISSOURI
ROLE OF THE AMERICAN RED CROSS BY RONALD SAMPSON
MR. MUSSER: Our next presenter is Ron Sampson. Ron is the Director of Disaster Services at the St. Louis Area Chapter of the American Red Cross. He is responsible for disaster mitigation and preparedness response and recovery program for the ARC in seven counties. This jurisdiction contains approximately 40 percent of the population of the state of Missouri and is at risk for a variety of disasters, natural and manmade. Additionally, the chapter is the state coordinating chapter and state lead chapter for disaster services. Ron responds and coordinates activities related to large-scale disasters anywhere in the state of Missouri. Ron also serves as the primary contact for the state emergency management agency and other agencies active in disasters. Prior to joining the American Red Cross in 1997, Ron served 30 years in the United States Air Force. He served in various locations throughout the world and retired in 1997.
MR. SAMPSON: Thank you, Dave. Today, I am the only volunteer agency representative. The Red Cross is one of the lead volunteer organizations in the federal response plan. I will take on the mantle and speak broadly a little bit for the entire VOAAD (Voluntary Agencies Active in Disaster). There are a number of us, so we come from that perspective.
I' m not Elaine Clyburn (ARC President). She would tell you that she' s a level five American Red Cross Disaster Operations Director. Level five is the highest level, like an Andrew-type disaster. She' s also the American Red Cross Regional Disaster Planner that means she is my resource to make sure that both my state of Missouri disaster operations plan and my chapter operations plans are in concert with what the national headquarters plan. She is the
Red Cross representative whose office is in Memphis, Tennessee, at the CUSEC headquarters. She is very attuned with what' s happening with this earthquake phenomenon. She' s the American Red Cross emergency response team representative for ESF-6 under the Federal Response Plan. She happens to be pulling that duty today.
I' m the disaster director of the local chapter for American Red Cross. I' m a resident of this area on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. I do commute every day and two minor accidents this morning caused a one-hour delay on the bridge. There are only five bridges that cross the Mississippi River between Illinois and Missouri in the St. Louis area.
When I see the concrete collars MoDOT has added around columns of Interstate 64 as a seismic retrofit effort and I see other structures in the area that are not as hefty, I would be afraid these old rickety bridges would fall down in the slightest shake. When it comes to travel demand, just look at what happens when we just have a minor accident on one of these bridges. I don' t know that I would be able to get work the day or the night that the big earthquake happens. I' d probably have to call the civil air patrol to fly me over to the west side of the river, which I can do because we have arrangements with the civil air patrol.
Nobody has to look at the map very hard to see we are in the physical center of the United States, and road, rail boat, train all cross in abundance through here. So what does that mean to us.
The Red Cross chose a level-7.6 earthquake as the worst-case planning scenario. Ones larger than that have a pretty low probability of occurring. Ones that are smaller have a higher probability but if we can deal with a 7.6, we can deal with smaller ones. We chose the 7.6 level to drive our planning efforts.
About 40 percent of the state' s population of Missouri lives within about 25 miles of St. Louis. So that really presents us with a real problem. This includes about 2.3 million people. The area in general has been growing even though the central city has been declining in population.
Red Cross has a motto: We' ll be there. What does that mean to us? The American Red Cross in general is a volunteer organization but I' m a paid staff member. I have a small paid staff that primarily deals with activities of planning, preparation and training of volunteers and response to single family events or emergencies that occur in our metropolitan area on a daily basis.
I' ve got approximately 450 folks in the state of Missouri who are trained by national headquarters, trained to work on these large-scale disaster operations. Just like the military, we have to mobilize in times of a major disaster. They' re at my call but it takes time to call them together. Historically, it takes five phone calls to get one volunteer. People are scattered across the globe on any given minute and I have to work to get my folks to respond.
Beyond the trained 450, we also have other categories of volunteers. These are local volunteers who do not want to leave their home area to do disaster response across the country. I have access to their help at any time. We have the spontaneous volunteers. We have a structure to deal with these spontaneous volunteers to get them train quickly to work at our lower level operations. They are the people that actually provide delivery to our clients.
Now, the Red Cross response is like all other emergency management responses. It starts out at the local level, the chapter. We have 27 chapters across the state of Missouri and about a similar number in the other CUSEC states. We don' t have a clue about how many homes will fall down when a New Madrid 7.6 earthquake happens. So at the very best the local volunteers will be responding to local needs. They' re not going to be additional forces. They are the first faces that the victims of this disaster will see.
The Congressional charter gives us the charge in times of disaster, whether man-made or natural or in times of war, to alleviate the suffering and prevent death that is caused by the effects of that disaster.
How do we do that? We have an organization that has its roots from the military. We are organized very much like that. We have a command structure. We have communications. We have vehicles and a chain of command that goes up to the national headquarters in Falls Church, Virginia. We mobilize on a national level like the military does.
We have a number of functions. They run the gamut of setting up and operating a city for instance: communications, logistics, and transportation. But we have four functions. The first one is mass care to insure that people are fed, sheltered, and clothed in an emergency situation. Disaster health services; if we set up a shelter, we have to insure that we comply with health regulations so we aren' t causing a bigger disaster by making people sick, serving not healthful food and providing at least some level of first aid in that shelter. We are never a hospital. We are not emergency medical services EMS). We are not in-depth first aid. But we do provide a level of first aid.
Along with both coping with the immediate after-effects of a large-scale disaster or even a small family one and recovering from it, mental health services are important. The American Red Cross provides mental health services.
In a major disaster involving massive communications disruption, there are going to be many families, friends, and concerned individuals from outside the disaster area that will try to enter the area or call to learn more about the health and welfare of their families and friends. The American Red Cross is the primary agency set up to do what we call DWI, Disaster Welfare Inquiry. It is the better kind of DWI. DWI is the computer system we set up to capture information on disaster victims. We get information from any source we can: victims themselves, people who are either trapped or evacuating the disaster zone, or governmental agencies that set up shelters and hospitals. Once this database is set up, we assign people who answer the inquiries.
Finally, for family services, we interview people who have been affected by the disaster to help determine what it' s going to take to start the recovery process. We are not an insurance company nor do we make families whole as a result of disaster. We find out what kind of insurance they have and help them submit a claim. We can put them up temporarily while the rebuilding process gets started. We can refer people to other agencies or organization that provide assistance we cannot provide.
Not one emergency response agency claims they have all the resources in our pocket ready today to respond to a disaster of this size. I´ve seen projections of up to 150,000 people would be totally without any kind of shelter. Their homes are like pancakes. They can´t stay in them. As we have seen from Turkey, even people whose homes are standing, would rather live in the streets than go back into a home and suffer the aftershock anxieties.
So let' s say that I' ve got nearly 150,000 folks that need temporary housing. Well, I' ve been a pretty good soldier and I´ve canvassed my seven-county area and I know I have lots of buildings. I' ve got 650 buildings with signed shelter agreements and listed a computer database. In total, they have a capacity for about 115,000 folks. That sounds pretty good because there are other chapters surrounding me that have done a thing.
For the most part, my shelters are un-reinforced masonry school and public buildings that I have grave concerns on whether or not they will be standing. They have not been inspected for survivability by the Corps of Engineers. The Corps has been very busy looking at public structures. So we have confidence in buildings, bridges, roads, and dams but they haven't gotten to my shelters yet. Someday I hope they will. I'm afraid the answer won't be what I would like to hear. Even if we assume there will be a lot of shelters in place, it might be safer for you to stay in your house if it is still standing and reasonably safe rather than trying to travel the highways that are falling down trying to get to a shelter that you know nothing about. There might be enough bridges down along an evacuation corridor to prevent you from completing a trip to a shelter. If you wait at home, in a couple of days the overpasses may be bulldozed off the road so you can travel that route. There aren't a lot of buildings down on I-44. There is a lot of open area, so where out there could I shelter 150,000 people? There are lots of problems to deal with and lots of shortfalls in resources that we need.
It has been projected in the high damage zones, the area 10 and 9 on the Mercalli Scale. Those people could be on their own for ten days with their local emergency management, their local Red Cross response, their local Salvation Army, or churches.
Repairing or replacing damaged infrastructure could take years depending on the magnitude and the kind of damage. Right now it's going to take us ten years to build another bridge across the Mississippi River. An army pontoon bridge works pretty good, but when the ice jams up against it, it doesn't work too good.
The Red Cross doesn't operate shelters. We really can't operate shelters without gas, electricity and water and somebody to say that building is a safe to occupy during minor aftershocks. So picking a shelter in the damage zone is risky business. We pick up liability if we open that shelter and in the next hour the roof falls in. We'll do what we've got to do to keep people from freezing to death.
The American Red Cross has a policy of not running tent cities. First of all, we don't have the assets in terms of tents. If you talk to the military they might have them, or could get them. Setting up a big size tent city is a problem. The Red Cross doesn't have the expertise to run a tent city. You set up a tent city and you have a municipality. That's local government's responsibility to run a tent city. You've got all the problems that are associated with running a city, whether it is law enforcement, medical treatment, or in-depth medical treatment. the things that we expect from a city will be expected in the tent city. We will help run that tent city but we will not be responsible for a tent city.
Spontaneous volunteers and spontaneous resources are great for us. They always happen but they have to be managed. You can end up with warehouses full of clothing that nobody needs or wants. Nobody can manage it, sort it, size it and get it to where it's needed. So basically, it ends up a management problem. You have pre-designated some organization to take care of that kind of well-intentioned donation.
Four million people in the seven-state area feel the direct effects, and we already talked about those that would be in serious trouble.
We all know there is apt to be competition for scarce resources. There is CUSEC and others who continue to work with all the various agencies that are going to respond and how we're going to deal with it prior to it happening. Now we see DOT coming on board. Nobody is adjudicating who gets rebuilt first. So somebody will have to decide where is the worst hurt. For example: Indiana may have a little disruption of its water and electricity but other States may have buildings down and laying in the streets. So it's going to depend on setting priorities to get to the worst areas first and assign our valuable resources to them first.
One of our responsibilities under the federal emergency response plan is plan and share information. We are one of the organizations that do damage assessments. We do drive-by damage assessments. We are not engineers. We're not going to go into buildings and say, "This building is not going to fall." We drive by the outside, the electricity is on, water´s not springing out of the ground, the roof is still up, looks like it might be habitable, that's the kind of assessment we would be doing in the early hours.
There is a relatively large chapter in Kansas City out of the damage zone. If they haven't heard from me in about 15 minutes after they hear that there has been a major quake here, they take the lead. I'll get back to them as soon as I can. They would pick up all the roles and responsibilities that I have at that point.
Out in the center of the state, we have the State Emergency Management Agency and a headquarters. It's in a National Guard building. It's in the heart of the facility. It is very survivable and probably will not have to be moved. It has good communications and it's out of the major impact zone. They're in pretty good shape there in terms of data management. We have liaison that would be there and be our point of contact there.
The FEMA disaster field office is planned to be in Columbia, Missouri. They haven't got all the building arrangements tied down, but at least there is where they intend to go. We would have representatives there or fairly near. First the FEMA field office will be out there in Kansas City and we have a VOAAD coordinator there. There is a Red Cross staffer that coordinates all volunteer agencies active in disaster response. Then we have a staging area for resources in Springfield, Missouri. So in kind donations would be planned to go into the Springfield area for sorting and dispatching to the areas where they are needed.
The states that are going to be affected have similar layouts and plans. As I indicated earlier, we do start with national recruiting. As soon as I get something as large as New Madrid, and even much smaller than that, I call national headquarters and ask that we start the mobilization process.
The American Red Cross has 20,000 trained volunteers scattered across the country. I have 450 and can draw upon the other 19,650 for additional help. Every time we have a hurricane alert warning in the Gulf or Florida, we activate that regional center. We send our response vehicles there. They stage from there and get assigned to the area that eventually needs the help. Kansas City is now designated as one of those regional staffing centers because of the New Madrid earthquake threat. Kansas City is a staging area for us to huddle and organize and then move into the disaster area.
We eventually get to service delivery. You' ve seen our vehicles on the streets. We get down to the streets and block area when we can. In something very large, we're going to be looking at congregate kinds of areas to do feeding and so forth.
The American Red Cross is mentioned in four of the ESF responses, No. 5, No. 6, No. 8, and No. 11; health services, food and planning and information sharing.
What is ESF 6? Well, it fits very closely with what I described to you in American Red Cross' function and other volunteer agencies provide a large portion of that. The Southern Baptists always have huge mobile kitchens. They come in and cook meals. The Salvation Army's got the same kind of mobile vehicles we have and come in to help us. There are just a number of agencies, many of them church affiliated, that come in and provide part of this support. I don't have all the assets ourselves to deal with a large magnitude disaster.
That's who we are. That's what we're supposed to do and what we're planning to do. We'll keep working on it and continue collaborating with a number of other organizations. At the national level we've got more than 50 memorandums of understanding with agencies both in and out of government, DOD, FEMA, DOT, on and on with the alphabet soup. We are the volunteer agencies that come together and work together in response to a disaster.
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