 In the following segment, the National Terrorism Preparedness Institute of St. Petersburg College presents Live Response, a panel discussion where experts answer questions from a program audience while exploring topics related to WMD consequence management and the importance of maintaining routine operations during a large-scale incident. To effectively manage a large-scale incident, it is vital to have a comprehensive emergency management plan that covers issues such as mission essential functions, delegations of authority and communications. Today we'll look at continuity of operations planning and how it will be used in a large-scale incident on this edition of Live Response. The first call that I made as I stepped out of my hiding place was to Sarasota County, our neighbor to the north. And I called my counterpart there of 17 years, Greg Fagans, the director, who I affectionately have called dad for a long time, didn't even know if he'd acknowledged the call when I said, dad, we're ground zero on this hurricane and we're hurt real bad. And it shocked me when the call came back almost immediately from him and he said, son, we're on our way. This was mutual aid of the highest order. After several years of tropical storming activity, four significant hurricanes struck Florida, trying the nerves of even the best prepared response professionals. Even worse, each successive hurricane closely followed the previous storm, providing little recovery time for responders. Justed with the recent hurricanes in Florida, the emphasis on terrorism preparedness has focused on the need for continuity of operations capabilities. Continuity of operations, or COOP, is an effort within businesses and government agencies that ensures the continued performance of essential functions during a wide range of potential emergencies. This is accomplished through the development of plans for alternate facilities, personnel, resources, interoperable communications, and vital records collection. As was demonstrated in the case of Hurricane Charlie, mutual aid will be key in incident response and recovery. Well, the immediate response, of course, was to check on the life safety of our public safety people. We needed to know where we were. We needed to know where we stood in terms of our forces. We knew that we had lost four fire stations. That was almost inconceivable, but the word quickly came in that four of our major facilities had been compromised. The apparatus, for most cases, was intact, some broken windows, and other things, but it was all usable, salvageable. A COOP plan addresses emergencies from an all-hazards approach. Some of the COOP planning objectives include methods to ensure the safety of personnel and visitors, ability to continue essential operations, provisions for the protection of critical equipment, records, and other assets, efforts to minimize damage and losses, a foundation for the continued survival of leadership and provisions for an orderly response and recovery from the incident. At first, we were entirely overwhelmed by the outpouring of support. Out the back of our building here, we had a complete city established within 48 hours. Mobile command posts from, I can't even tell you how far away they came from, probably more than a dozen of them set up, and it was a small city. Part of the continuity of operations plan will include the acquisition of an alternate facility. This can include anything from a borrowed conference room for a few key people on a temporary basis to a complete turnkey facility to house the entire organization. The size and scope of the alternate facility is dependent upon the individual agency, its identified essential functions, and its available budget. The acquisition process should consist of at least three steps. First, identification. During this step, an agency should address what type and size of facility is needed to carry out its minimum essential functions. Second, selection. The alternate facility should have reliable logistical support, services, and infrastructure systems to maintain operations for up to 30 days. And third, alternate facility reevaluation. This is recommended to ensure that the alternate facility still meets the needs as determined by the agency's plan. As a final step in the COOP plan, an organization should develop a comprehensive training program to validate their plans and policies. If you don't practice well, then you're not going to play well when it's time to get on the field. We learned so much here in Florida from the events that have occurred since Hurricane Andrew. We tuned it in 1995 with Hurricane Opal in the Panhandle, which followed eight weeks after Aaron. Everybody thought that was extraordinary that the same area got hit twice in eight weeks. Few knew what was going to befall us in 2004. Hello everyone, I'm Al Rochelle, and this is Live Response. We are coming to you live from the facilities of the National Terrorism Preparedness Institute at St. Petersburg College in St. Petersburg, Florida. Live Response is brought to you by the National Terrorism Preparedness Institute at St. Petersburg College and is sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, Office for Domestic Preparedness and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Live Response is also an interactive program, and as always, our television and online viewing participants can be a part of this discussion by calling this toll-free number anytime during this program. The number is 1-888-870-3000. We'll give you that number throughout the program. Or if you would just like to fax your questions to our panel, here's the number 727-341-4140. As always, this is a great opportunity to interact with today's panel of experts. Alright, let's get started. First I'd like to introduce Jeffrey W. Walker. Mr. Walker has served as the director for the Liking County, Ohio, Office of Homeland Security, Emergency Management and the County 911 Center. He also has extensive experience in law enforcement and safety, which includes seven years as the director of safety and chief of police at Liking Memorial Hospital. Currently he serves as the president of the Emergency Management Association of the State of Ohio. Next, from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, we have James D. Sewell. Mr. Sewell currently serves as the assistant commissioner of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. During his tenure with FDLE, he has served as the deputy commissioner as regional director of the Tampa Bay Operations Center, the director of criminal justice information systems, and the director of the Florida Criminal Justice Executive Institute. And finally we have Mr. Robert J. Jevik. Mr. Jevik serves as the acting unit leader for the Medical Systems Operations Unit in the National Disaster Medical Systems Section of FEMA's Response Division. He also functions as a senior planner and policy advisor to the chief NDMS section. He's formerly served as the COOP program manager for the Department of Health and Human Services. Guests, so glad to have you all with us. The changing terrorism threat environment along with the recent natural emergencies has focused awareness on the need for continuity of operations capabilities, we call that COOP. Successful COOP planning will enable an agency to continue their essential functions during a broad spectrum of emergencies. Of course all of us in government over the course of the last few years have dealt in what we call COOP and COG, which is that continuity of operations as a part of the continuity of government overall. It's imperative, no matter what the disaster happens to be, that you maintain some semblance of control. That's why we have the government and the system that we have. We have elected officials who then appoint others to run government. And if you're not there, then the public's going to recognize that very, very quickly. And then you're going to have breakdowns beyond that. Because again, if there's no control, then there's chaos. So we have to very quickly establish that yes, we were in control, yes, your government is here, we're okay. Welcome back everyone. We have assembled for you a very good panel that represents the state, the local, and the federal level in dealing with what we are calling COOP. Who comes up with these anachronisms? It's one that, it's very, very functional. I'm going to start with you, Jeff. On a local level, give me a definition of what COOP is. Well, basically on the local level, that means we are still providing all the essential operations that we did before the incident occurred, that people still have the ability to receive services when they call 911, the police fire respond. When they have some situations they need to use, a government agency, it's still there with some exceptions. We might not sell dog tags during a major incident. But we'll probably record deeds and do those other pieces in the courtrooms, but it means essential operations are still available and the people can feel comfortable and safe that we're still doing the job that we're assigned. Now this would be a normal part of the planning procedure for a local agency, would it not? That's correct. And dependent upon staff or does that become part of the whole formula that you use? Staffing is a situation in my particular case. I am a small rural county in central Ohio, close to Columbus, we're an adjacent county. Some of our people that are responders essentially may wear double hats. They may be a firefighter volunteer in my county and a full-time firefighter for the city of Columbus. So we have to add that piece into our planning. We know that our staffs for emergency response may be smaller based on need, based on their primary employer. So we all have to build all those pieces into it to be able to provide those essential services in a timely manner. We try to return to get COOP, operational, excuse me, within 12 hours of whatever kind of an incident, so that we're really back to some degree of normalcy that the public can still receive those services. Okay, that's on a local level. Let me ask you Jim on a state level, what happens with COOP? It's not too dissimilar. Our major concern in the COOP itself is to make sure that we can provide, not necessarily a team, but essential services in those areas that are affected by the disaster, whether it's a hurricane or a man-made disaster. At the same time though, our other responsibility is to make sure that we're able to integrate support services to those affected communities. It's critical in our planning that we know that we can activate and deploy law enforcement resources, for instance, or national guard resources. The State Emergency Operations Center, which is under the control of the Division of Emergency Management, is standing up and is prepared to make sure we support, through resources or personnel or whatever is needed, those folks at the local area. Now this, I take it, this is really nothing new. COOP may be a new term, but in terms of this continuity of operations, this has been going on since basically day one in law enforcement and health planning and disaster planning. We've talked about emergency plans for years and only in the not too distant past has somebody come up with COOP and COG and all the other kinds of acronyms we use. Now on a federal level, let me ask you Bob, how does COOP work and is COOP changed or modified as a result of the WMD type event? Yes Al, basically in the federal government within the three branches of government legislative, judicial and executive, all three have a requirement to have a COOP program in place to be able to continue operations during any major incident that may affect their particular agencies. In the executive branch, which I am basically part of, there was a presidential decision directive number 67 during the Clinton administration that required all executive branch agencies to have a continuity of operations plan in place, an effective plan. The importance of that plan is particularly at the national level and particularly in the city of Washington D.C. where most of the federal agency headquarters are located. COOP is the basis for the continuity of the United States government as we know it in its constitutional form. So on the federal side, this is where we find COOP to be an important part of the program. And COOP has become more in focus since the terrorist attacks that have occurred recently, potentially because of the targets in Washington D.C. and major cities where we do have federal presence. Now we assume, and may rightfully so, that COOP would be something that we would use in a WMD incident. What would change in a WMD incident versus a, I want to call them a typical disaster or a hurricane or a snowstorm or floods, what would be the difference? Well one of the differences, a terrorist incident is defined as by law as a federal crime. So you do have federal law enforcement involvement, the obtaining of evidence and all that part that is part of crisis management, which may not be a part of responding to a natural disaster or an accident or a technological disaster. That's one difference. And we also know that it's elevated because now in a WMD incident somebody is a bad guy and wants to do us harm. Jim. Right. We have a crime scene and we have to deal with that. One of the other significant differences though, as we learned during this last summer, was that we had in essence about 56 or so of Florida's counties that were affected. We had a far larger area that we would have expected by what we considered to be a normal WMD. Whereas we've seen in the few terrorist acts that have been committed in the United States. Now are we assuming that this would flawlessly slip into a WMD event, the COOP versus we've, like we said, we've tried it here in Florida and in the entire South Eastern United States, that we know that we can handle one and we can handle two and we handled three and we had to handle four so that we did? I'm not sure flawlessly is a good word, but I think that the model of COOP should be applicable to any of the kind of disasters. Now as we find that there are other factors like a crime scene and how we have to respond and coordinate, for instance, with the FBI and that, then that will color our actual response. But it should be the same basic imprint. There are areas like Ohio where you do have nasty weather in the winter. Oh yeah, we just went through that period of nasty weather. Does that change the way you put together COOP? We have to protect our people, if it's a WMD, then we're looking at exposure. There's some degree of exposure. We had an inch and a half of ice, then snow, then flooding, all within a period of 21 days. And so we had to look at what protected those first responders, those utility workers, the citizens, those kind of things that are important. So it takes training and testing and exercising for each one of these kind of incidents, whether it's a natural disaster, man-made disaster, a terrorism incident. We have to practice. We have to know what the next step is. We have to exercise, then look at the after-action plan and say, hey, we need to build here. We need to do more there. Bob, you were saying? Yes. One thing that would distinguish a WMD event to a natural disaster, for example, most natural disasters, would be that it's normally no notice. It's a no-notice event without warning, unless the situation could have been mitigated by appropriate law enforcement. On the natural side, you may have warnings in some cases. And the type of response within COOP would be dependent on whether it's a warning or no warning situation. And provisions should be made for either type. Let's step back just a little bit. And I'm going to give you a chance, Jim, to kind of give us some planning objectives when putting together this continuity of operations plan. I think Lee Moody captured it early on as she was doing the intro. And I think we probably have some things that will go up on screen. But there's several things that are really important. One of the most important and probably the most is ensuring the safety of your personnel. We have to be prepared to take care of those folks assigned to you before we can expect them to go out and help others. Second, it's important that that plan provides for the ability to continue essential operations. We have to identify what's essential and what's routine that can wait for a while and then be able to do that. Third, we need to make sure that the COOP contains provisions for the protection of critical equipment, which we see in all of our major kinds of governmental buildings. That includes records or other kind of assets that are necessary. We need to be able to maintain efforts to maximize or to minimize the damage and losses through prior planning. There are a couple of other issues that are also key. One is that we plan for the survival of leadership. Not necessarily the survival of leaders, but the survival of leadership. We have to make sure that there's a continuous ability to govern. As we saw in the World Trade Center, there were significant deaths in the upper ranks of the fire service, particularly the chief of the fire department himself, the third ranking official, was killed. Others in that level were killed. We have to be prepared to make sure we've provided for some kind of ready order of succession. And finally, we need to make sure that we're prepared to now, once we've dealt with the immediate getting everything back in the road, respond and recover in that community. Bob, let's go to you talking about some of the responsibilities that each of the people, the partners, play in this. And let's start out, I guess, with the first one would be the agency heads, the head of these agencies. Well, basically the head of the agencies on either could be the federal side or the state and local side be the same. The head of the agency should be responsible for establishing the COOP program to give it some emphasis and to motivate the rest of the organization. Also, to appoint probably a COOP POC, a primary official, who would actually develop the program, perform the program management functions and develop the plans and also conducting training and testing and exercise of the particular COOP plan. And one important part would be at the executive head would be to ensure that there is a budget available in order to perform these functions to have the plan worked out to be able to do the exercises and the alerts that would require it. Yeah, because we learned so much more in the actual exercise than we do in planning on a piece of paper. We've got, Jim, we talk about the division of emergency management. Are most states set up so that is kind of like the agency within the state that covers that? There is, I think, it all states virtually a state emergency management function. We're blessed in the state of Florida because we've got strong leadership in that and strong support historically from the governor. That is the critical cog to make sure that the state resources and state response are coordinated. While we have separate emergency support functions within the state emergency operations center, the division of emergency management is really kind of the caller of the tunes to make sure we respond as we need to. Now, Jeff, there is a counterpart to the state level as well, which is in the local level, right? Each county and the state of behind across the country has a county director who is responsible for the county's program, for the county's continuity of operations on a day-to-day basis. And they work in cooperation with that state EMA agency to make sure that all occurs and they build a viable plan to accomplish that with the use of local officials and knowing what the resources are locally. Each one of these plans have to look at the local picture. What's there? What are the central operations? What kind of plans and procedures do we need? What's our mission? There's nothing worse in a county where you have limited resources of manpower than to have unnecessary missions to be accomplished that don't mean anything, don't have any meaning to the situation. The delegation authority has to be very clear as well as the order of succession. And as far as alternate facilities, mostly in the county, most counties don't have enough resources to have that alternate facility always available. So in our case, in our particular county, we deal with a commercial real estate person that helps us identify those at a moment's notice. And there's communications, vital records, those are all important to know where those are. What's the logistics? How are you going to administer this? Who does it? And when does it all kick in, so to speak? The personnel issues, how do your personnel know who's supposed to be, where and when and how do you coordinate that? And ultimately, when you have a big issue, your security is always heightened. You need to protect not only the public that's coming in to use the services that you've reconstructed, but also your staff, your employees. And ultimately, again, we want to test and train all this and manage the program continually 365 days a year. So it's not a shelf document, it's a living document that breathes and works and is part of everybody's thought pattern when an incident occurred. Let's talk about a term that you hear a lot when you talk about policy. Agency buy-in. Who is the guy or the gal? Where is the person that really has to sell this so that the troops down below believe in what you're doing and don't think that when the incident occurs that this may fall apart in the midst? Anybody? Well, basically, as I mentioned earlier, the head of the agency who has the most motivational power and has the power of the budget should be the one that would be the most interested and motivational. Particularly in large organizations and to show his presence and require that exercises be conducted, that a staff be designated and oriented and so forth. So it starts from the top down. Go ahead, Jim. Well, the National Charism Prevention or Preparedness Institute is working with the Office of the Governor in Florida to kind of capture some of the essence of the after-action reports of all of Florida agencies and identify those lessons we learned. That was one of the things that was real clear that the agencies oftentimes that no puns intended weathered this better were agencies in which the agency head set the leadership role. The example that I've used in other discussions is that we have a fairly active plan at FDLE not only at the state level and headquarters but up for all of our regional offices and our 22 field offices. When we did our tabletop exercise on an attack on the FDLE building, the commissioner of FDLE at that time, Tim Moore, sat with us and went through the entire exercise with us. And that was a clear message to everybody that it was important. And that filtered down through the division directors and the other supervisors to understand that this is something that was just not going to be a piece of paper that sat on a desk. And also having the governor, as it happened in the state of Florida and in other areas where they have real problems, the governor was one of the first people on the phone and on the TV reminding people in English and in Spanish to his credit to remind people that there was help available. He also participates when we do the statewide exercises every year. So that's always been one of his issues is to begin that kind of leadership from his position. Let me ask you a couple of other questions because as we're going through this, I'm thinking a couple of things. We had a situation and do have a situation where the United States is at war with terrorism and particularly in Florida. And I know this happens in other states because of the responsibilities that the National Guard carries. What do you do when you've made these kind of plans and all of a sudden, you've got three to 5,000 guards members that are no longer in the United States? Well, the good news is we saw this time and that is exactly what happened to the Hurricanes. We still had a sizable cadre we could deploy. We made sure we focused their missions and their missions are primary twofold. One is humanitarian, if you will, to support some of the rescue and other operations. Two is security. And they did that hand in glove with local and state law enforcement. We deployed in excess of 6,000 state and local law enforcement and National Guard during the four Hurricanes for a total. And it was a closely coordinated operation between the Guard and the state law enforcement leadership. Something else I was thinking about when we're talking about staffing, because I have a chance to bump into a lot of firefighters in our area and a lot of these other first responders. How do you staff? Do you staff based on the minimum requirements for that area that you're serving? Or do you staff, in your mind, knowing that someday you're gonna have to be ready for either a large-scale WMD event or some other kind of disaster? Jeff, you wanna talk local and I'll talk state. Locally, we try to get as staff for the ultimate so that what's the major, what's the major situation that's gonna occur based on history in a particular area. And then based, the second thing that always comes into play is financial piece. Whether we can afford to have those kind of resources always available. So we have to make that all balance out. But our goal is to have the most available responders to handle the most serious situation that we may face. Well, we know that particularly in something like this, and I'll use the four hurricanes, we really lost control in a lot of local areas because all of the unexpected happened at once. In Orlando, when we lost, I think it was at one time about 200 intersections with lights, we couldn't handle that with just local resources. Nor could we expect those local officers to have to be going constantly for X number of days and not be able to worry about their own homes which had been destroyed. The plan at state government level is really twofold. One, we have a viable document that says within certain numbers of hours we can deploy X number of state law enforcement resources into an area. So that if I was a chief of police or a sheriff down in Charlotte County, and as soon as the storm hits, one of the first representatives is gonna be an FDLE agent with him. That agent will explain that we will be bringing in X number of troopers, Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Department of Transportation Motor Carry Compliance, those folks within a period of time followed by wave after wave after wave. The other thing that we coordinate and we do this both with the Florida Police Juice Association and the Florida Sheriff's Association is the deployment of local officers. You saw in the film that there were Miami officers there in Charlotte County. What we do is coordinate that through the State Emergency Operations Center. So we don't have people just going scattergun and we can control and meet the needs of those local areas. Again, we deployed sizable numbers of local law enforcement from unaffected areas into the affected areas. And that's an important assistance level. We do the same thing with firefighters and emergency medical technicians. Now, when we come back, we're gonna be talking about plan execution. As it was said in one of our pieces, it's one thing to have a plan, it's another thing to practice it, and then to see how well it can be implemented and to make changes along the way. Just as a reminder, St. Petersburg College is issuing what we call continuing education units. Those are CEUs for live response programs. To register for those CEUs, we've made it pretty simple. You go to the NTPI website and you click on CEUs online. That link will take you through the registration process, take you through the evaluation and the program test. Now, if you pass that test with a 75% or better, you will receive a CEU certificate via email. We're gonna be back with our program and more on this program coming up in just a bit. So please stay with us. Emergencies happen. Community emergency response teams will be able to provide critical support to first responders. Lee Moody explores the CERT program and shows its relationship to the Department of Homeland Security's Citizen Corps. As a federal resource, the U.S. Department of Transportation has many transportation and safety programs that can assist emergency responders. Stacy Phillips visited the DOT and shows what it can offer in response to a terrorist incident. The Environmental Protection Agency offers training to personnel who are likely to be first on the scene of a terrorist incident. Jenny Dean looks at the EPA's comprehensive program for protecting the public and the environment from hazardous materials. Responders will rely on various types of mechanical equipment during an emergency. John Eastman meets with public works officials to talk about the role of heavy equipment during a terrorist incident. Join us for all this and the latest in responder news. Comnet airs Wednesday, February 23rd at 2 p.m. Eastern. For more information, make sure to register online at terrorism.spcollege.edu. We always like to remind you that live response is, in fact, that it's live. It's an interactive program and we welcome and encourage your participation at any time during the program, which means you have a half hour left. So if you wanna participate, now is the time to call with any questions that you might have for our panel. That number is 1-888-703-1000. We always tell people to jump on those lines early because you may not get a chance at the end. If you have questions that you'd like to have answered, don't particularly care to hear your voice on the air. We have a way to handle that too. 727-341-4140. Again, the time to participate is right now. During an incident, the activation and execution of the COOP plan will show how effectively an agency's essential functions will be implemented. From the first 12 hours of activation through the termination of the recovery, effective continuity is going to be critical. Surprisingly, after 72 hours, we began to see some areas get some sporadic electricity returned to some of our communities, particularly some of our critical facilities, which of course are all prioritized with the power company. Some of those, we were able to get the equipment back in and get it put up, and of course they were working so hard, working in some cases through thunderstorms and conditions that were almost unbelievable to get that power restored. Water was the same way. It began to, the pressure began to come back up. It began to return. I think most importantly was the major providers, the major department stores and grocery chains were up and running. And because of the relatively small size of Charlie, it didn't take an extraordinarily long trip for people to go outside the impact area to reach a store that was functioning where they could get the services and the goods that they might need. We here in Florida were particularly cognizant of the extraordinary efforts that were being made by ordinary people just doing their jobs and recovering. And it was remarkable to see how fast, despite those four hurricanes that came slamming through how fast people were able to get aid and help. And that's one of the things that we talk about. Many of these agencies that we talked to from a news standpoint as a news organization, they said, you know, we had practiced this stuff. We had been through this before, so yeah, it was a lot bigger than we expected that it would. But if you handle it on a small scale, you just use the same principles on the big scale. And let's talk about that. Jim, start out with you about this whole idea of plan execution. There's actually a time clock going on, isn't it? There is. And particularly for the first 12 hours or so is when everything starts to get real key and real crazy because that's when everything is, you're trying to assess everything that's going on. Let me go back and re-emphasize one thing. And you touched on it and we've all touched on it. But the most important thing is to have the plan and exercise the plan well before. The issue that we saw in a number of agencies, both the state, county and city level of Florida, was that they had great plans. They had exercised them to some degree, but oftentimes they had equipment failure. The emergency generators weren't fueled. The emergency generators weren't capable of supplying the needed electricity to fill a whole building or take care of certain important functions. So it needs to go beyond that as you're playing with it. Activation is really twofold. One, and in Bob's point a while ago, was it's a lot different if we're dealing with a WMD with no warrant versus the fact that we knew beforehand these hurdles were coming short. Granted, however, that they came in much lower than what we expected. And probably in a lot of ways, a lot stronger. That's why we lost two county EOCs. That's why we lost a total of 16 fire stations. Because during these storms, they were just mammoth storms that hit us real hard. The activation beforehand was to put folks on call and use the words we've talked about that everybody hates now to hunker down. And to be prepared to respond immediately afterwards. That was the good news. The bad news was oftentimes they were relying on communication that was no longer existent. Hard wires didn't work. In a lot of areas, the cells were down so you couldn't use cellular traffic. If there wasn't a pre-existing plan for folks to come in, there were some difficulties. Two, what we often saw was that the telephone trees, the contact numbers weren't kept up to date. And for activation to occur, you have to make sure everybody knows how to reach everybody necessary in a certain point in time. And that becomes important when you're trying to get your folks in. Yeah, I had no idea that were portable cell phone towers that could be brought in. And they were brought in. Yeah, we did. And the good news, this is an aside, and the good news, one of the things that we found with the state radio system, there's a state law enforcement radio system. And not only was it, it withstood far better than what we expected with its towers, but we also had the emergency crews on standby outside of the target areas. So we were actually making adjustments within hours after the storms. We have a phone call right now that's coming to us from Colorado. Alan, can you hear me? Yes, I can. And your question for us this afternoon. Well, regarding the continuity of operations plan, if it's previously developed before the event, I think the point that confuses me is, why is there a delay, possibly up to 12 hours, I think somebody said, before it's operational, after the activation? Go ahead. It's activated immediately. Your first 12 hours is when you're really working the hardest on it. Because that's when everything's going on at once, and you've got to make sure you've got control of your resources. You've got to make sure that your equipment is, if it was still, if it was in a safe place, it's still safe, and you can use it all the things that immediately occur as you're walking out. It's also during that period of time where the locals are, at times, most on their own, at least the first four to eight hours, where they're waiting for additional resources from the state or federal level, depending on what the tragedy is. Go ahead. Another point that would impact that would be the location of the alternate facility where you have to go to, whether the distance to get to that particular facility in order to begin operations, how quick you can get your staff that are going to conduct the essential operations, essential functions to that location will also have an impact. But generally, the guidance is at least by 12 hours. Right, Jeff. And we're looking at first responder safety, too. Right. Can they go down the same route that they have planned out to go to this particular area of town or not? If it's not safe anymore, if it's not safe, health-wise, the roads are closed, all those things have to be assessed in that 12 hours so we can still provide the service, but we do it safely for the first responders and for the staffs. Now, as much as we've talked about leadership, a COOP plan, though, should be something that everybody on all levels is aware of so that if they don't have the immediate supervisor over them telling them what to do, that they pretty much know what they should be doing on their own. And I think we've said that, too, that again, that's one of those things that can't be of size too much. We need to train the plan and everybody needs to know their role and responsibility and how to function if that boss isn't there. Not only the staff that is involved in the essential operations within COOP, but the entire staff of an organization should be at least aware of it and those who do not have an essential role should know that when they are notified, do not report back to work or go back if there is no location for them at the alternate facility or function for them there. Now, what happens because we mentioned something in the other segment, Jeff, and I thought about this because I come from a small rural community where I'm thinking, you know, you've got guys that are volunteer and gals that are volunteer firefighters that also may work for the bank or may work for the school district and they may have responsibilities within WMD or with a storm to take care of their responsibilities. How does that, what do you do with that? That becomes very difficult because their primary employer is gonna demand their services. And we've also trained them. So that's where the depth of training, the succession piece for those people, we have to know who's gonna be there. That's when we were talking about maximum number of employees that you can put towards them. So you have to blend all that in. If Harry's gonna have to be at his primary job when the situation occurs, then you know you can't count on Harry, you have to build in a backstop to backfill those positions. Now, do you also share this kind of a plan? And I'm thinking again, as Florida, and we're not trying to, you know, negate the rest of the country, believe me, but these are just some good examples. Or what happened when you have these big snowstorms that we've been having on going through the Northeast? Do you share this information with a public or a supermarket chain or a Walmart's? Because a lot of the items that people are going to need to recover are going to be coming from those stores? Yes, one of the most effective things I think Florida does prior to storms or prior to hurricane season is the kind of information it puts in the hands of literally everybody. And you'll have publics giving out emergency hurricane kits so people know what to do and what to buy. And I think that there's been a great buy-in. Another important thing, though, that's critical to the success of a response is two folds of communication. One is communication with the first responders, that interoperability we've talked about. But I think even more important is communication with the public. Because if you've been the victim in a disaster area, you're scared to death. And you want to know what's going on. And you need to hear from the leadership, the governor or the mayor or the county commission chair, to tell you where things are and how you're being protected. I think in this past hurricane season, that's, again, one of the things that perhaps we did better than we had ever done before. We did it well partially by force of personality. Governor Bush not only communicated at every press conference in English, but he turned around and did it in Spanish. And we had a number of significantly Hispanic communities that were affected during this storm. Right. Now, one of the other problems that developed in talking about implementing this plan is that you don't think about is that all of a sudden, and I have some good friends that are 911 operators. And they said that the phone calls hours before the storm and even hours afterwards, they just could not begin to handle all of them. And a lot of the people just literally wanted their hand held to know, do I evacuate? What do I do? I don't have any water. When will I have power? How do you plan for that? How do you plan for 200,000 phone calls in three hours? That's a big problem in that you have to have secondary numbers they can call to get specific information about specific situations. Whether it's what do I do without water? What do I do without heat? What do I do so that you don't over tax your 911 emergency system? There has to be that secondary phone number in place where they can call and get that information, whether it's recorded or whether they're talking to somebody or whether they need some assistance. So the mental health, behavioral health people have become so very important over the last, since 2001 in our processes and in our annexes, that there's so much a part of it to help us through those particular things. It's just unbelievable. Otherwise, as you say, you've got 200,000 phone calls and no way to answer them all. A number of communities have gone to 211 calling. Exactly. Information of calling. That becomes a ready resource. And again, when we think about response in both before and after storms, we need to think beyond just governmental agencies and how we can motivate and mobilize the private sector or traditional non-governmental organizations to work with us in that. Right, and I know the media, our news organization has picked up a lot of that slack too because we have our own websites and have ways we are able to transmit some of this information. Have we forgotten anything else in this first 12-hour period that's very critical? I guess what you said about the media telling people, you become a very, very key element to the media themselves in getting the message out and giving people good, accurate information because we tell them in our pre-planning, excuse me, to have battery-powered radios and all those kind of things, and that's why. That's a reason why pre-planning is so important. When we talk about it in the spring and the winter in Ohio, have this kit ready, be ready so that you can get that message that we're putting out through the local media. Have a place where you can congregate if something happens to your home. Now, we've tried to go through this with our family and quite honestly, some of these scenarios, you can't even begin to imagine so you have a hard time figuring out, well, where would we meet as a family if something like this did happen? And of course, again, with the WMD event, we're talking about this happening in an environment, this kind of thing, happening in an environment where things are relatively safe, they're relatively calm and now it's cleaning up. But with the WMD, it's that fear factor that certainly is going to motivate people not to be as cooperative as they could be or just because they're frightened. Well, and of course we also experienced some of that with the Hurricanes simply because we didn't know what was going on. There were the first rumors that we'd had, had hundreds of people killed. There was a total of 117th, I think was the final count. We, the massive movement of folks, we evacuated about 9.5 million people during the four Hurricanes and sheltered almost 400,000. So families were being separated from folks elsewhere and they couldn't find them. And it became important to have that planned beforehand so that you could contact or be contacted. Okay, now let's talk, let's say we've gone through the first 12 hours and again realizing that this timeframe is just a guideline of some of the functions that you need to get accomplished in 12. Let's talk about phase two, which is alternate operations. 12 hours to termination, Bob. Well, once the COOP is activated by the appropriate official as designated within the COOP plan, generally the guidance is to have individuals at an alternate location. If an alternate location is required based on the fact that your primary location has been compromised. Pre-designated individuals would be deployed, asked to deploy it to the alternate site based on the essential functions that these individuals have to perform. And that was all done ahead of time and it's in the plan. And generally in the plan, you don't use individuals' names, you use the title. Right. Because names can change for each particular position. Alert notification obviously has to be in there and that's already been done at the beginning. They report to there and they should be able to sustain themselves for at least 30 days because one does not know how long the primary location will be out of service. Right. So you have to at least plan for the provision of that. And to have appropriate communication so that you can, once you're at the alternate site, you can speak with other agencies within the particular group, whether it's federal, state, or local. So you can operate as effectively as a governmental agency, have interoperable communications. So you can talk to all levels which will allow a much better prediction for a response. Now have it, you gotta admit, we are technologically, we are so fortunate and I know cell phones can seem like a pain sometime especially when they go off in the middle of a program like this and you forgot to turn them off or in a movie and all those kind of things. Cell phones have really established a kind of communication because I remember during some of these storms I was out on the field with EMS people and for one reason or another they couldn't get back to their vehicle to make a call. The guy whips out his cell phone and because they had put up those temporary cell phone towers they were able to establish communications much faster than anything we've ever seen before. But oftentimes that was 24 or 48 hours into the event. Right. And so we didn't have some of that communications. One of the things that again the storms taught us if we didn't already know was the need for some real redundancy in that communications. The SAT phones became our mainstay throughout especially in law enforcement and in order to assure continuity of government those satellite phones were the things that could communicate. Our communication systems post September 11th gotten better because we know of some of the their shortcomings now. Better but not where they need to be. We've been working on a major interoperable communications plan for the state for the last couple of years that we've focused a lot of our money from the Department of Homeland Security towards to get us there. We're not there yet. And it still weighs out simply because we've got 35,000 police officers in the state in about 500 agencies. So we've got to make sure we bring them all up and we're getting there but it takes time. Now on a federal level does FEMA have anything to do with making sure that these communication devices are all compatible with each other? Because even in New York City that got to be a big problem with the incompatibility of something as simple as a hose connector. They were different in New Jersey than they were in New York. So when all the New Jersey firefighters got in New York to help out, well guess what, none of their hoses worked. Well FEMA doesn't obviously have any authority to promulgate which type of standard should be used. Certainly guidance can be provided from that particular level. They have more of an influence with the federal agencies based on the coup preparedness circular that FEMA produces. But basically they just give the guidance and not the particular requirement. They would never put that on to a state or a local entity. All right we're gonna mention one more time that we have this phone never for you to call if you have any questions. Please get a hold of a telephone right now with any questions for our panel. The number is 1-888-870-3000. It's right down here. 1-888-70-3000. We've got about 10 or 15 more minutes left in this program. And if you have any questions for our panel we certainly would like to answer them right now. And I have a couple more questions simply because I'm kind of interested in some terminology that I'm not real familiar. What's the difference between, because I've heard law enforcement agencies say this, the difference between a hot site and a cold site as far as commands? Our definition of a hot site is an alternate facility that is prepared to accept the staff and the staff can go to work immediately. The telephones are in, the communications devices are in. Everything that's needed to operate a operation center to perform still essential functions only are there. That's a hot site. The hot sites are budgetarily expensive to have on hand. The cold site is basically, you know there's a location that you can go to. Eventually you can bring equipment too to set that up or it'll take a little longer. Anybody else? I think on the local level we have to constantly be aware of what some, like telecommunications people, if they're shutting down a location in a building and it's all set up for faxes and multiple telephones and those kind of things, we have to be talking to them about what are you gonna do with this site? Because that becomes somewhat of a cold site for us but a usable site in the case of a major situation. One that we don't want them to demolish without us having a chance to see if it's workable. Right. When you said when you plan for a site, a secondary site, you have to plan for that site to be up as long as 30 days. Now I know from FEMA's standpoint, it's only been a short time when the FEMA folks finally left and I'm not even sure that they have left. They're in some areas, I think they were still doing some of the work. So for FEMA, a federal agency, they can be in a remote location for a long time. Yes, that remote location then eventually becomes this DFO, this disaster field office, which can be continued in some cases for several years depending on the severity of the incident but slowly through other federal interagency support, particularly from GSA, they can maintain that and sustain it for a longer period of time. That is different than this alternate facility that we're talking about in COOP. Right. That is something that the author of facilities, if the main facility goes down, you'll just get a backup plan. Has that ever happened? Well, I guess it has happened with the firefighting facilities. Well, we lost firefighting, we lost two EOCs. So we had to come with alternatives. One of the things that we used a lot during these storms were the mobile command centers. We had deployed the state law enforcement mutual aid command center. We deployed a number of sheriff's department command centers, oftentimes, for instance, when Pinellas County here in St. Pete Clearwater deployed, it took its mobile command center with it. That allowed some advanced communications that allowed a lot of support for the number of deputies that they sent down there. And that became usable for those other agencies that needed it. Right. Can I just give an example of where exercising, particularly exercising the alternate site location with the staffing that you're going to be sending there, was very beneficial to us, our department, when I was with the Department of Health and Human Services. On September 11th, 2001, we had scheduled that particular morning, seven o'clock in the morning, to do a testing and an exercise at our alternate coop site that morning. And we had quite a bit of the staff there. And then we had heard what happened and we just continued. And thank God we had that coop. We were probably the first coop in the federal site that was in operation. Oh man, what are the odds of that happening? It was coincidental. Yeah, absolutely. Now we've talked about, in the three phases, we've talked about the activation phase, we've talked about the alternate operations phase. Now we're talking about phase three, which is reconstitution and termination. Explain to me what that is. Jeff, maybe you can take that. You know, once the problem starts out locally, it ends up locally. If it happens in my community, it's still my problem. So as the termination of the event occurs, the state people return to their offices in Columbus in the case of Ohio or whatever, the people from FEMA shut down the DRC and they leave the area. And once again, it becomes the locals to kind of broom out the room and so to speak and make sure everything's back to normal. And then look at the after-action report, you know. And one thing I would stress that as we do exercises, you should do an after-action report for your exercises. Because otherwise, how do you blend back the tools that you need into your plan if you don't take a look at it? And the same holds true with the actual incident. We need an after-action. We need to have plans that say, this is what we're gonna do to bring us up to the level where we need to be. Because we don't want to stay down here and know that the next time this situation hits us in the case of Ohio, we get a lot of flooding. The next thing comes along are tornadoes, you know. So we're moving, we're thinking about spring now in Ohio, more ways than one. But those kind of things, we're looking at what occurred and we don't want the same things to happen in our area and I'm sure everybody would agree, we have to do some remedial action that brings us up a step. Now I've never been in on one of these after-actions and I would like to simply because in our business, when we talk about after-action, it's usually yelling at people, you know. You didn't do that and you didn't do that. What, no, you don't do that. So what happens in an after-action so that you can honestly evaluate a situation and honestly evaluate where there were shortcomings and not point the fingers of blame at individuals? Each agency brings to the table their concerns, the things that they want to improve upon. There's a good discussion among agencies and you bring together that final report. Each agency has theirs and then there's that final cumulative report of all agencies in the county level that says here's our after-action report for in my case, Licking County, Ohio. And have you guys been in programs? Were you satisfied that there was good feedback and not simply blaming? Like for example, when we had our first exercise where we had the agencies, there was supposedly an outbreak of smallpox in one state and of course what was mostly leaked out to the media was, oh, it was a total disaster. Everything melted down. People in the exercise were struggling to get out of their borders and you had to have armed guards around Texas where this thing supposedly began. I think what you've got to guard against is against that. And you've got two extremes and if you've got the right facilitator or the right folks conducting an after-action, the one extreme is when there's all blame about what happened. The other extreme is when everything was perfect and you know in reality it's all fluff. Because you couldn't have, in our case, have evacuated 90 half million people and everything gone smoothly. So you've got to have folks who are willing to come to the table and be honest and say here's what happened without assessing blame, without trying to cover up government mistakes and saying at the same time, here's how we can do better. What do we learn from it? What do we need to fix? And at the same time, what do we need to recognize we did well? Right. Jeff, we're down to the point where we're gonna have to start wrapping things up. Jeff, I'm gonna give you the first opportunity to wrap up of what do you want, the first responders that are watching our program at this moment, what do you want them to come away from this program and what have you learned from it? I guess we've been able to talk together local, state, and federal. They need to be able to do that back home and that helps them get started. If somebody hasn't started the continuity of operations for their particular responsible area, today's a good time to set that in motion to take some of the information that they've gained here. There's a lot of available outside sources that'll help you and just get to work. Jim. I agree. We need to make sure a coup plan's in place. It needs to be clear, concise, current, and read throughout the agency. It needs to be practical, usable, and you need to make sure when you have to exercise it, you do an after-action review. All right, Bob. Coup planning is simply good business practices. Major corporations that work for profit require and have these plans associated with all aspects of government. It's a fundamental mission of any organization to be able to continue their operations, and particularly in a changing environment like we have now with terrorism in all spectrums of emergencies. So Coup is essential also for continuing the actual process of government. Sure, and if you haven't started a coup plan, FEMA says that call them first. We'll put them on the line, won't we? By the way, remember to register online for the CEUs that you can get at the NDPI website also. You can help ensure that we're meeting your learning needs by filling out an evaluation form. Folks, that really does help us. To submit an evaluation form of the program, you go to our NDP website, click on evaluation. Our next live response program will be held on March the 23rd. That's at 2 p.m. And the topic of discussion will be on the National Incident Management System. And of course, ComNet will come to you February the 23rd at 2 p.m. Be sure to register at terrorism.spcollege.edu. For all of the staff here, I'm Al Rochelle. Until next time, take care, everyone.