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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
COMMAND CENTER BY W.R. HARPER
MR. WILKERSON: This session is going to begin with the command center, EMC. A lot of you are not intimately involved with emergency management. This will give you a good idea of what the various operational centers do and how they interact.
Our first speaker will be talking at the state level and the next speaker will be talking about the FEMA region level and the final speaker will be talking about what goes on at the Virginia Department of Transportation, their operational center.
Our first panelist this morning is W.R. Harper, to most of us known as Bud Harper. He is the appointed director of Arkansas' Department of Emergency Management by Governor Mike Huckaby, back in August of 1997.Mr. Harper served in the governor's cabinet. He is vice president of NEMA, representing Region 6. He is chairman elect for CUSEC. Prior to his appointment, he served as county judge for eight terms in Sebastian County, Arkansas. The county judge in Arkansas is the same as a supervisor. He served as chairman of the local authority for conversion of Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. He represented United Nations Conference on base conversion in Kaiserslautern, Germany.
MR. HARPER: I am pleased to be here this morning. I'll talk to you a little about state government. While most of us are very similar in states, we all differ, too. We operate pretty well out of the same hymnal, but we just sing different hymns. We do have everything in the state that you can imagine from natural disasters of tornadoes, windstorms, hailstorms, and flooding. We have Nuclear One, so we work with those fellows quite a bit. We have the arsenal at Pine Bluff where we have the largest stockpile of mustard gas probably in the world.We have the New Madrid fault. We feel pretty lucky in that area. So we have a lot of similarities and a few differences. I suppose that the differences are where the changes in the operation of our emergency operation centers come into play.
All emergencies are local until they exceed the resources and the facilities of the local government. So while we around the states see windstorms, hail storms, tornadoes, and floods, we're pretty much on hold until the local government tells us that they need assistance from the state. The state emergency management handles it until we have exhausted our resources and our supplies, and then we call on the federal government. We call FEMA. We try to get a presidential disaster declaration to get some assistance and some relief financially for the states.
In Arkansas the local emergency management are folks appointed by the local government and subsidized by the state. We have 75 counties and two cities that have emergency coordinators. So we have 77 emergency coordinators that are the eyes and ears for us. The Arkansas Department of Emergency Management subsidizes up to 50 percent of their salary. That makes them responsive to us. We also train these folks by giving them classes and exercises. They, in a sense, work for the state. In your state it might be the county exec, the chairman of the board or your chief elected official. They report directly to him and we give the training on emergency response.
In Arkansas we have 24 different programs. We have training and we have folks hired for each of these programs. They specialize in whatever they might be. It may be earthquake mitigation, the natural disaster end, the chemical stockpile, or whatever. We have folks that are trained in those specific areas.
We have 80 different funding sources. This gives our folks in the administration something to do in keeping all the funding straight. We are fortunate that 85 percent of our budget comes from the federal government. So we have some outside help on our everyday activities.
Our philosophy in our EOC is pretty much akin to the Marine Corps philosophy. Every man is a rifleman. When the emergency arises and the rifleman is needed, everybody is a rifleman. Every person that responds to an event has a pre-designated place to be.
Most of you in the room are from departments of transportation. When anything happens, you guys will have your hands full. You know what your job is; your people are assigned to their duties; and you're doing what you do. To your agency, your job is the most important job in the state. Everyone has that same feeling. When an emergency hits, your department is doing is the most necessary and important thing that's going on. That's the way it is and the way that it should be.
At state emergency management operation centers, we are like the quartermaster.We have all the resources available. We keep track and records of what's going on, what's going out, what the resources are, what is still available, and if we need help from other areas.
Our EOC in Arkansas was built in the 1965 era during the cold war period when we were waiting for the big bomb to fall. I think a lot of them were built during that period. Our EOC is built 18 feet underground. It was built to house the chief elected officials for the state to come for a prolonged period of time. It was capable of being independently operated. It has its own water system, air filtering system, and sewage system: everything is needed for folks to stay for some period of time. It has a dormitory with a kitchen, a communications room, and office space.
Over the years with the cold war and situations changing, we have altered and modified our emergency operations center a great deal. We got rid of the asbestos about two years ago. We did some interesting renovations and made it more livable, more workable, and more palatable to be in.In addition to this, we have some office space upstairs that was originally built by the CSP folks.
Over the years through tornadoes and during our remodeling period, some trailers have been used out in the state for temporary housing for folks. So while we were remodeling, we moved in three trailers for our folks to operate out of. We have 8,000 square feet downstairs and about another 10,000 square feet upstairs.
We have about a hundred liaisons that are ESLOs. When we have exercises and drills, they will be aware of what's going on in our EOC.When an event occurs, they are not strangers to what's happening. They've been there. They've gone through the exercise. They've had an opportunity to see what we do and to see what their role is. The ESLOs are the eyes and ears that go back to the Department of Transportation or Health Department or National Guard. We´re called upon for resources.
When a situation occurs, we contact the ESLOs of the impacted area. These liaison officers show up for the particular disaster and we might have only eight or ten liaison officers in the EOC when we set up.
The structure of the EOC is a pre-designated. Everything is pre-designated. We set up the course with a team chief, a team chief assistant, an incident coordinator, and data entry folks.We have situation analysts. We have folks who are in charge of resources. They know what has been called out or what's being used. We have a couple folks on the switchboard. Security is set up. We also have the mobile support units. So we have a very similar setup for people in the field supporting us.
When a situation, we have four area coordinators that work directly out of our office and they're responsible for being our eyes and ears out in the four various parts of the state. They assist the county and city coordinators with training and with whatever information they need.So they're our area coordinators. They can't be everywhere, but we depend greatly on the county coordinators to tell us decide exactly what the situation is back in the county and then work through the county judge.
When a situation goes beyond the capabilities of the county or the city, the judge or county exec or mayor would declare an emergency, would sign a proclamation on the county basis requesting state help.In turn, again we do the proclamation on the state level requesting federal help. It's a stair step operation that things dovetail together.
We are really fortunate to have the cooperation and interagency relationship we have.In our state we're directly appointed by the governor and are a separate segment of our government. However, we couldn't work more closely than we do with the National Guard. And the State Police are there whenever we need them. In a lot of other states, the emergency operation services works through the National Guard or the State Police.
We house State Police troopers in our EOC to do their paperwork for that area. We have a good working relationship with these folks. Good interagency relationship is important. Without the teamwork, it's going to take that much longer to get our jobs done. Our procedures are already established. We've rehearsed those, gone over them in exercises, and we know pretty well where we were going.
How are we going to keep in contact? What are the communication routes going to be? How do we establish those? We have some pre-established communications set up with the folks like the Civil Air Patrol and the Arkansas Pilots' Association. The Civil Air Patrol has capabilities in our state of giving us direct video reports of the situation as it's going on. If not, then they can take videotape of the situation and bring it back to us and hand it to us physically.
We also have outstanding volunteer efforts provided to us by the pilots association in the state. We have the normal communication routes that we all have. I think most of us have something similar to an 800 Megahertz system.They're good as long as the towers are up and the systems are working and you have electrical power. We have the land and cell phones.
The ham radio operators have their own setup, their own office space, and they're permanently established at our emergency operations center.Our ham radio operators are active, they meet monthly, and they have regular exercises. Our emergency operations center is located about 35 miles west of Little Rock. When they built it, immediately they put Cruise missiles all around it so if they were going to be bombed, they could take out not only the Cruise missiles but the EOC too. Now that was pretty good planning but the Cruise missiles are now gone.
On the state level, county and city level, we need to be flexible. So we have to remain flexible and work with whatever the situation might be at the time. Thank you very much.
MR. WILKERSON: I've got seven board members, four of which are just like him. You can imagine what we get done at board meetings. You've heard a lot about Central United State Earthquake Consortium (CUSEC) and the organization. I think it's appropriate to give you a little background right now on who we are and what we do. It fits in between what you've heard at the state level and what you're about to hear at the federal level.
We're a nonprofit organization and we were born back in 1983 as a partnership between FEMA and the state emergency management agencies here in the central U.S. There are seven member states, charter states, make up our directors, Arkansas being one of them. We began to see there was a real problem with the earthquake threat here. This is a hazard that's not going to stay in a state. It's going to cross state boundaries potentially affecting another six or seven states.So the state directors got together said they had to do something about this. States laws prevented resources and goods from going across state lines and we had to have a mechanism for addressing that. And that's where CUSEC came from.
So we've been at this like 16 years now. We're a small staff of seven and we work very hard to try to address all the issues that pertain to any seismic risks in the Central U.S.
It's a unique partnership. We work very closely with a lot of different groups. We are really an extension of emergency managements in that we're a coordinating entity. We have no operational role. I think that may change in the event of an earthquake because I suspect CNN and others will show up on our doorstep. But we do our best to try and bring groups like yourselves and others together and begin to see that we do have a problem here. It's a regional problem and we need to do something about that.
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