Got power back! "What I learned from a mini-disaster..."

[WuLabsWuTecH]

As many of you may have heard, Ohio was hit especially hard with storms this past weekend. I happened to be on duty as the storm hit and have come up with some thoughts about emergency preparedness and what we might all be able to take away from what I experienced. Some are meant to be humorous, but some are very serious. I will leave it for what it is worth and welcome any comments and suggestions to my insight.

Background: I arrived at station about 7am for an 8am shift to start doing truck check. We had a probie on his first ride with us until 1400 so I wanted to start some truck checks before he got here. It was 84 degrees at 7am and would hit 90 before 10 am. We anticipated a day full of heat related emergencies.

The department I was with this last day was located on the edge of a suburban/urban border. Our primary run district is suburban, but many of our runs are mutual aid into the urban area. We also have some rural township that we cover due to the shape of our run district. The department is all volunteer, but staffed (i.e. no one responds from home, we are on station for the duration of our shift). We have a very small budget and we go with the bare bones. There are a lot of things a fire station should have but that we don't and that hurt us big.

Lesson 1: Never expect how a day might turn out.
Yes, the what index was forecast to be 105+ but no one expected the 75+ mph winds that later came that day. A full truck check (by sheer dumb luck in preparation for the probie) saved us a lot of trouble later. There are tools in the compartments that I had not really looked at in years because there are Heavy Rescues and Engines all around us and we would never be needing to use the rescue equipment right? That stuff hasn't been touched in a decade, why would we need it today?

Lesson 2: A generator and/or a backup battery in station is a must.
We got very screwed on this. When the power went out, so did our overhead dispatching. Because the cell towers in our area were also knocked out, we had no MDT service either to receive dispatches. How we are dispatched is via overhead PA when we are in station that is run though a dedicated phone line--but the box that converts the signal needs power. Further, the MDT can also dispatch like the PA when the radio frequency for dispatches is busy, but that was also down. This left only our radio to receive dispatches. At one point there were over 350 pending runs from dispatch. After doing the debriefing, we noted some weird inconsistencies in the run times. On one run, the dispatch time was 20 minutes before the unit responding time. What happened was that the dispatch was sent to the PA and MDT and Radio at 1800 and while the PA and MDT went out immediately, due to those units being OOS, we did not receive the run until such time that the stacked runs on the radio were dispatched in front of our run.

If you have stations that do not have backup plans for power, I strongly encourage you to start looking into it. Having power at our station would have made a very long night a lot easier.

Lesson 3: Have maps on the truck for neighboring areas
This one saved us. We were asked at one point to respond to an address that was so far out of our district, it was not in the computer. We were first on scene even though we were about 15th on the run card and 4th available. The other units have gone to electronic mapping, so when they went out of the county, they got lost. Even if you just take a cheap $1 county engineer's map and put it in the glove box, it will save you a lot of headache when you really need it.

Lesson 4: Don't bite off more than you can chew.
One of the best things our in-charge officer did that day when all hell broke loose was to take us out of service with one of our dispatchers. (We are dispatched by two different agencies). The other department that tried to stay in service with two different agencies just had too much on their plate. When they were responding with one agency, the radios were so busy that they couldn't get a word in edgewise to let the other agency know they were tied up. They would then get dispatched to another run, but wouldn't be able to mark that they were not responding. If you have multiple areas you are responsible for, concentrate on the primary run area. If you have to take yourself out of service with another dispatcher, do so, because it will save everyone work later.

Lesson 5: Have personnel IDs.
I know a lot of people are afraid that IDs can get misused, but even in a small suburb like we are in, just because everyone knows you doesn't mean that everyone working the disaster will know you. Two of our officers who came to help out in plainclothes were turned away at the barricades because our police had called in county deputies to help with traffic control. They didn't know our fire chief from Adam. Which meant that we had to go to the barricades to vouch for him so he could get in--time that could be spent elsewhere. Now is the time to issue IDs to those on your department. If you can't trust someone with an ID, should they really be on your department in the first place?

Lesson 6: You may be on your own.
Because our area was so hard hit, the departments around us were also tied up. The closest mutual aid was coming from 12 miles away through city streets. This means that you have to be ready to manage the emergencies in your area, without outside help. Which leads me to...

Lesson 7: Use the resources available to you, and know what is available.
We keep a triage and incident command board on our truck. This came in handy. Our suburban residents were reporting fires, wires down, structure collapses, and medical emergencies directly to our station. When our station's phones failed, they reported to the police who then relayed it to us. We had no way of notifying dispatch (the radios were very busy and our phones went down, remember?) so we had to keep track of our own suburb's runs and decide which ones were were going to first. Even though the triage command system was designed for patients, by writing addresses on each Velcro strip and using the CC box for additional info, we could prioritize our responses to reports of fires and collapses. As more information came in from the officers on scene, we could easily move each line up or down based upon people who are hurt, and imminent threats. This is obviously not what the smart triage tag system was designed for, but since our particular crew did training on the system, we realized we could adapt it for this purpose.

Speaking of using available resources, don't be afraid to use unconventional methods in times when you are strapped for resources. We had police officers helping us out with assessing damage and threats so that we didn't have to respond to everything to "triage" each run. We commandeered many chainsaws and shovels and people to help clear a path for us to get to scenes. Use all the help you can get.

Lesson 8: You will be tired but treat everyone with respect.
Chances are you will run with a lot of departments that you have never seen before or even knew existed. By keeping charge of things and being assertive but not aggressive, you will not make accidental bad first impressions. Our fire chief has already gotten emails form other chiefs applauding our ability to treat everyone with respect. Apparently the outlying departments that came in from other counties found that not the be the case with our surrounding neighbors who are usually very nice and friendly.

Lesson 9: Know the duties of everyone on the department and know each position.
Our first officer did not arrive into the suburb until about 2 hours after the incidents were in play. Had we not understood those roles of the Chief and Lt.'s we would have been in a lot more trouble during the incident command setup. There is nothing more embarrassing than having to call in another department's brass to help you out with incident command (it happened to a neighbouring department).

Lesson 10: Keep an eye on the world outside of your bubble
We were so busy with working the heat emergencies that we didn't even look at the changing weather forecast all day. Had we known something like this was brewing, we might have made a food run earlier in the day. Instead, I had to go 24 hours without food

Lesson 11: If you are parked under a tree and a storm hits, you might want to considering moving your vehicle before you go on a run

My partner thought we might just go to some wires down and be back real soon. A few hours later, he has a new hood ornament!

Like I said, this was just a mini-disaster. There was no one hurt in our area and things could have been much worse, but I'm glad we had it. At the next council meeting, you can bet our chief will be asking for more funds to rectify some of the situations mentioned above. Because if a worse incident were to happen, we could have been in a lot worse shape lacking basic things like an electrical generator.

Please feel free to leave comments!
-WU

 

[epipusher]

Lesson 2a: Call in sick
Lesson 2B: Out for mechanical(if already on duty)

 

[bstone]

It sounds like you guys did the absolute best with what you were dealt with. Bravo. Be proud and take a few well earned days off.

I spent 3 months in the Gulf Coast after Katrina. Talk about an absolute disaster. The local fire dept was absolutely destroyed. We were doing EMS runs out of POVs. It was total improvisation. You have to work with what you got, as simple as that. Don't got what you need? Work around that.

Again, you made us all proud. Bravo.

 

[Meursault]

That's way rougher than I would have expected from the (minimal) news reports, and it sounds like you did a great job with it. You're even thinking critically about your experience and trying to improve before the next disaster. Makes me wonder if FEMA has the budget for another consultant.

When they were responding with one agency, the radios were so busy that they couldn't get a word in edgewise to let the other agency know they were tied up.

Sounds like it's time to insist on having only one agency dispatch you, with the other agency sending over calls as needed. And even with a functioning MDT, I've had similar radio congestion issues under much less system load. It seems like that can only be avoided by having a plan to bring in extra frequencies/dispatchers ahead of time.

 

[DrParasite]

We (Northern NJ) got hit with a little bit of snow a last year. It literally crippled the city, as well as every other city in a 30 mile radius.

Agency Couple lessons (some that may or may not have been learned):
1) have upper management on site 24/7 from the start of the incident. Major incidents like this often require rules to be broken, and it's much easier to do it with a super high up on site than having to call on the phone.

2) Plan what to do when staff can't show up due to problems at home or with the commute. Flooding, downed trees, worry about family, etc. Forcing the existing staff to stay isn't always the right solution.

3) Expect rules to be broken. have upper management's consent to bend or break rules. consider contacting the state DOH for approval depending on how far you will be straying.

4) have a backup generator for all critical systems. this can be stations, radio systems, computer systems, GPS, etc. make sure it has enough fuel for 24 hours of usage.

5) have sleeping quarters, or areas that can be converted to sleeping quarters. Give people time to rest; order people who have been up for a certain amount of time (24 hours or whatever you chose) and are too proud, stubborn or stupid to admit they need sleep to get some rest, and have enough crews on hand to cover them.

6) Approve OT. have extra staff on hand for extra ambulances, and extra support vehicles

7) your on your own; remember, if a natural disaster hits you, odds are it will hit your neighbors too. they might need your help, but don't expect your normal mutual aid agreements to be honored.

8) everyone is over worked, everyone is tired. Make sure people get breaks, and if you need a break, ask for one. You might not always get it, but if you need one, ask. Also having management say thank you will go a long way to having happy staff. having management buy everyone food when they get back to station will go even better.

9) don't forget about your dispatchers!!!! they are the ones who are juggling everything, getting yelled at by callers because the ambulance is taking too long, and they are they ones who are trying to do the most with limited resources. Food is appreciated, relief is needed.

10) mistakes will happen, especially when the systems aren't functioning at 100%. help each other out, don't get all pissy, and remember, we are all working as a team.

and lastly
11) don't wait until a disaster to happen to have a backup plan. have redundant systems in place. test them to ensure they all work, and that all your crews know how to use them. Have it written down, have the equipment already purchased, make sure it works, know what you are going to do when your radio/MDT/CAD goes down, and how you are going to maintain normal operations.

 

[WuLabsWuTecH]

Lesson 2a: Call in sick
Lesson 2B: Out for mechanical(if already on duty)

I like this!

That's way rougher than I would have expected from the (minimal) news reports, and it sounds like you did a great job with it. You're even thinking critically about your experience and trying to improve before the next disaster. Makes me wonder if FEMA has the budget for another consultant.

The disaster as i described was a "mini-disaster." And the news reports gave it the right amount of coverage. What made for a brilliant headache was that our suburban dispatcher lost all systems and power (announcing at one point for all units to return to quarters and patrol their own areas because she had a flashlight and pen and that was about it...) and our metro dispatcher lost both the primary dispatch frequency and the backup dispatch frequency.

And yes, we had some time to debrief with our crew and also some brass that day to tell them of our experiences. I think it was a really good experience for all of us because as you alluded to, the disaster wasn't that bad--minimal loss of life, but the effects from it were on par with a major disaster (loss of radio systems, loss of generators, loss of MDT, loss of mobility--due to trees down, etc...) What that really allowed us to do is to practice doing what we would do for a major emergency but not really affect the outcome of our smaller emergency. I think we all found out that there is still a lot of work to be done for when we can't pre-plan (we had about 30 minutes lead time of warning of the storms coming, barely enough time to pull firefighters off the street and into dispatch and not enough time to call in extra crews).

Sounds like it's time to insist on having only one agency dispatch you, with the other agency sending over calls as needed. And even with a functioning MDT, I've had similar radio congestion issues under much less system load. It seems like that can only be avoided by having a plan to bring in extra frequencies/dispatchers ahead of time.

It's a money issue. Currently, dispatching costs us about $3k a year. This is because we still have "volunteer" status in the county since more than 50% of our staffing is volunteer. (In reality we all consider ourselves Volunteers because our "paid" staff are paid at minimum wage to satisfy some requirement I don't fully understand. Some guys will just sign their "paycheck" right back over to the department). This status allows us to get very cheap dispatching from the primary dispatcher in the area. Problem is we cover 2 different dispatching areas, so if we wanted either dispatcher to dispatch us on runs that aren't in their own dispatching area, they would charge us at the full rate of a professional department for both areas on the order of nearly a hundred thousand a year. Our departmental budget is about half that...

We (Northern NJ) got hit with a little bit of snow a last year. It literally crippled the city, as well as every other city in a 30 mile radius.

Agency Couple lessons (some that may or may not have been learned):
1) have upper management on site 24/7 from the start of the incident. Major incidents like this often require rules to be broken, and it's much easier to do it with a super high up on site than having to call on the phone.

2) Plan what to do when staff can't show up due to problems at home or with the commute. Flooding, downed trees, worry about family, etc. Forcing the existing staff to stay isn't always the right solution.

3) Expect rules to be broken. have upper management's consent to bend or break rules. consider contacting the state DOH for approval depending on how far you will be straying.

Our SOGs allows whoever is in charge that day to have basically all the powers of an Acting Chief when a disaster strikes until officers get to the scene of the disaster. And in those cases, even lower ranked officers will have the rank of Acting Chief functionally. The exceptions to this are that anything that is breaking a law must be authorized by whomever enforces the law (governor for state laws, mayor for municipal codes etc...) and no deviations from our main protocol are authorized until the Medical Director activates the "Secondary Protocol" himself.

This gave us some latitude that day. For one, taking ourselves out of service with one agency while we were in service helped tremendously. Second, we were able to run "hot" even when just returning to our primary run district. Remember this hit at rush hour and all traffic lights went down. Technically, since we haven't been dispatched (because the radios are busy/broken), we shouldn't be running L&S, but when called on mutual aid to a neighboring county, we didn't want to wait in traffic for an hour before returning to our primary run district.

There were a lot of other things that were relatively minor that we broke/bent rules for, but I am a very big proponent of allowing your officers or whomever is in-charge that day to have all the powers of an Acting Chief. If you don't trust them to do that in the first hour of an emergency until the Chief can get there, then you need to reconsider if they should be in-charge of anything at all.

4) have a backup generator for all critical systems. this can be stations, radio systems, computer systems, GPS, etc. make sure it has enough fuel for 24 hours of usage.

Our Safety Committee Chair for the town has already talked to us about this. Since the Police and Fire share a building, there is no reason not to get one. The Chair was surprised to see us in the dark and we have never gotten one just because I guess the board was unaware of the fact that we did not have one!

[...]
7) your on your own; remember, if a natural disaster hits you, odds are it will hit your neighbors too. they might need your help, but don't expect your normal mutual aid agreements to be honored.

One thing I mentioned to someone in a PM about this: We actually were lucky that we kept old SOGs around.

We found a lot in there that is really, obsolete, but some things in there saved our asses. The major point I can think of is back when we had volunteer stations in the county, there were run cards that ran deep for when the volunteers couldn't get out the door and protocols for what to do if people were having trouble getting out the door.

We haven't used non-intra county mutual aid in a long time (except for the people on the edge of the county obviously) as the county now has about 70 engines, 75 medics, 20 rescues etc and never needs outside help, even in minor disasters. Problem was, of course, people weren't getting out the door b/c they weren't getting their dispatches. Fortunately, we had our old SOG's still and could get the other county dispatchers to send their units. Sure, it was a long haul for some of them (20 minutes just to get to the city, and then another 30 min in some places to fight through rush hour traffic for rural volunteers who are not used to more than 2 cars on the road at a time) but at least we got people going and to the pending runs while they worked on fixing the radio systems.

Also, even when we upgraded to the new digital radios, we kept one or two of the old ones. That was the only reason our department was responding when no one else around us was. We could listen to other county's dispatches for mutual aid, and jump runs that we were closer to (pretty much all of them). In the grand scheme of things, did us taking an extra 10 runs help that much with reducing the workload on the hundreds if not close to a thousand runs on the board? Probably not, but we were able to keep an eye on our primary jurisdiction to make sure we had our own people covered.


You're right though, all of our surrounding departments were so busy covering their own areas that they took themselves out of service with surrounding departments. As things calmed down, we put ourselves back in service with various dispatchers only to be toned out to a run 30 minutes away. We took ourselves back out of mutual aid availability for quite some time after that to make sure things stabilized in our own town before going back out to help others knowing that we might get called to somewhere an hour away.

8) everyone is over worked, everyone is tired. Make sure people get breaks, and if you need a break, ask for one. You might not always get it, but if you need one, ask. Also having management say thank you will go a long way to having happy staff. having management buy everyone food when they get back to station will go even better.

I would take it further and even authorize crews to call their own breaks. If you read above in this same post, you'll know that our in-charge had that power of Acting Chief. Each crew can determine if they can handle another run safely or not. We had been out in 100+ degree heat earlier that day with no time for lunch and the bottles of water spilling out of our trash can on the medic would indicate to you how tired we could have been. At midnight, we stayed out of service after a run for about an hour and a half since we had been running non-stop since 10am and in an accelerated state since the storm hit around 4. This gave us time to get fluid into us, take a break, and find some food.

Unfortunately, with no power, there was no food, but the hospital graciously gave us all the chips and pretzels and cold water we wanted. And since not having anything since breakfast on a hot 100+ degree day, those chips and pretzels felt like a 5 course meal!

And the notes from other department chiefs appreciating our response to mutual aid alarms when most other departments couldn't or wouldn't (because we have a small run district we stabilized things in our small suburb much earlier than the other departments) and responding to things where we were about 20th down on the run card really did help boost our morale. We worked our butts off and it's nice to know that the other departments noticed and appreciated it. And you can bet in the future when we need mutual aid for a disaster from 2 counties over, if they are able to help, they might decide to venture over to our suburb first before some of the other ones!

10) mistakes will happen, especially when the systems aren't functioning at 100%. help each other out, don't get all pissy, and remember, we are all working as a team.

Major key point! The fact that our department kept calm was definitely notice in the grand chaos and noted by other department chiefs. Everyone is tired and overworked, mistakes are made, just keep trudging through it!

and lastly
11) don't wait until a disaster to happen to have a backup plan. have redundant systems in place. test them to ensure they all work, and that all your crews know how to use them. Have it written down, have the equipment already purchased, make sure it works, know what you are going to do when your radio/MDT/CAD goes down, and how you are going to maintain normal operations.

It's funny you mention this. We are on a fully automated outbound dispatch system post-calltaker. That is, after the call-taker enters the info and selects the appropriate info, the system dispatches it overhead, over the radio, and on the MDT without further human intervention. (We have a computerized voice dispatch but in reality at least one human is monitoring the system at all times). Every Friday, from 0800-1200, the automated system is taken offline so the dispatchers get to practice dispatching by human voice. During this time, redundancy checks are done and the backup dispatch frequency is tested for functionality. I happened to also be on shift the previous Friday when this was done and other than dispatching being a bit slow (since they can only dispatch one run at a time by human vs somewhere on the order of 20 at a time by machine) all systems were functioning including the backup dispatch system/frequency.

Ironically, this particular Friday morning, due to the fact that the day started out at 84 degrees for us, the officer in charge of the Dispatch Office decided to forgo the weekly test due to fact that runs were already building up from the heat. He decided to move it to either later that night at 0000, or if it was still busy, to Monday morning. Ironically, had he tested it that morning, he might have found that the backup systems were non-functional... That is some pretty bad luck!

 

[Achilles]

So how'd the Probie do?

 

[WuLabsWuTecH]

So how'd the Probie do?

The probie is pissed! Since he's on provisional status, his shift was only 6 hours from 0800-1400. He missed the bulk of everything except some heat emergencies earlier in the day!

Saved my butt though. The In-charge knew he was going to be running late, and the second member comes from another job so he's always right there at 8 so they asked me to do the truck check by myself that morning in exchange for coffee and doughnuts on them. It's been years since I've checked out the entire truck by myself and having to explain what everything was and what it was used for to the probie made sure I knew where every single piece of equipment was on that truck. We ended up using the majority of the rescue tools on the truck that day, some of which I didn't even remember that we had just a few short hours before!