CouveCast episode 7 Be Ready Vancouver Part 2

In Part 2 of the Be Ready Vancouver series, hear from Scott Johnson with Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency (CRESA) about Emergency Management and their function in an emergency. 

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Welcome to CouveCast, the City of Vancouver's official podcast, hosted by Steve Harris. Each episode is a mix of city insights, stories, behind the scenes, and hopefully a few laughs along the way. No jargon, just real talk with the people shaping Vancouver's future. One episode at a time.

Speaker 1 0:19

Welcome to Couvecast, the City of Vancouver's official podcast. I'm your host, Steve Harris. Today we will be talking about Be Ready Vancouver, a new preparedness initiative to help prepare and support our community in the event of an emergency. Today is part two of this series, which will focus on what happens on the Emergency Management side of an emergency. I'm joined by Scott Johnson, Emergency Management Division Manager for Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency, or CRESA. Thank you for joining me, Scott. Thank you for having me. So to start off, uh most people are aware of calling 911 and what that means. But what they may not know is what happens on the emergency management side. Can you explain what emergency management does?

Speaker 2 1:02

Sure. I would like you to think of an emergency or a disaster as a three-ring bullseye. You've got a red center, then a white ring, then a blue outer ring. That red center is the bad thing. That's the wildfire, that's the flood, that's the landslide. And our uniform responders, public works, public utilities, that's their focus. Stopping that bad thing from getting worse, protecting lives, and really protecting critical infrastructure. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Speaker 1 1:30

And avoiding the bullseye.

Speaker 2 1:32

It is, and avoiding the bullseye. In Emergency Management, we support in all three of those rings. So we provide support to the first responders in that red ring by getting them resources, by helping share information. But we also look at the white ring, which are the impacts caused by that red ring. When we have wildfires and people have to evacuate, they need some place to go, where to get information. We help coordinate that. Then we have that blue outer ring, which are the things we never thought would happen, but did as a result of either the red or the white ring. And we are there to look for community resources that can have that, or if we have to, to help provide those resources from our department. So that's what we do as emergency management. We help support the uniformed first responders that are dealing with the bad thing as well as the community as a whole that's impacted by the bad thing.

Speaker 1 2:29

So now I've seen this and a lot of people haven't, but describe what happens in CRESA on the emergency management side when there's that room of people that are on phones, they have computers in front of them. What's going on there in that room?

Speaker 2 2:43

So what we're trying to do is several things at once. The first thing is we're trying to establish situation awareness. What is going on? What has this bad thing done to our community and the components of our community that make it work? So we're trying to establish what we refer to as a GRID grid gaps in resources, information, or decision making, because those are the things that we can help coordinate to provide to our impacted community members or organizations. So we could have a severe winter event that may impact the public works department, police and fire in ways that it doesn't impact human resources, legal, or community development because they have different functions. So by establishing situational awareness and then determining what the gaps are in the resources, information, or decision making that those various entities need, that's how we help support them to transition from the bad place that the incident placed them back to Blue Sky Day operations.

Speaker 1 3:50

And as you said, you are they are in contact with emergency services. Everyone keeps everyone updated to help facilitate whatever needs to be done in that particular emergency.

Speaker 2 4:00

Yes, we're able to contact emergency services through our dispatch operations division, so we have direct contact there. We also use digital platforms to allow partners to push information to us. And we can always get on the phone, email, or other communications platforms to pull information from divisions, partners that are impacted to help inform our overall picture, but also share information with them on impacts to other systems that are adjacent to or maybe impacting them.

Speaker 1 4:32

And you have uh training exercises to practice, if you will, uh if an emergency did happen, this is how it would play out uh for those various um entities.

unknown 4:45

Yeah.

Speaker 2 4:46

So uh we have a duty officer, a divisional duty officer who's on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And those duty officers practice every week for making that transition from a blue sky to a black sky day. We do a monthly proficiency drill, and then throughout the years, we do various types of exercises. Some of them are discussion-based, some of them are actually bringing people in and firing up the computers and creating situations and scenarios to test people in various ways.

Speaker 1 5:17

And I'm assuming over time doing those exercises and trainings, you that you come to a point where there's discussions about, oh, well, we could have done this differently, or this might have been more effective if had we done it this way.

Speaker 2 5:29

Yeah, we call that an after-action review. Every time we do something, whether it's an exercise or an actual event, we sit down once it's over and we kind of have a chance to catch our breath, and we look at it, we look at it from the perspective of what did happen.

Speaker 1 5:44

Yeah.

Speaker 2 5:45

What would we have liked to have happened in a perfect situation? Now, if those two are the same, then why how do we sustain that? Right. Because that means that we did everything right. How do we sustain that? If things didn't go the way we wanted, then what was the gap that didn't occur? Yeah, how do we improve? How do we change that? Yeah, how do we change our processes? How do we change our training so that the next time what does occur looks like what we want it to or how we want it to occur?

Speaker 1 6:15

Like a post-interview. I mean, it's good for most things, you know. What could have been done differently here? Um I want to ask you when we're talking about um alerts, what what kinds of different uh types of alerts are there?

Speaker 2 6:29

So generally we have three ways of communicating with the public to let them know that a bad thing is gonna happen.

Speaker 1 6:38

Yep.

Speaker 2 6:39

So the first is um the EAWS Emergency Alert Warning System. It is the one many people are familiar with because they've heard it on commercial radio, they've heard it on commercial radio.

Speaker 1 6:51

The annoying buzz.

Speaker 2 6:55

Um that is a very broad alerting system. Yeah. Um and because we're part of the media market for the large jurisdiction across the river, if we were to send one of those, it would actually go from Salem to Centralia and Hood River to the coast. Okay, so like a regional regional one, because it's designed for immediate life safety, widest distribution, and we want it across the broadest possible market. Sure. Um it's generally pretty, I want to say it's brief, but at the same time it's very generic. Yeah. So this bad thing is happening, avoid this area. Not a lot of detailed information. Okay. The second one, and this is one that some people are also familiar with, is what we call Wireless Emergency Alerts. Okay. Or WIA for short. Um, it's similar to an Amber alert in that it comes across your phone, but we do not do amber alerts. Those are done by the Washington State Patrol. Okay. For a wireless emergency alert, all of our duty officers have the ability to identify where a bad thing is occurring, where the community is that we wish to alert, and we can use wireless emergency alerts to notify every cell phone within the area we map out that that bad thing is happening and what's going on. Okay. Again, we have some limitations with that in that we're limited to the number of characters. Um, if you are driving, you know, you're gonna know you got a text where you might not be able to. So there are some limitations. Again, it's a very broad tool.

Speaker 1 8:26

Yeah.

Speaker 2 8:26

And the third one, and the one that we encourage the public to sign up for, is our public alerting uh system. And if you go to our website, you'll see a link that takes you to our signup page to sign up for public alerts. Okay.

Speaker 1 8:41

And you can get this like on your cell phone.

Speaker 2 8:42

Yeah, you can get them on your cell phone, and that's the beauty of it. You get on your cell phone, you can get it on your work computer, you can get on your home computer, um, you can get an email, you get a text, you get a voice message. And the reason that we really encourage people to sign up is it allows us to communicate with you how and where you want to.

Speaker 1 9:01

Okay.

Speaker 2 9:02

So most folks, you have some place you live, you have where you work, and you might have places that are important to you, where a spouse or partner works, where children work or go to school. So by signing up for public alerts, you can say, these are the numbers I would like to receive texts at, these are the numbers I would like to receive voice notification at. Here are the email addresses that I would like to receive. You can filter it the way you want it. Yeah, you can filter it the way you want it.

Speaker 1 9:29

Nice.

Speaker 2 9:30

And that also allows us to provide more detailed information. So for a wireless emergency alert, you might get a text that says, Wildfire, burnt bridge creek, evacuate north. All right. Some specificity, but not a lot. General. Yeah. Very general. With an actual public alert, we would say there is a fire in the Burnt Bridge Creek area. It is currently burning to the south, threatening homes along this ridge. If you live here, evacuate to the north. If you live here, shelter in place. We're able to provide a lot more detail to people because we know that when people receive alerts, oftentimes their first response, they want more detail. Right. And so if we can provide that in those initial moments, we're allowing their response to be more effective for their safety.

Speaker 1 10:20

Nice. Um so when a disaster is happening, uh, what are the procedures uh for emergency management? What what what's sort of the first thing that's gonna be happening? If it's a pretty major, you know, like a big earthquake or something. Um I'm trying to think, you know, major wildfires that are really close. What what's gonna be the first thing that's gonna be kicked off in emergency management?

Speaker 2 10:46

So it's the same process essentially, whether it's large or small. Okay. Our duty officer who is in contact with our dispatch center, in contact with our partners, does that initial situational awareness establishment. What is going on, what do I know right now?

Speaker 1 11:01

Okay.

Speaker 2 11:02

And then we will set our short-term objectives based on the gaps, resources, information, and decision. So in the next 90 minutes, what are our gaps in resources, information, and decision making decision making based on what I know right now?

Speaker 1 11:18

Okay.

Speaker 2 11:19

And then we will start working those. And as we get more situational awareness, as we come become aware of more gaps in resources, information, and decision making, then those objectives change. And we bring in more partners to help us deal with them. As we deal with things, we may have other partners that are able to return to managing their things. And throughout the entirety of the event, we expand and contract who we have in the emergency operations center to meet the needs of our GRID assessment.

Speaker 1 11:53

Okay. And I'm guessing if it's it's something that's not a super major disaster, but something that might still be impacted and there is response to it, you start to get a feel of of um on the emergency management side of okay, this is get to a point where we've got this handled, and now it's going to start to de-escalate because we're we're on top of this.

Speaker 2 12:16

It is. And that's where that three-ring analogy really becomes key for people to keep in mind. Yeah. Is that we may have that red center shake, shrinking, and the fires being put out. But we still have people who might have lost homes. We still have infrastructure that might be damaged. We might have secondary effects in that white and blue ring that we as emergency managers have to keep dealing with to support the impacted community members or the impacted partners long after the initial incident is over. After effects. Yeah.

Speaker 1 12:52

Yeah, makes sense. Um how does Emergency Management uh communicate with emergency response in the field? Is it mainly by the dispatch?

Speaker 2 13:03

So we try to do direct contact with incident command in the field. Okay. We can go through our dispatch team and we do in the initial moments, but if we need to, we can put our emergency manager management coordinators in the incident command post with them. And for larger, even moderate-sized incidents where we have some complexity, we will offer to the incident command team to have one of our emergency management coordinators in their incident command post. Because then they have access to what we know right at the same time. It's instant. It's instant. And they have the ability to send alerts or do that messaging right there at their fingertips. So our preferred method would be if you want one of our coordinators there in your hip pocket side by side, we can do that. If not, we can communicate over phone, we can do text. It's whatever level of support they want and how close they want it and what proximity.

Speaker 1 13:59

Are there ever like um near situations? And what I mean by that is uh it looks like something is gonna be happening and then it goes away before it even really becomes an issue. Like a false alarm sort of a thing.

Speaker 2 14:14

All the time. Okay. So our duty officers um probably activate, and when I say activate, something happens, the duty officer becomes aware of it. And this happens probably half a dozen times a month. Oh, okay. And the duty officer will get a text that something has happened.

Speaker 1 14:33

Yeah.

Speaker 2 14:33

It might be law enforcement activity, it could be a fire activity, it could be a hazardous material spill, it could be anything. And that duty officer will monitor that situation. And they will use our access to dispatch information, they might call, they're monitoring it.

Speaker 1 14:52

Sure.

Speaker 2 14:52

Because if it gets worse, they're then ready. They have situational awareness. They know where within the city, within the county, that is, they know what's being done up to date. And they've started thinking how this could expand from that red into that white and blue area. And like I said, happens half a dozen times a month and 5.9 times a month, it shrinks and it doesn't go beyond that. But because our duty officers are there 24-7, they're able for that point one time when it does get better, we're that much farther ahead of it.

Speaker 1 15:26

Yeah. Yeah. That's that's nice that you're ready in a moment's notice, so to speak. Um so in part one of this series, uh, it was about how residents can be prepared. Um how helpful is it on a scale like something bigger when residents are prepared? How how helpful is it in the whole process of of um continuity and keep keeping things you know even keel?

Speaker 2 15:55

It's critical.

Speaker 1 15:55

Yeah.

Speaker 2 15:56

In any large impactful event, we always have more need than we have more resources to meet those needs. Yeah. And any member of the community who can give me one hour's worth of resilience, that gives me one hour to solve a problem for that part of that community that doesn't have that resilience. One less thing to be concerned about. One less thing to be concerned about. And that resilience doesn't have to be huge. It can be small. It can be I'm ready and my family is ready. We can do two days. And I've walked across the street, I've walked across the fence to talk to my neighbor. And together, we can go for 36 hours. Okay, that means you two can look out for each other for that much longer.

Speaker 1 16:41

Yes.

Speaker 2 16:41

And by knowing your neighborhood, having that level of resilience, that means for those communities we have who are either starting the day at a lower level of resilience or were impacted more by the event, or for whatever reason, have taken a greater hit from the incident, that gives us the opportunity to help get them stable before we start looking at where we have other areas of impact. So, yeah, any level of resilience that our community members can give us helps give us that much more time.

Speaker 1 17:11

Less panic, more organization.

Speaker 2 17:13

Yeah.

Speaker 1 17:14

Well, Scott, that's about all the time I have for today. I want to thank you for joining us and giving some more information about what Emergency Management does in the case of a disaster. So thank you for your time. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Be sure to tune in to our next episode, which will be part three of the Be Ready Vancouver series. If you want more information about Be Ready Vancouver, check out the website at cresa.wa.gov. And if you haven't already, now is a great time to prepare yourselves. Until next time.