 The last time I was on a stage like this, a beautiful setting like this, I was up in the Hyde Park Opera House. I was part of a production in which I made a fool's bet, turned out my daughter won and I was the fool. And I was part of a winter production of the best Christmas pageant ever in the historic Hyde Park Opera House. And it strikes me how similar this is in structure and space and feel and how important it is to have spaces like this for our communities and for our people to come and enjoy and make them stand for a long time. So I appreciate your efforts and being here and your engagement with this process. There's a ton of things about emergency management. I teach emergency management at the college and as well as being an EMD from Cambridge for three and a half years and the EMD for the college now and part of the association. I stick my nose into just about everything I can. And there's a ton of things that go with it. But we can start pretty simply and we can use small bits to make this all understandable. So I'm just going to talk about the basis of emergency plans, how we know how to make a plan and how we're going to be effective at it. The first thing I'll start out with is a quote from General Eisenhower, which is that plans are useless. Planning is essential. And the reason he says that is because it's never going to look exactly like you think it will when you're making your plan. That was one of the last things Ben said was when we can't prepare for the last disaster. It's going to look different. So we're going to prepare for the next disaster. How do we do that? By being flexible and how we design our plans. The basis of any good emergency management plan is to understand the actual risk, the hazard that you face inside a context. And then you'll be able to know what you're facing and then what you can do about it. So this is, and I'm not going to go too far into it, but what we're going to talk about this is called Thyra, threat, hazard, identification and risk assessment. It's part of a much larger framework. Welcome to the world of emergency management. Just so you know, I never figured I would be on stage. I'm Mr. Dark and Stormy. I've spent my entire life in public safety. You know, my wife and I went grocery shopping. She's a graphic designer. She's looking at the Uncle Ben's rice and she's like, oh look, they redesigned their packaging. The colors are very warm. The texture on the photo is really nice. I'm looking over her shoulder going, that guy's a sex offender. She's like, stop. I'm like, no, I read the email on him last week. I have spent my whole life showing up at bad times. And one of the things I love about emergency management is it's one of the only places I've found where I can put all my experience responding to bad things. Into action during good times and have the chance to reduce what happens when things all do go wrong. You're entering into a whole system, a whole framework of being able to anticipate, being able to potentially mitigate, maybe even prevent bad things from happening. And they're all over. The picture is very dramatic. Of course, Irene, flooding. Of course, flooding is not just Irene. The last time that the wrong way bridge flooded in Cambridge, it was April because it snow melted. That's kind of what happens out there. Thankfully, there's no infrastructure that's really at risk when that happens as a regular occurrence. But it's something that happens all the time. We also face other risks. One of us in his room haven't heard at some point recently about an active shooter event, mass homicide or attempted mass homicide. There's been a fire somewhere at Brattleboro, lost a whole block a couple of years ago. There's some risk out there at any given time. This is a system that can be used to identify all of the different potential risks, rate them in terms of the outcomes and the likelihood in the outcomes, and then how to best apply our resources because we're all dealing with limited resources. Inside the world of Ben and I and the folks who do emergency management is a whole thing. We're up here in the identifying and assessing risk and estimating capabilities section. Before we can get to building capabilities, before we can get to validating them, all sorts of things that go with this. The cyber process is actually pretty simple and you probably do this in some other way without recognizing it. The first thing to do is identify the hazard, the threat, the risk, the concern. And I'll use the words hazard when I'm speaking about a natural occurring thing, flooding is a hazard. And I'm using the term threat about a man made or a person caused thing. And whether that's a cyber security, whether that's a car through your front, your office. Is the lesson really, watch out if we hire you to be in charge of everything? Because there's just this little, there's over 40 years, that's fair, that's fair. I've worked with some folks that just seem to have this little dark cloud and I'm just conscious of that. Give the threats context and then establish what you want to be able to do with the capability target and then develop what the resources are that you would need. These are the four steps in conducting a thyra and from there you can end up building a plan. This is just about as mathematical as I get, I was an English major. So this is letters and then I don't actually have to come up with a number of works for me. But this is just a way of conceptualizing how this works. The threat, whatever that thing is, we're going to name it, we're going to call it, say it's flooding, it's a hostel of intruder, it's fire, whatever we need to call it. The vulnerability, what is the risk in this space? Okay, I'm going to say this is a lot of old wood in this space. I would not want a fire breaking out here. So this is a high vulnerability to fire in this space. And then what are the consequences? How many people, if you've ever heard of the station nightclub fire, 100 people killed and they were almost all killed right at the front door they came in, even though there were two other viable exits, people didn't use them. The risk, the vulnerability, that's actually state fire code requiring crowd managers for any event over 50 people and more than one for every 250 people based on fires like that. The Iroquois theater fire, the Beverly Hills fire where hundreds of people die inside spaces. So the consequences, what can they be? And then what's that total risk package? Another way of looking at it, a little easier graphic to view, is if we have the probability high to low and the impact low to high, what are the things that we may suffer, what may happen? Ben talked before about fluvial erosion, that the river decides it's going to go, and by the way mother nature, kind of bigger than us. If she decides the river's going this way, that's how it's going to go, at least for a while, inundation flooding, another significant risk. This is straight out of Ramon's, I didn't create this PowerPoint, I modified it along the way. This is straight out of Ramon's threat hazard assessment. It's actually an exercise as they do annually. We're going to be at it tomorrow and Thursday down in Killington. They do a three day exercise, I'm only there for a day and a half of it. But this are what we face here in Ramon, the highest ranked things. Ice storm, you'll notice that the ice storm is relatively likely to happen and relatively low impact compared, high impact compared to some things, lower than some others. We've gotten kind of good at this, we know how this works. But when 1997 came around, the January 98, it was a mess, wasn't it? Everybody remember that one? Just a couple of years ago we had the same thing, and we had at one point, what was the estimate? Literally half of one of the power company's customers out of service, literally half 50% of the people because of the ice storm. We have a system set up for that where we'll have trucks from Canada and trucks from Pennsylvania and line people, line workers come up and repair these things, but it's also an identified risk, and we know that. So we're going to spend time and infrastructure and money in trying to mitigate those kinds of risks. And interestingly, so in Cambridge, if you've ever gone around the wrong way bridge, that bank is hardened because we know that river's going to flood. We know that happens to be an area. So the state has, transportation has built that bank up so that it can take that kind of flooding. There are other roads that were the same amount of water to run across it, it would just wipe them away. We figured out this is a space, we armored it, we dealt with it. Winter storm, very likely to happen, but overall not that much of an impact because we know how to plow, we're used to it. I laugh, my brother lives in North Carolina. Three inches of snow, they're done for. He can't go to the grocery store for a week. I called him up, my first year in Vermont, I came out here for college in 1992, and I called him up January 93, I was at Linden State, it's up on the top of the hill, it was a wicked cold winter, and I'm like, oh, Scott, it's so cold up here. He goes, yeah, I know, it's been cold down here too. Last week I had to put on a sweater. I was like, shut up, it's not nice. So when we identify the risks, we're gonna find the highest risk things, and we're gonna say, how do we deal with these? How do we mitigate these? This is where our first dollars and the largest number of dollars, our first effort and the largest number of effort are going to be disease outbreak, you can see, probably not really for the arts and culture, probably not the thing you need to worry about most. If there's an outbreak going on, it's public health. If there's an outbreak going on in their recommendations, you know, if you have an exhibit that gets touched a lot, then put some hand sanitizer next to it, things like that. That's all good. Not where you need to invest your dollars, even though it's in the news a lot. If you were up here, like, I didn't look out back, but it seems like we're kind of high up, flooding is probably not the biggest risk for this theater. Anyone check me on that? We're a little bit higher up, right? So I'm not worried so much about flooding here. Somebody down the river, somebody down a little closer to, obviously Weston, that's going to be the concern. Here, we would use this process and come up with a slightly different answer than this. And that's okay, that's the point. It's flexible, it's here for you. From there, the state loves these little diagrams. From there, this is everything I've said already. You identify what the threat is, you give the threat or the hazard context, you establish the capability target, and then you say, what is it that I need to do to get there? How does this work? This is a silly little example. I want to hike up on Camels Hump. It's a little kind of granular. Yeah, you can read that, okay. I want to go hiking on Camels Hump. I have a couple of things I need to keep in mind. One, I'm kind of sensitive, I get sensitive feet. I don't know, it's a thing. I always need good insoles. My left one bothers me, my right one. My boots that are going to not make my legs hurt when I'm going up. Last time I went hiking, weather outside, right? It was 40s today, so I don't want to get up to the top and then be really cold. Things I have to keep in mind. If it's a five-hour hike, there's no facilities along the way. This is some context. The top third of the mountain is above the Clermont Climb. Anyone hiked Camels Hump? You know this, right? This is all stuff. And that's what I'm saying. I'm going to hide this in this setting and how to move it into the world of emergency management and protecting this stuff, if you do. It's a gorgeous view up there, but that top third of it is above the Clermont Climb. There's no trees left, it's just scrub, and it gets wicked windy up on top. So you're going to need to know that you need to bring a jacket. Let me see the next one. Yeah, removable layers, right? We're out hiking, that's an old thing. And then when I get up to the top and then I want to sit, I'm going to want to have a bite to eat, I need to have some snacks with me. The time I went hiking, the last time I went hiking up there, I went up and got up having my little peanut butter and honey sandwich and another crew managed to get up there with a six-pack of beer and I'm like, dude, you guys beat me. I just got a sandwich. I suppose they had to figure out how not to get too shaken up going up the mountain. So this gives us context, this gives us some capability targets, this gives us some resource requirements. Once we do that, we're going to say, okay, what do we have and what do we need to get? So if I have lots of granola at home already but I don't have any protein bars because I ate them on my last hike, I don't have any peanut butter, but I got plenty of honey. I know what I need to run to to get to the store. I also need to make sure that if I just bought new shoes that I have transferred my insoles, got new insoles, I don't want to be sore. I need to make sure that I actually grab my coat, my light layers, whatever it is. Just yesterday when I was wearing my boots, these are actually brand new shoes so I'm actually doing okay for once. I feel good. Now that I know that, I know that the week before I'm going to swap my insoles, I'm going to go buy some food supplies and I'm going to make sure I pack a light jacket. It's all stuff we've done before, right? At some point, you know, anyone ever travel with kids? Right? There was an NPR this week, about two weeks ago, I think it was actually, they did one of those little blurbs, it was kind of funny news, they just threw it out there. A state was trying to revoke a woman's license plate and she ended up winning the argument and keeping you know exactly where I'm going with this, right? The license plate was the license plate was P, B, 4, U, Go. Clearly she travels with kids a lot. That's a little bit of an emergency plan. Hey kids, you know, you run through the checklist. It's the same thing. Here, this isn't so silly. This is our beloved historic building, okay? We're going to look and say we want to protect this from flooding water damage. So I don't, yeah, there's no sprinklers in here either, so that brings us back to fire risk in this building. If there were sprinklers in here, that would be a separate risk to the historic building like this. Okay? If there's a, if there was a shop down in the basement, like a carpentry shop, I would really be concerned if there wasn't some kind of fire suppression system here. I'm not trying to ding on the, on the theater here, I'm just saying that we've got to be conscious of where we're at and the risks. So in our context, we'll go back to the Western Playhouse. They know that they're in the floodplain. They know that they're concerned about risk. In fact, we heard how they were conscious of what a three-foot flood would do and move stuff out of the way. They weren't expecting, you know, the whole dam river to come into play. So if we're worried about flooding and water damage, the building is within the 100-year floodplain. And again, the FEMA maps that are out there and the 911 maps that overlay the flooding. Again, that's inundation flooding that is not the river deciding to move or overpowering its banks. That's just if it's a lazy Sunday and all the water backs up. But the other thing we need to consider, especially an old building like this, a water line might break. If the bathroom window gets left open and it's, you know, zero degrees outside, 10 below, that might freeze up the bathroom. The pipe bursts and we soak everything downstream of that, below that. We want to be able to protect our stuff. Knowing that, we know that we have a lot of paper or historical articles. Actually, going up, anyone remember actually the very first meeting that started this network, we had a presentation from UVM from the Fleminghaus where it was a Fleminghaus. Another area, yes, where they had just barely finished moving the majority of their collection into waterproof containers when the building caught fire and the firefighting effort poured water all over everything. And if they had not just finished that project of moving everything into those waterproof containers, they would have, they're just a hundred years of stuff would have just been gone. And they said this is a risk we face just because we have sprinklers, just because I don't even know what the genesis of them wanted to do that was, but I know that they actually saved themselves a phenomenal amount by engaging in an active process. So if we're conscious that we have historical items, papers, articles, whatever, and we need to protect our paper records from flooding, then we determine the volume of materials to be protected, what the right storage system comes into assessments of what's money, what money is available, what functions, what space. I can't tell you and no one can tell you what's right in your space. This has to end up being a decision you make based on the logistics, based on the need, based on the resources you have available for connecting with people. This might mean that you identify that you need to make some kind of a capital campaign or an outreach campaign to get what you need. There's restrictions of the space that you're in. Maybe there's things that just can't be done to retrofit this space. Maybe you can't lift a 200-pound 8-foot steel cabinet up the only flight of stairs you have because the stairs are too tight. Up on St. Mike's campus, we have the old hero theater and the stairs just wind all the way around. There's no way you can get most of what we would normally consider like, oh, this protective equipment, we can't get it in that space. So what is the best you can do? What's the mitigation? But the thought process behind this was down in Wilmington where the town clerk realized when the river was rising during Irene that all of the land transfer records were handwritten into books in the ledgers that were down in the basement of that building which was right next to the river and they spent a couple of hours walking downstairs, grabbing an arm load of books, putting them in a room, walking back down and sure enough the basement flooded. And that was millions of dollars in transfer records, tax records, time and effort that would have had to have been recreated or just lost entirely with no way of getting it back. If they hadn't done that mitigation project right there in the moment, better to have that happen intentionally have it ahead of time because if the river was rising at 2 in the morning and she wasn't there to think of that in that moment there would have been no way to fix that. So from there we know that if everything is in boxes in the basement if we have an upstairs office again this is, you have to say decide what works in your space but this is the foundation for how to write a plan, how to create a plan how to put one in place. If we were talking about an active threat and a hostile intruder comes into this space what would we do? We need to understand where the exits are. There's a great example with the magician being able to say I'm going to perform my next act out there. Everybody follow me out. I've actually been in stage productions before where something from the smoke machine set the fire alarm off and then everybody's like is that part of the show? And so somebody has to jump up and this is a crowd manager and if you don't have crowd managers be conscious of that because it's actually state law that you fire code you have to follow and somebody go up and say folks this is not part of the performance we need everybody to follow some basic directions and have a plan for how you're going to direct people out of there and in fact it might have even been an option in that case even though the threat wasn't to fire maybe that's the easiest thing to do because everybody knows how to do that because let me just say hey guys I just want everybody to stand up, you know there's a bomb maybe so if you just comes off kind of rough right versus hey pull the fire alarm sorry we had to interrupt those to show everybody to step out because of fire alarm we're all going oh fire alarm I don't bring my jacket bring my water bottle how are you doing okay it's a much less of a a traumatic thing if we thought about that ahead of time rather than trying to make it up in the moment then we'll probably succeed better the other thing cooperation from other incidents we know that Vermont snow melts eventually and that happens if it does rapidly especially if a storm system is coming through at the same time that the flood may happen six years ago three years ago someone left the bathroom window open things like that are context you can look around either in your facility or you can look around for other buildings in your area or other places or places like yours and say what has happened here and I assure you it has happened here one of the key things we keep pointing out in emergency management and again on Mr. Dark and Stormy this is my whole life is that it has and therefore it will again in Essex 2006 I was one of the police officers that responded to the shooting that took place in that school okay it has happened here okay fires all over the place flooding all over the place ice storms it has happened here broken sprinkler systems they've happened so we do need to make sure we're aware that we're being conscious that we understand what we face is real and our responsibility our obligation to the people that come into our venues to the people that have donated to the venues to the people that have given their lives and their sweat and their tears and the space and the people that need the cultural opportunities and experiences we have that obligation if we're the stakeholders if we're controlling the venues if we're in charge of the shows I was just talking with Tom just a minute ago were you hiding in the back you must have run out even the fair the street festivals I'm Mr. Dark and Stormy what happens if somebody drives a truck into your crowd just like they did in Nice France you know that stuff exists in the world and that's the difference between hazards and risks anyone from Middlebury here excellent I got a buddy who's a cop in the Middlebury Police Department and every time we get a thunderstorm I open the radar app on my phone because I love thunderstorms the good storm I never do wherever I am but Middlebury gets hammered every time doesn't it no matter which direction the storm is coming it runs right through Middlebury like a freight train if you're having some kind of outdoor festival and you've got the little tent canopy thing set up all over the place you need to have a plan for what happens when the wind kicks up and those things start rolling like tumbleweeds through the aisles something to be conscious of we can do this in every space we can do this for every event whether we're inside or outside some bad thing has happened and there is some way to protect, to mitigate to make sure that we don't have it as bad as it could be because we were prepared believe it or not that's the basis of what you're going to end up writing your emergency management plan on now writing a plan is a whole separate conversation but you can already go back start looking around your space and go this might work this might not we don't have a resource to deal with this we should look at that because that's a gap that's going to be how you end up coming up with a plan I'm probably way early I'll take some questions and then any other questions that need to be had from anywhere along the line as well because I doubt I have that much to talk about on this topic anyway so we're coming on our 10th year of the River of Light Lantern Parade in Waterbury which is an outdoor event at night with two or three thousand people and so what do you recommend for a plan absolutely so here's the thing anywhere you have people you can have problems right we're all human and again I'm not exactly the optimist my wife does the rainbows and sunshine I don't so traffic control and the venue control are one of the primary things if this is going to be if there's any way to be able to solidly block off the area where it's going to be out of service for a while get the fire department to park their truck block in this or Waterbury get the construction vehicles it's a mess I know they're doing good work so have those vehicles this section this section are going to be blocked off park vehicles on this side park vehicles on that side that gives you a whole space to protect from a vehicle born incident from there the next thing is probably just education because it's not like in a wide open venue it's not feasible and also it's not really in the context to try and set up a metal detector everywhere because the risk really isn't that high you'll notice back in that the you know the crosswise in active active shooter wasn't even listed because it's such a rare event by the way I know I know some of them just went what really it happens all the time it actually doesn't there's when you look at the FBI standards for what an active shooter event is attempted mass murder with a firearm it's actually happens about 20 times a year in the United States that's the average 16 to 20 in the US that's a lot of square mileage hundreds of millions of people 20 times a year less than 200 people die in these events each year more people die from the flu okay we don't see that because we're constantly inundated with the media images and with the politicals and every and it's very emotional and all that's valid but be conscious that it's not actually high of a threat and as imminent as we're being kind of just processed with all the time so we don't want to live especially in a celebration like that with the idea that we have to have four knocks around us that's not reality so if you take some basic precautions about put vehicles here vehicles there and actually we face a greater risk from a drunk driver crashing into the crowd than we do an intentional homicidal act but that vehicle would protect against that just the same so the fire truck or the construction vehicle and giving us a nice safe space in between to just have a good time and then move them afterwards and from there have people conscious that okay water rate doesn't have its own police department anymore so make sure that somebody recognizes that the state police have you reached out and have a liaison with the state police are they likely to have a presence there you have two officers there fantastic then you've handled 90% of what's gonna come up we're gonna have a fire department and a rescue squad they know they're gonna be involved in the planning they probably have a plan about we're gonna have a dedicated ambulance crew just for the festival and an ambulance crew because they have at least two trucks that's still able to take the medical calls from anybody else that has their issues knowing as an event organizer what the fire department has for a plan does it just go right on Main Street right in front of the fire department okay everyone's gonna need to make a plan okay this is the road this is the road this is the road that are blocked off you wanna as an event organizer know what their plan is to get if whatever their other unrelated emergency is on that side of things how they're gonna do so that you can help them so that's a conversation we have a planning meeting with the fire rescue the state police just a probably one hour coordination meeting everybody loves coffee and cookies and have a quick conversation about this is what you would want to do to protect how to help you out best a couple of things just to keep that incidental from happening and you've got 90% of a plan right there we have one more maybe time for one more question in the back and then we'll move on to the next speaker hi my name is Shana Bowler I'm from Middlebury College I'm the arts events manager at the Mahini Art Center I have I just want to first of all say that all of my student ushers are trained crowd managers and that we are all trained crowd managers I can't recommend that enough even if you have volunteer ushers it's just really important that they have some basis of knowledge in that but I had a question about accessibility we've been working on that a lot at Middlebury and so we've been we're incorporating how to evacuate folks with disabilities during all of the emergency scenarios and I wonder if you have that at St. Mike's if you have included that in your plans at St. Mike's absolutely and by the way I work with you folks from Middlebury and your public safety counterparts quite a bit they're really on the ball and doing some great work so yes we have to be conscious when we have a person a student that is in a wheelchair that we don't put them on the second floor of a building because in a fire alarm the elevator drops to the first floor and waits for the fire department and you can't use it our housing assignments have to be based on where a student will be able to still get out of the building under their own power we have a student with actually a medically sensitive to temperature so we're actually adapting the fire the fire evacuation plan to that person be shelter in place much like the Department of Health in Burlington on One Way Cherry Street has a cafe that is staffed by people who are visually impaired it's on the second floor they're not going to be able to find their way out of the hall down the stairs out onto the street so they have an area what's called an area of refuge I'm not a fan of that I'm not either but it's better than having them fall down the stairs and break their neck if the fire department knows that that's their job is to get to that window and get them out of there because it's part of the plan right so in an arts center they don't come with plans they don't come with IEPs which is why plans which is why plans are very very helpful planning so if you thought about this ahead of time in your space then you know so someone coming back and here usually there's a cutaway like there's two or three chairs that aren't there right where the camera platform is that's where a person would be able to set up with a wheelchair because they don't have to be in the hallway that's already in part a plan the next person the next thing is for your person who's a crowd manager to go one or two people say it's between the two of us to get that person out that door or that door whichever one is available one of the two of us is responsible to do that that way you have redundancy in your system and you have some of its definitively tasked with that so that it doesn't get missed I noticed on your Doug I noticed on your risk and outcome assessment diagram it doesn't have long term electrical outages or grid failures and I was just thinking about this hall you know like if the power went out for two days in the middle of the winter and that the heat would stop the pipes would freeze the alarm systems would fail the internet and phones would be down the door locks might fail and there would be electricity light batteries were used up so just curious about how the state thinks about that and what kind of planning for grid outages if it's not going to be in the risk diagram you know how do you plan for it absolutely so the power and I'm not going to speak for the state but I'll tell you I've been involved in the in the planning process and the long term power outage is actually a whole separate system this is just an example it wasn't comprehensive of everything the state's considered think about New York City if you live on the 99th floor of a skyscraper and the power goes out right you're either not getting groceries or you're not going back in your house after you do but even even beyond that if you get down if you do get down to the store how do you use your debit card if they don't have any power either remember the blackout they had a couple years ago it was a squirrel that got into a transformer that they didn't have a replacement for and it took days to get New York City and have the Eastern Seaboard back online and all of those things are risks in that case it was during the summer so heat stroke and exhaustion was a risk as well as fresh water which we've all become accustomed to but you can't get up 99 floors without electricity or power absolutely right inside this space it wouldn't be the state's obligation to figure out what to do but it's great that you thought of it if the power goes out in this space you might have to consider whether you need to find the water valve the water main and turn that off and open the lines to bleed them out so that they would have room if they froze to to expand and not crack the pipes that would be part of your long-term power out plan the batteries the exit sign is going dead not your problem because if it's out for two days you're not having anything in here anyway you've secured the building until everybody will be back when the power is on and you don't have to worry about that light so just wipe that concern away it's identifying those kinds of things and thinking about them ahead of time when I'm doing active threat presentations I say I try and get everybody to be paranoid for five minutes a day I want you to be here I want you to be in Hannaford I want you to be in the bank and I want you to get this all goes wrong right now insert disaster here happens I can see that there's a door there I can see there's an exit sign there so that probably goes right outside I've been in a lot of bad situations I've been an EMT firefighter, coast guard all sorts of bad things and I have thought all sorts of ways this goes south what am I going to do do the same thing be paranoid in your space for five minutes a day and figure out what would you do and then actually pick it up and do it or pick this chair up actually pick it up see what it's like that muscle memory that's building a plan not because the plan will work but because planning is essential alright thank you Doug very helpful