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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 STATE POLICE BY MICHAEL R. PETERSON
MR. MUSSER: Moving on to our next presenter, Chief Michael Peterson. Chief Peterson has been with the California Highway Patrol for 27 years. He is a deputy chief, currently assigned as the division commander for the Golden Gate Division, which includes field operations for the nine San Francisco Bay Area counties. He received his bachelor-of-science degree in administration of justice at San Jose State University and his graduate degree is from Pepperdine University.
MR. PETERSON: On Saturday at 1:30 a.m. a moderate earthquake hit Napa. I live in San Mateo County and it rocked and rolled my bedroom. My wife and I are so used to this we just kind of leaned over and looked at each other and just went back to sleep. When I left California, I thought I was coming to a safe location where I didn't have to worry about earthquakes. As I learned, you guys are in about as bad shape as we are in California.
I want to bring some reality to this seminar and bring about the role of state law enforcement in earthquakes. I'll use my experiences in the Loma Prieta earthquake and some of my experiences I gained over the past 27 years to emphasize the role of state police and how we need to coordinate our activities with the other agencies.
When the Loma Prieta earthquake hit in 1989 that particular day in October the baseball World Series was being played by the Oakland A's and San Francisco Giants. Just by chance, I was still in my office. I was the commander of the Redwood City area which also covers Santa Clara County.
When the rock and roll took place, the first thing on my mind is thank God I survived the big one. About three days later, I was told that wasn't the big one. I was very disheartened because I thought I had made it through the big one and could move on with my life.
We immediately activated our emergency operations plan. We were given very limited information. You must realize that when an earthquake hits, chaos hits. You have to be able to deal with the chaotic state and still take care of the mission. That's very hard to do. I wish I could say I accomplished it when I was in Redwood City. I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off. My toilets overflowed. I had everything going wrong. I'm thinking what am I going to do? What am I going to do? I'm the commander. I've got to do something.
You really need to pull back. You need to recognize your role. Our role as a state law enforcement organization is the transportation arena. We have an immediate role to do damage assessments of the roadways. That's working with CALTRANS doing the initial damage assessments.
Our dispatch center went down for a period of time and we didn't have communications. We didn't know how to get that information out of the command up to a centralized location. However, my officers found out that our local communications system was working. They're calling back and reporting the roadway is clear here but we have a split on a section of freeway there, and so on. Very interesting. I've got some young officers, 21, 22, 24 year old kids just coming out of the academy making damage assessments. Think about it. They were making public safety judgments on whether or not something was safe. That's the kind of information we were getting back. We learned a lot from that. We tried to improve upon their knowledge by providing some training. We wanted the officers to at least recognize what they had to look at and what was important from the integrity of the structure. We're not the experts but we can make a quick assessment to really get the ball rolling in the response protocols. I think that's our role.
More importantly, if the damage assessment says we've got some problems, we can immediately close the roadway to traffic.
We had another interesting story come out of the Loma Prieta earthquake. We had three major problem locations. We had the Santa Cruz-Watsonville area where the earthquake was centered. We also moved further up to the S.F. - Oakland Bay Bridge where that collapsed and to the Cypress Freeway in Oakland where the double deck came down. We had three incidents going down.
We had a sergeant in the Santa Cruz area who was asked to check out a potential bridge failure. I think it was Soledad Creek on SR1. He found it and lots of water too. He took off in his beautiful new Chevrolet and ended up in the water and located the downed roadway. So we learned that a road might not be there when we get there.
The other role we have after completing damage assessments is our traditional role of law enforcement including accident investigations, public safety responsibilities, rescue, and any EMS that we stumble upon. We slid into that role immediately.
Again, we lost our communications to the outside world. I didn't know what was happening outside. So I was focusing on the problems I had within my command and also providing assistance to the local agencies. We were getting a lot of false reports on bridges being down. I had reports saying the San Mateo Bridge and the Del Mar Bridge collapsed. We sent people out to check. I also had reports that shopping malls were down and we sent people to help the local agencies. All these turned out to be bogus reports. Responding to these reports really tied up our officers.
We could not get information from our TV sets because they had collapsed in our briefing room. They were crushed and weren't usable. One of my young smart-ingenious officers came running into our local command center. He unzipped his bowling bag and pulled out a small portable TV. Obviously, he was going to go out on his beat and watch the World Series. He turned it on and opened our eyes to what was happening around us. It helped us identify the problems occurring in the Watsonville. We also identified downed bridges: the S.F.- Oakland Bay Bridge and the double-deck Cypress Freeway in Oakland. We changed our plans and redirected our resources to these locations. So again, we slid into our response plan that was well defined, working with CALTRANS on highway damage assessments.
Eventually our communications got back up and we were able to lock on different frequencies. I was called immediately to respond to the Cypress Freeway double deck structure. They asked me to come over and assist as the incident commander and relieve the captain of the Oakland office that had responsibilities for the Cypress. So I was back to my traditional role of state police handling law enforcement on the freeway.
Another interesting event occurred. We had an assistant chief who responded to this location. He thought he made a very appropriate decision that turned out to be very inappropriate. Working in conjunction with Oakland Police Department, he advised the Oakland Police Department captain that since the freeway collapsed it wasn't a freeway anymore so it belonged to the City of Oakland. Initially, a very smart move and a very career ending move on this gentleman's part. It was still our responsibility.
Of course, I'm talking a chaotic state. We had responses coming in from the Oakland Fire Department, CALTRANS, CHP, Oakland Police Department, and the Sheriff's Department of Alameda County. All were converging on this location. All had jurisdictional responsibility for this incident.
I really want to stress the role of the state police in interagency coordination. In 1989, we had yet to receive any training in the incident command system. We didn't have a clue about how to develop a command structure addressing an emergency. We were still in the command and control mode. If I'm a captain, I tell a lieutenant what to do. That mode will not work in an incident of this magnitude. As we're working through this chaotic state, everyone was thinking they were doing the right thing. We were in the search and rescue mode: looking for people who were trapped in structures. We had no coordinated effort. We had duplication in searching and we had a multitude of responses out of control. We didn't know who was there and who wasn't and who looked at what part of the structure and who didn't. The initial response was obvious: find the individuals, pull them out, and get them medical aid. But later on, we realized we did not have a systematic approach or command structure in place so we ended up going back into the structure to be sure we did not miss anyone.
Chaos created the atmosphere of confusion that added to duplication of effort and wasted efforts. This resulted in a lengthier response time for this incident.
One thing we realized we had to do was interagency coordination. We came up with the concept called unified command. We had five responsible agencies. All had a role and some facet of jurisdiction in this incident. Initially, we didn't know what it was in 1989. We just felt we had to bring everyone together to survive better together. So that's what we did. We ended up bringing the various command centers together by co-locating them. That immediately improved communications. We locked into a system where we were meeting every two hours. We were making decisions on how we were going to approach rescues of victims from within structures, body recovery, and eventual structure demolition and removal. When we talk unified command, it really made sense. The initial response based on responsibility was from the Oakland Fire Department. They were charged with the rescue and EMS responsibility. So when that was happening, they slid into the top leadership position. CHP and the Oakland PD supported them by providing perimeter control and securing the facility. CALTRANS provided a very important role of determining structural integrity since a structure could come down with every aftershock. Not only did Caltrans provide technical support, they were also the checkbook. They were the financial support to bring in all the contractors we needed. So the unified command really provided some direction and guidance for us. Once we got into it, it became a very successful operation.
I want to mention nontraditional roles. As the CHP, we deal with emergencies. We deal with crisis but with the Loma Prieta earthquake, we were dealing with a lot of variables that we weren't used to. While we were doing the rescue operation, we were getting a lot of false noises from the damaged structures. We thought there were people still trapped. It turned out to be a significant rat infestation. The noises we were hearing were nothing more than rats. We hired a pest control company to handle the rats.
We had structure that was fairly significant. Where it overlapped as double-deck was fairly short about a quarter of a mile. However, two miles down and two days later, we discovered we had part of the structure about to tumble onto a public housing facility. At that point, we had to make a decision to evacuate the public housing. The residents were quite upset. They were left in danger for two days. We had to send in two squads of riot officers to get those folks out. Again, we weren't ready for a non-traditional response to this type of emergency.
The securing of this scene was a very significant challenge. We had approximately five miles of roadways that had to be closed off. We had to bring in hundreds of construction people to help out in the rescue, body recovery, and shoring the structure. We had to issue identification passes for official workers to gain access to the site and to maintain security. . Scene security is very, very difficult and a very labor-intensive operation.
CHP has about 7,000 officers statewide. Prior to mutual aid being called, we were able to bring a variety of those officers down from all parts of the state to help us but on security. The Oakland Police Department, who also had responsibilities were tied up with a variety of other problems occurring within the city. They only provided a minimum amount of staffing for the actual security of the site.
I really stress the importance of unified command. The next problem at this location is the media. The media was constantly challenging us by trying to get up onto the site. We almost arrested a famous newsperson from 60 Minutes who put himself in a hard hat. He jumped in a pickup truck to get up on the site so he could get close and personal with the rescue teams as well as the incident itself.
When I walked outside the command post and looked at what we called the media village, it looked like a testing site for NASA. I've never seen so many satellite dishes and everything else. The media was just hanging all over. They were trying to buy their way onto the structures by giving the construction workers money to carry a camera up there; getting construction workers to carry tape recorders up there; and trying to take that information and put it on the news so they would be first. That wasn't their fault. It was our fault. The role of the state police in cooperation with the unified command, should consider the needs of the media from the very start.
We came up with kind of a unique approach on where these people should be located. The media is a pain in the fanny but deal with them. Set them aside and deal with them. If you don't, you're going did get eaten up. Once we did that, we were able to provide for their needs and meet our needs at the same time.
Large numbers of the media were in San Francisco to broadcast the World Series. This turned out to be very helpful initially. Later on it was a hindrance. We had a very loose yet very cooperative spirit with the media. When you get into a unified command structure, make sure that everyone has a similar philosophy in dealing with the media. We dealt with the Oakland Police Department and the Alameda County Sheriff's Department. They didn't have a very good relationship with the media and they wanted no part of the media. That's why it came very close that Mr. Dan R almost got arrested because we weren't willing to work with the media initially.
We understand politics. Our organization has been successful because we are politically astute. When you deal with a crisis, you don't expect politics to come into play. However, you have to expect politics to come into play in whatever you do. The Vice President came in. The second day was very hard for us because we were still in the rescue mode and had to stop just for him. We pulled everyone off the structure to let the Vice-President walk on the structure. We were thinking all the time that we could be in assisting and helping someone get out. This is reality and it's hard to deal with. You have an obligation to share that with your folks and they will have a hard time with it. But again, recognize it as reality and deal with it.
Politics also came into play in what we were planning to do in our body recovery efforts. Our body recovery teams had some very difficult times. We were dealing with nothing more than body parts. We really wanted to quickly clear the scene up and to move on. CALTRANS wanted to move on. The Alameda County Sheriff's Department with coroner responsibility also wanted to move on. We initially decided to just drop the remaining parts of structure and then worry about gather the remains of body parts. We initially thought we can't worry about lifting up every piece of concrete and taking out whatever partial remains we found. Politically were over ruled. It was decided that we would not drop the structure. CALTRANS had to establish a contract to actually remove every ounce of an individual's remains as we could as we uncovered the stacked up concrete.
Politics also slipped into some contracting. The mayor of Oakland got very involved in some of the contracts within the city. Some of the contract decisions delayed their ability to actually demolish some of the structures. But again, politics will be there and you just have the deal with it.
State police role in traffic management is a big-time role. As you can imagine, we had three major closures. We had I-80 closed at the S.F.-Oakland Bay Bridge. We had Cypress 880 closed. We had some problems on the San Mateo Bridge that caused closures on and off. We had State Route 17, a major route from San Jose to the coastal area of Santa Cruz, shut down due to a slide.
It really required CALTRANS and the highway patrol to work together very closely to establish a traffic operations plan. CALTRANS developed the plan and we had to be plugged in to determine how we could best deploy our available staff. We had to consider what access was available and whether it was limited at specific points or whether it was a full-blown closure or if it were a bypass or detoured access. So we needed to be plugged in to make sure what CALTRANS did could be properly staffed.
We are very fortunate that we have an outstanding working relationship with CALTRANS. They understand what our role is and we understand what their role is about. Because of that working relationship that occurs on a daily basis, it made this process real simple. I think the successes of getting the community and residents around the S.F. Bay Area was based solely on a very strong relationship that we had with CALTRANS before the earthquake.
Another funny story, this is the window of opportunity for CALTRANS. Mr. Baxter talked about the environmental issues. It was also a window of opportunity back in 1989 some of you recall, the HOV lanes, High Occupancy Vehicle lanes, the commute lanes were a big thing at that time and CALTRANS was getting beat up because the Feds wanted more of them, and the community didn't want enough of them, so CALTRANS took full advantage of this opportunity and all of a sudden one of my officers came back after I came back to the office, and showed me his pants. He had white spray paint, or white paint still on the leg. He was on a traffic stop when CALTRANS decided to spray the lanes for HOV, so they took full advantage of this. But HOVs obviously again took a coordinated effort because HOVs are no good if they're not enforced. So we needed to be plugged into what HOV lanes were going to be proposed and did we have the personnel to actually deploy to those HOV lanes.
The relationships we had on the front end or before the earthquake were very critical to our ability to respond effectively. Our excellent working relationship with CALTRANS helped us get through the chaos of the earthquake. CALTRANS has emergency incident response teams that come out during major accidents. We have worked together on traffic control plans and measures for a long time. So this good relationship was in place before the earthquake and we already knew each other's roles and responsibilities. What is critical here is working together as a state: CHP and CALTRANS. This helped us get through some hard issues. When it came to working the hard issues with the local communities and politicians, we put up a united front concerning closures, the permit processes, lifting restrictions on weight, lifting restrictions on drivers and hours. If I leave you with anything, I leave you with this. If you don't have a good working relationship with your state police build one before a major disaster hits. It's essential and it's critical.
Accept chaos. You're going to have it. Don't get frustrated with it or panic. The quicker you find yourself in a command structure, the quicker you can facilitate a decision making model; and the quicker the incident will be mitigated. Probably the most important aspect is to get right to your people. I saw it at the Cypress. People were looking around wondering who is in charge. It's so critical that this message is very clear. You may have to put on a phony facade when you don't know what you're doing. But if you make it look like you're in charge, things will happen. It's important you do that.
The next point deals with leadership. Just because I'm a chief carrying a set of stars and there's a captain out there, doesn't make that guy less of a leader. Leadership is the key. If you can identify that within your department, you're very fortunate. Recognize leadership, especially when it comes to critical incidents.
The final thing, don't narrow yourself down. We had multiple sites to attend to but we became very narrowly focused in our response. We should have developed a much broader approach to solving our problems. We might have fixed something today but we created a bigger problem for the next two weeks. This goes back to relationships and the idea of having a unified command center. It gets back to nontraditional aspects of our responsibilities. Just because a CALTRANS engineer is not law enforcement doesn't mean he doesn't have something to offer me and vice versa.
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