 It's a pleasure to turn the floor over to Jenny Arena. Thank you so much, Adam. And thank you guys for holding tight with us, technology. What can you do about it but fight? So we're so glad you're with us. And as Adam said, we'll go over about 15 minutes. If you can't hang on, you'll understand there will be a recording of this after the event. So for anyone who is logging in with us for the first time, let me just give a quick introduction to the community and then we'll move on to the topic. So the online community was originally created in cooperation with the American Association for State and Local History and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The community and webinars are moderated by Heritage Preservation and Learning Times is kind enough to review both our website and webinars and help us troubleshoot when we have these technical issues. The goal of the online community has always been to help smaller museums. Libraries archives in historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources and network with their colleagues like you're doing right now. That helps you do that. We've compiled an extensive list of online resources that are broken up by topics on the online community. In addition, we also host free drop-in webinars like the one today on topics we hope that you'll find useful. A recording of all of our webinars, including this one, can be found under webinar archives. And of course, if you're interested in continuing the discussion, you're welcome to sign up to become a member of the community and post questions on the discussion board. So today's webinar is a little special. It was organized to help celebrate May Day. So every year Heritage Preservation encourages cultural organizations to participate in May Day, which is a national event aimed at improving emergency preparedness within the cultural community. In addition to this webinar, Heritage Preservation is collecting examples of the simple preparedness steps that cultural organizations are undertaking this spring. Institutions submitting a brief description of their May Day plans or accomplishments by May 31st will be entered into drawing for free disaster supplies donated by Gaylord Brothers. So make sure to go to that link and submit your story. Not only are we doing the drawing, but we're also including a sale on emergency resources and all that information can be found on the link you see on your screen. So one of those resources that we are fortunate to say is now being offered at a discount is our speaker's publication. David Carmichael is the Director of Records and Information Management for the Atlanta Housing Authority and he is author of the publication Implementing the Incident Command System at the Institutional Level, a handbook for libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions. Oops, sorry, repository. Sorry, David. And he has also served as the State Archivist for Georgia and you'll see when you go to that May Day link, you'll see a link to the bookstore where you will also see this book at a discounted rate. David, thank you so much for joining us today and helping us celebrate May Day. I am just going to move this out of the way and hand things over to you. Thank you, Jenny. I appreciate it very much and I want to add my thanks to all of you for hanging in there. There are always technical issues with things like this, but I appreciate it. Carl, I did notice that you said I sound good even without speakers on. I actually sound better without speakers on, but hopefully you'll leave them on for the next hour. So without further ado, let's start talking about the Incident Command System, or ICS. Imagine for a moment, if you will, a fire that covers a half a million acres, 500,000 acres. The first fire company that comes to respond is completely overwhelmed very rapidly, and so is the next and so is the next, and eventually almost 20,000 people are there responding, trying to extinguish this fire. They come from 500 separate departments and agencies. That is exactly what happened in October of 1970 in California. 773 separate wildfires, as you can see on the screen here, and you can read the stats. Imagine for a moment with 20,000 responders from 500 different departments. Each company arrives with its own leadership. Each one has their own plan for attacking the crisis. The priorities just shift wildly back and forth. They even have difficulty communicating. Not only do their radios work at varying frequencies, but they use different language in terms of acronyms and things. And so after that fire in 1970, total chaos ensued with all those responders. And Congress reacted by ordering the California Forestry Department to create a system to prevent that kind of chaos in the future. And what they created became ICS, the Incident Command System. The ICS was created to provide a standardized way to manage incidents, no matter how large or small. Even if the responders come from different jurisdictions, different disciplines, they can all use the ICS to respond. ICS standardizes the response to the incident. It supersedes all of the organization charts of the responding agencies. So when ICS is invoked, these positions are created that don't exist in your normal day-to-day operations, things like incident commander and operation section chief. We're going to talk about some of those in a few minutes. And these positions have very clearly defined responsibilities. And what that means is if you know ICS and you walk into an incident that's being managed by ICS, you know exactly who is responsible for what. And theoretically, you could assume the role of any position within ICS, or at least you would know what that role entails. ICS standardizes a whole list of things, the positions, the responsibilities, even the terminology that's used. And when I say language there, I don't mean English or French. I mean the terminology and the acronyms that are used so that people can communicate no matter where they come from. So why should you care? Well, there are at least two reasons you should care. There are external reasons and internal reasons. Let's look at the external reasons first. ICS is used at the incident on scene. That means when you have an incident, if you have a fire in your building or something, the people who respond are going to use ICS to manage that incident. It's very likely they're going to use it. The more you know about ICS, the better you're going to be able to fit in. Now, you need to understand, as I'm sure you do, the emergency responders are in control. They aren't going to fit into your management structure when they come to respond to your fire. They're not going to adapt to your priorities, and so you need to fit into theirs. And the more you know about ICS, the better you can do that. It's also multi-jurisdictional. That means all the responders will be using it. Your firefighters show up, if ambulance crews show up, and that's good news because you can fit right in if you know the system. You become part of that multi-jurisdictional approach. And so ICS eases the coordination between staff of an affected institution and those who are going to respond to that institution. So you should care about that. And then there are internal reasons that you should care. The ICS is applicable to all hazards, fires, floods, earthquakes, you name it. It is scalable. We think of the incident command system being used for very large incidents like hurricanes, hurricane Katrina, for instance. But it can actually scale down as well as up. So it will work in a smaller disaster, and it can work even within one institution. Totally scalable. We'll talk about that tomorrow. It's very cost-effective. It minimizes duplication of effort. It makes sure that the resources are concentrated at the point of greatest need, and they're not dissipated across the incident. And it can be implemented in response or in advance. And this is something I think a lot of people don't think about. They think about incident command system as a way to respond to a disaster. But it's also a great way to pre-plan like a major event. Suppose you're opening an exhibit, a major exhibit, or you're moving to a new facility. When I was at State Archives in Georgia and directing them, I built the State Archives there, and I wish I had known the incident command system at that time, because we had to move from one building to another many miles away, and I would have used ICS to plan that move. It would have been perfect for that. And you can also use it for impending disasters. We live... When I worked at State Archives, of course, we dealt with institutions clear across Georgia. And so any time a hurricane was headed towards Savannah or something, we would try to help the institutions that needed to prepare. And ICS is a good way of preparing, even for an impending disaster. So you should care, because the people who respond to your emergencies are going to use ICS. And secondly, it's a great tool to manage your own planning and response. And I call it a supercharged, temporary management structure that you implement during times of stress. So whenever you have stress and need to move out of the day-to-day management structure, ICS is a great tool to kick in temporarily. So let's talk about what is an incident. ICS defines an incident as anything that threatens property, lives, property, or the environment. So if you have any kind of incident, we think of fires and floods and such, but anything that might threaten lives, property, or the environment is considered an incident. Many of you have visitors to your repositories. You may need to protect their lives at some point. You're staff. You may need to protect their lives. We all have collections. You may need to protect this property. So anything that threatens that is an incident. And of course, it can be caused by humans. It can be caused by nature, many different things. And it can be caused knowingly. Someone could try to burn down a building knowingly, but it can also be caused unwittingly. Someone forgets to turn off a coffee maker one night and you could have an incident. Incidents require you to respond. Normally, that response occurs after the incident. The flood comes, then you have to respond by protecting life, a property, and the environment, and then you have to do the cleanup. But as I mentioned, in rare instances, the response can come before the incident. If a hurricane is bearing down on you on a winter storm, you may need to evacuate collections or cover windows or inspect your generators. All of that constitutes a response, even if it's happening in anticipation of an incident, because you're responding to an incident in order to protect lives or property. ICS is very effective in both of those instances. So again, it's a temporary management structure that you invoke during times of stress. I like to think of response in three phases. And this is not exactly something that ICS spells out, but I like to think of it this way. Initial phase of response, the continuing phase, and the recovery phase. And you notice the initial response is a very short period. Continuing could be longer. And recovery can last a very, very long time. So let's talk about initial response. Who initiates the initial response? This is the reading room of the Georgia Archives. Who initiates the response? I can tell you, these two guys right here, here they are again. How do I know that? Because they are the only staff people in the room when that picture was taken. The initial response is initiated by whoever happens to be present. So whoever, normally that would be your staff. And whoever happens to be present when the incident occurs will initiate the initial response. It often takes place in an atmosphere of panic or disorientation, of course. So success depends on having a prearranged plan. Success depends on everyone being disciplined enough to stick to that plan. That's why we do fire drills, of course. That's why we should practice ICF as well. So the initial response is conducted by the staff who happen to be in the area when it begins. So who conducts the continuing response? Well, emergency responders are going to conduct... The emergency responders are going to conduct the continuing response. You may help with the continuing response for a little while, but you can be sure that as the responders arrive, they're going to take control of that response. Think about a tornado touching down. You don't see it coming. The tornado touches down. You're going to conduct the initial response of trying to protect life, but then the emergency responders are going to arrive and the ambulance crew and the others are going to take control of that response immediately. Now, that's good news because the injured probably don't want you tending them. They certainly don't want me tending them. They'd rather have an ambulance crew, but that's also bad because the responders don't care a good least lot about your collection. We're going to talk about that in a little bit as well. So after continuing response, you have recovery. Recovery can be a very long period of time. Think about Katrina and how long the recovery went on for that. And who's going to conduct that recovery? That's very likely left to you, to the internal staff, perhaps some contractors to assist. Once the firemen have left, you're on your own, basically. So we'll come back to that, but the ICS can help you even through that recovery response. I want to talk about, though, before we talk about that in a little more detail, let's talk about ICS and how it functions. So whenever an incident occurs, the normal assumption is that the staff who are perfectly capable of managing day-to-day operations are also capable of managing the incident, either during the initial phase or during the recovery phase. But that's not necessarily true. At that moment, you need crisis management, and that's where the ICS comes in. The ICS assumes that you're going to suspend the normal day-to-day management operation, and you're going to give way to crisis management. And what happens during that is that someone, not necessarily the boss, someone steps to the front and becomes the incident commander. A team forms around the incident commander, and together that team ensures the flow of information and decisions and activities that will constitute the response. So in the initial response, as we already mentioned, the red that you see here, you conduct that whoever happens to be on the scene becomes the de facto incident commander. And that person will need to assess the situation and respond in some way. And the ICS has a lot to say about that. We're going to mention that in a minute. In the continuing response phase, yellow that you see here, the ICS is just going to happen. Those are the emergency responders. They're going to see to it that the response happens according to ICS. But then as you see the green phase there, the recovery that could take days or years, you will probably conduct that. But you should still be in crisis management mode during that recovery phase, even if it lasts for years. That means you need to stay out of the day-to-day management as far as the response is concerned and manage it in a very, very different way. Crisis management is a very top-down, very tightly controlled kind of management. It's not the kind of management that most of us want to live in every day unless we're in the military. Because it is a very military, structured system. It does not depend on consensus, which is great day-to-day, but not necessarily in a crisis. It's very centralized. During a crisis, it's very easy to be overwhelmed by calls for help and simply react to the calls. The most urgent-seeming request might not be the best one to tackle first and you can squander your resources. I always think if I lived in an area with wildfire and my home is threatened by wildfire, I'm going to think that's the priority that everyone should be focused on. But it probably isn't the highest priority from the responder's point of view. So ICS has a very strict way of determining priority, which we'll talk about in just a second. But that's one reason it has to be coordinated from a central point at all times. In crisis management, when you're using ICS, you have a new organization chart. This is the entire ICS organization chart. Now, don't worry. You don't need to build out this entire organization, but I've shown you this to say the organization chart that you used day-to-day doesn't work during a crisis. So you set it aside and you create a new organization chart. And you can see that if you had a lot of responders coming from different areas and they all knew ICS, they're all working for this organization chart. And so they're all going to understand what's happening. You don't need to build out that entire organization. ICS is set up so that you can build out as much or as little of it as the crisis demands. And so you build it over time and then you unbuild it as the crisis winds down. Now, the incident commander is the person who has the overall responsibility for the response. In your office, not necessarily the boss. During the crisis, it could be somebody else. If outside responders come, if firemen come or policemen or other responders of some sort, this is the person you're going to want to deal with because this is the person who's directing the firefighters and the police personnel and the other responders. So you're going to need to know who the incident commander is and that's the person you want to talk to at your repository if you have a response. So since you have an organization chart that can grow this big, and again, think about Hurricane Katrina and how big their org chart must have grown, there's a principle that ICS includes. ICS requires unified command. All the responders form a single command structure. One person becomes the incident commander and everybody answers to that person. Even if you have an incident at your office or your repository and the fire department shows up, the police show up, the animal shows up, they will decide among themselves who the incident commander is and that person can change throughout the incident. Let's say it's a fire. The fire responders might provide the first incident commander, somebody from the fire department, but then the fire is put out and an arson investigation begins. So now the police will provide the incident commander during that phase and then they all go home because the arson investigation is over and you're allowed back in and now you have to provide the incident commander. So the incident commander is the person appointed to direct the response. Again, it's not necessarily the person who is normally the boss. It's the person who is most qualified to lead given the particular circumstances of your crisis. At the State Archives, whenever the fire alarm would go off, my chief conservator became the incident commander. It was not me because she was in charge of making sure that we did everything correctly to evacuate the building, protect the collection and everything we needed to do. So it doesn't necessarily have to be the person who is normally the boss. Now it's important to know that all the directions for the response flow downward from the incident commander. You see in this chart the directions are issued by the incident commander and they follow a very important component by CS, chain of command. Chain of command says that every person takes orders only from his or her supervisor. It's very good to know not only when you're dealing with a crisis, but if somebody is responding from outside and you're dealing with emergency responders, you can't just grab the first official you see and expect them to issue orders to meet your needs. They work through a very strict hierarchy and it helps to understand that each person receives orders from only one direct supervisor. Now related to that is called unity of command where each person reports to only one supervisor. They receive assignments from only one supervisor and that prevents all kinds of confusion and inefficiency. It doesn't mean the workers can't speak to each other or to other people. It just means they follow a chain of command and unity of command. ICS actually recognizes two forms of communication. There's a very formal form of communication that you see here. In formal communication, all orders flow down along those lines and any request for resources, any report about the incident flow up through those very strict lines of communication. According to ICS, it's always used in these three specific instances. When you're receiving or giving work orders, when you're requesting support or resources, or when you're reporting progress. You can see why ICS is a good tool to use during times of stress. I don't want to live like this all the time, but during a crisis, it's a good way to function. ICS does recognize informal communication, though, as well. Information can flow very freely through ICS, but there's only one reason you can use informal communication, and that is to exchange incident information. You can talk to one another, any worker can talk to another to exchange information, but if they're going to request resources or give assignments, they must follow the formal communication, and that applies whether it's in writing or it's in verbal. So, all of these things, unity of command and chain of command, informal and formal communication may seem odd, they may seem uncomfortable, but the ICS has been used to manage many crises, ranging from a building fire to major hurricanes, and it is very, very effective. So, it can handle your crisis as well, and it is something to consider when the day-to-day management just won't work. So, with those basic ideas in mind, let's go back to our response. An incident requires a response, remember, and it involves these three phases, in my words, and the person responsible for initial response is whoever happens to be present. Very important point. Now, whenever an incident occurs, the very first priority is situation assessment. ICS sometimes calls this size-up, situation size-up, and the point is to first identify as many actual and potential problems as possible. Okay, so let's think about a flooded basement for a moment. In your repository, you go to the basement where you've stored artifacts. Despite the fact that you've been told many times, not to store them in the basement, but you couldn't help it, you stored some in the basement. You don't have a busy day, and you discover water running across the basement. There are already five inches of water on the floor. There are artifacts floating around. So, here are some of the problems that we're having. Artifacts in the water being damaged. ICS says you must tackle the most significant problem first. So, what is the first priority? Jenny, I think we have a survey so that people can wake up a minute and do some work here. What's the first priority? Just click on your screen. Give that another few seconds to give people a chance to... Okay, so 92% say that we should shut off the water. 2% say get the artifacts off the floor, and 6% are saying something else altogether. Okay, Jenny, we can pull that down. So, who's right? The point there is that if people disagree on what the priorities are, they can struggle to respond. They can begin arguing over how to respond. And the ICS says that you have to gauge the significance of the problems in order according to three priorities. Let's look at the three priorities. Life and safety. The first priority is always anything that poses some danger to a human life or health gets the first part of the response. Is incident stabilization? Keep the incident from cascading into a more complex or dangerous situation. And then lastly, property preservation, including your collections. So, it's not enough to assess and prioritize. We need to assess and prioritize problems based on a common, somewhat objective standard that will help us prioritize without arguing about it. So, based on those priorities, a lot of you were correct. The majority of you were correct. Shut the water off first. Stabilize the incident. On the left, of course, there are electrical cords running across the floor, right? If there's some danger to health and safety, that takes the precedent. But it's always in this order according to ICS. Life safety, incident stabilization, and then property preservation. So, this is how you keep your staff from running around chaotically in a crisis. If everybody knows that these are the priorities, life safety, then incident stabilization, then property preservation, then you don't have to fight or have a fight when it comes time to respond. And it's one thing you can do today to prepare. You can talk to your staff about, these are the three priorities in this order if an incident begins to occur. Now, because ICS says that that's the order, life safety, incident stabilization, and property preservation, that's what's on the minds of your first responders. They're not thinking about your collection. They're not thinking about your documents or anything else. They're trained in life safety and incident stabilization, and they don't really have a clue how to preserve your property, and they probably don't care unless you've established some sort of relationship with them in advance. So, if you have a fire, your responders are first concerned with getting everybody to safety, and then with stabilizing the incident. That means putting the fire out. That means using axes to care holes and things if that's what it takes. That means knocking things over to get them out of the way if that's what it takes. They don't care what it takes. I had a smoke fire once in my house and I can tell you they don't care what it takes. And we all understand that they may have to destroy something to save our life, but that's the point at which they probably could begin preserving property. And if you get to know them in advance, they're much more likely to know what that point is and respond to you when it comes to that point and not just destroy things going nowhere. So, those are the three priorities. This initial assessment that people are making, whoever happens to be on the spot, is largely a mental exercise. But that mental plan is basically an action plan. The response, no matter how long it is, is always guided at every step by an incident action plan. And if a response stretches into many weeks, then the incident commander must have an active incident action plan at all times. This is what the action plan tells the incident commander. It answers basically three questions. What do we want to do? Who's responsible and what's the time frame? And normally these time frames are eight hours to 24 hours. They're not long time frames. So what do we want to do in the next 24 hours? Who's responsible to do it? And we know that we've got to get it done within the time frame. And you can look online, or in the book, the ICS includes many forms that you can use to make up the incident action plan. But you always want to be working through your response with clear objectives. Obviously, you're not going to do this during the initial assessment. But as the response continues, it becomes written. Okay, let's go back to the org chart here for a moment. This org chart does not spring into being when the fire alarm goes off, all right? ICS has a very extensive organization chart. Not every incident requires an extensive organization chart. The organization expands and contracts as needed. So, for example, you might have just the five positions that are shown right here. The incident commander, the info officer, the logistic section, the operation section, and a start theme down there. If a major incident occurs, you're going to add more positions as the response becomes more complex. And then as the response winds down, the positions are reduced in an orderly fashion. The incident commander is always the first position filled. It's always the last position decommission. And the appointment of the incident commander could be made well in advance. If you know that you want a certain person to be the incident commander if there is a collection-related incident, for instance, you can go ahead and appoint that person since they know well in advance. They're the one who will have to deal with any collection-related incident, for instance. You might want to look at this during the annual update of your disaster plan, which you're all going to do on May 1st, I know, on May 10th. But when the repository director grants authority to an incident commander, that doesn't mean the repository director hands over ultimate responsibility or accountability for the incident. But a repository director should not be afraid to grant authority to someone else to become the incident commander. The incident commander just has to be somebody who's very well-qualified to lead in the special circumstances of the crisis. They need to have very strong support of senior management, and they should have authority to commit the repository's resources, their staff or funding such, so that they will be effective. The incident commander then appoints a command staff and a general staff. And again, the person doesn't have to fill all of these. The ICS says that if these positions are not filled, any of them that are not filled, are simply fulfilled by the incident commander. So here's the command staff positions. The command staff helps the incident commander with the big picture, okay? They keep the audiences informed, they coordinate assistance, they protect safety. The information officer you see here is the primary contact for anybody who wants to know about the incident or the response. If the director of the repository is not the incident commander, then this is a really good position for the director to be, because that person can talk about the incident and the response to anyone who wants to know. And that can be the news media, it could be the community around the repository, it could be the internal audience of the personnel who are working their response, but the information officer is responsible for keeping all of those people informed. That person might have a team to do this. All of these people might have a team, but the incident commander gets all of his or her information from the information officer, from one person, not from 20 people on a team. The same with the safety officer. The safety officer advises the incident commander on issues that are related to safety. And the safety officer also reminds the responders constantly about how to take care of their own safety. And then the liaison officer, you see there, a very important position, that's to go between the incident commander and outside agencies. Outside agencies could be peer organizations, they could be vendors, they could be anybody outside the immediate response. So the liaison officer then becomes the incident commander's single point of information about outside assistance. Are the trucks coming? The freezer trucks? When are they going to get here? When are we getting the liaison officer, the one who has all that information, and feeds that to the incident commander? Imagine if the incident commander has just one person to go to for each of these pieces of information, instead of 10 or 15 people running at him or her with a lot of information. So it's a very, very effective way to handle a crisis. The incident commander also appoints general staff. I want you to see the little vest there. Don't miss those. I think no crisis tool package should be without a vest for each of these people. You can buy lots of ICS-related equipment online. So think about this. Anyway, here you see the general staff. The operations section chief, let me just touch on each of these four very quickly. This is the person who directs all of the single resources in the response. A single resource is an individual who's working on the response. It could be a piece of equipment and the people who operate that equipment, say a truck and a driver. That's a single resource. Or it could be a crew with an identified supervisor. So a team of people who are packing boxes who have a single supervisor, they're considered a single resource. And the operations section chief manages all of those people. The planning section chief has the role of trying to predict the probable course of events. What's going to happen next and how can we prepare alternative strategies? What happens if the trucks don't arrive? What happens if we can't evacuate this? And the planning section chief is always looking at alternatives and recommending them to the intimate commander. If this happens, this is how we should respond. The logistics section chief is responsible for communications, supplies, facilities. Very simple. Communications being things like walkie-talkies and telephones and that sort of thing. Not as in public communications, but communication equipment. Supplies. We need more boxes. We need more mobs. Whatever it is, logistics section chief is in charge of that. And facilities. We need a place to store these things. That person handles all of that. And then of course the finance administrative section chief sees that everything is paid for. They keep track of time, procurement, compensation, all of that. And by the way, this is the person who should keep track of anything that might get FEMA reimbursement due to a major crisis. And so the finance section chief is a very, very important position. So the command and the general staff that I've just run through quickly constitute the team that make the response run smoothly. And what they do throughout the response is they keep the incident action plan on the job to make sure the incident action plan is updated every 12 to 24 hours. And then they conduct a briefing at each operational period. If an operational period is 12 hours, they have a briefing every 12 hours. And they look at the plan. They brief the incident commander to make sure that he or she is up speed. And they stay together and keep that going until the incident is completely closed. So as the crisis winds down, some of these people may begin going away. The people who are remaining work as a team until each one has been decommissioned and is no longer needed. And until the incident commander is the only one remaining. And then the crisis is over. Now there's one more thing that has to happen once the response is completed. And that is an after action report. The purpose of an after action report is to identify areas of the response that could be improved the next time. It's also to identify areas that work especially well. We used to do this, at least informally, every time we had a fire drill or something at the state archive, I'd meet with the team to say, okay, what went well and what really didn't work and how are we going to improve this the next time? This team, the team that put together the after action report would make specific recommendations for improving those areas and record the key lessons that are learned so that we can learn through experience. And this is written by the key players in the response. That can be the line workers, it could be managers, it could be a lot of people, it could be a few people, but the key players come together and write the after action report. It does not need to be a long document. In fact, the longer it is, the less likely that it's really going to be used. And so a short document is much, much better. And here I've listed a couple of sections that could be in an after action report, just an overview of what happened, what was the goal of the response and what were the outcomes. How did we perform and what do we need to do next time in the recommendation section to do it even better. And so once the after action report has been written and it's been distributed to the appropriate people, then you can consider the incident to truly be closed. The incident won't be entirely wasted if it leaves behind this kind of product and improved procedures that will help you the next time around. So you're not going to use the incident command system in every instance. I've tried to give you just a very quick overview of it and you can study it a lot more than the detail I've given you here. But it is going to be used by outside responders. So you do very well to understand it so that you can fit into their system when they respond. In many instances, especially larger disasters that require extended recovery time or major events like building moves or big exhibits, it can be an excellent management tool. So it really is a good thing that is worth learning. So how do you learn it? Training with staff is very important. All of the staff should at least have some idea of what the ICS is and why you would be using it during a crisis so that they're not totally confused by what's going on. They should all know what an intimate commander is if nothing else. And it's especially important that all of the staff learn how to assess a situation during initial response because you can't always be there. We had a fire alarm go off one time. We had a beautiful plan in the State Archives. We had hall monitors for when fire alarms went off. We had, you know, floor captains and all of these other things. The fire alarm went off at about 8.30 and none of those people were in the building. Every one of them was on vacation or late, stuck in traffic or something, and we had chaos because nobody else knew what to do. And we learned a big lesson from that. Every person needs to know how to assess an initial situation or how to deal with an initial response in a crisis. You can practice the ICS. You can practice it through a tabletop exercise. A tabletop exercise is where a facilitator describes a scenario of some sort, just an incident that's made up, and then the people sitting around the table talk about what their response to that scenario would be. And in a full tabletop exercise, the facilitator could provide additional information as the exercise goes along. Maybe they insert some sort of twist to the story and now everybody has to talk about how they're going to respond to that. What you can do in a tabletop exercise is you can make note of things that people don't know how to handle, and you can go out while still quiet and calm and figure out how you're going to handle that if it really happens. You can use ICS to respond to minor incidents. No, you don't need to use it every time, but why waste the opportunity to learn if a minor incident happens? Use the ICS to respond to it. And then use it to plan a major event. That, I think, is the best way to practice. If you're having a big opening or a big reception or a festival or something, it's a great tool for managing even major events. So, the Intonet Convent System is a temporary management tool, but it is a supercharged management tool, and you can implement it during any time of stress, whether you plan the stress, you can see it coming, or it blind slides you. It's a great tool for using that. So, I appreciate your time, and I am ready to answer any questions that you have. David, you are incredible because you have just hit us at the two o'clock mark despite our delays. That's right, that's right. Yeah, so folks, if you guys have any questions for David now, it's the time to ask him, so feel free to type in that chat box select and in the meantime, when we're waiting for questions to come in, I'm going to move over a link to an evaluation. If you could, please fill it out. They really do help us shape our events for the future. And I will also say we're working on a couple more webinars coming up this year that I'm really excited about. Let's see, Lori has a question. It's the ICS Role Identifiers. David, do you recommend having two sets of badges, one for home and one for the office or one set in the car all the time? One of the things I always urge my staff to do with anything related to emergencies. If we have an emergency response plan, is to keep a copy in the car at all times, keep a copy at home, keep it somewhere on the Internet where everybody can access it as long as they have power. Keep it someplace where you can get it because when the crisis occurs, you may not be sitting at your desk. You may not be right there. You may not have it handy. Now, what we used to do at the archives, we had two versions of the emergency response plan. One had floor plans in it and things like that. That was the one that we didn't want people carrying outside of the building. We wanted them to carry the one that didn't have the confidential information in it. Other things they could carry outside the building and keep a copy handy at all times. Okay. We have a question from Grace. She's curious if you could recommend any resources that include table top exercises. If I'm recalling correctly, Rescue Records also has DVDs with table top exercises. Is that right? Yes, they do. I didn't want to talk about that too much because I'm selling stuff there. I'm doing things, but if you go to rescuerecords.com, we do offer table top exercises specifically for museums, libraries, and archives. But if you look online, you can find other places. The thing that I found and the reason we developed these is because there are very few that are actually geared towards the sorts of things that we are concerned about as cultural repositories. But once you've looked at one online, you can write your own. You don't have to buy one. You can pick it up and use it just very, very specific to your institution. Okay. And I will say, Julie Page talked about this on June 4th of last year, how to exercise your disaster plan. And so she did talk about table top exercises. So that's a great place to look as well. So we have a bunch of questions coming in for you, David. Okay. Let's see. So Carmen, she has a question regarding the last comment. Is it truly possible to implement ICS during times of crisis or could you only invoke it than assuming it's been trained already? You know, what is the viability of actually just implementing it? Sure. And I think it depends on the crisis itself. Now, obviously, if you have a tornado touchdown, you're not going to go into a full-blown ICS mode. You will understand that people who are responding will be in full-blown ICS mode. What your staff need to know is how to do the initial assessment and what the priorities are and how to prioritize their response at that point. Then after the response has been completed and you've got the continuing recovery sort of response, then you can certainly use ICS during that. But you know, a lot of crises you can see coming. Again, I go back to the idea of hurricanes. We once had a series of three hurricanes that were heading toward the Georgia coast. We could see them coming days and days in advance. And yes, you could certainly implement ICS in that much time. You've got the time to do it. But you can't do that unless you're trained to do it in the quiet times before the crisis comes. So it really does depend on what crisis you're talking about. Okay, and this kind of gets at the same question. Mary Rogers in DC is curious if you've seen a successful case of ICS implementation in a cultural institution recently. And if you have, if you could tell us a little bit about what the institution has done to make that successful. Okay, hi, Mary. We'll leave it to you to ask that hard question. I know a number of institutions that are practicing this and working toward implementing it. I've talked to a number of people who said, I wish we had done this. I wish we had known this. Or I wish our management had supported this because when the crisis came, there was a lot of confusion and the person who knew what to do was not put in charge. And so there was a lot of issues. And so I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. And the person who knew what to do was not put in charge. And so there was a lot of issues around it. So fortunately, I've not heard recently of too many cultural repositories having major crises. That's a good part. But I can't give you a recent example, quite frankly. But I do think, I think the idea is fairly new. I first started talking about it after Katrina and I began realizing ICS scales down as well as up. And I've talked about it more and more and many other people have. And I think over the years, we're going to see more and more people look at this and use it in a crisis and then we'll have some excellent examples. Okay. We have another question from Marcia in Illinois. She's curious, how do you determine the change in incident commander? That is up to the team that is responding. And if, for instance, the, let's say within a repository, you're going through a long recovery and you want to... the recovery is going to last for a very long time. So the first priority is to deal with collections. And so you might have an incident commander who is in charge of your collections, for instance, or your conservator who normally deals with collections. Now, depending on your repository, the director of the repository might simply say, you know, Mary is going to be incident commander until we get through this collection phase. And then maybe once the collections are taken care of, maybe the building itself becomes the problem and it has to be dealt with. And so then maybe the incident commander becomes the person who is in charge of your facilities and has the particular expertise to deal with that particular issue. I think, you know, there's a big crisis like a fire and an arson investigation, things like that. The fire responders and police and such work out among themselves who is going to take command right now. And in some cities, I'm sure they have a protocol that spells all that out in advance. In Georgia, in my dealings with emergency managers, most of the time we didn't have those kinds of protocols. The head of the state emergency management agency got up one time and he said, well, I don't know about all those protocols. David just called me on the phone and we worked it out. So we're a little more laid back here. But that decision, the point there is the incident commander doesn't have to remain the same person all the time. It should be the person who has the particular ability to lead on the basis in what the crisis is right that moment. Great. And we have a big picture question from a couple of folks who think this is really important. So Michelle kind of got started. She's curious if you do learn the incident command system to emergency responders ever insert you into their organizational chart in the continuing phase. And a couple of people followed up with questions about how to get cultural resources on the radar of emergency responders. So years ago after Katrina, we had a hurricane conference at Georgia Archives that the Council of State Archivists sponsored. And Rex Wansley, who was the head of planning for FEMA, was there. And at the end of the conference, as we were wrapping up, he said, you know, the thing you need to remember, we all need to remember is it's all about relationships. And I saw that proven over and over and over again. It is about relationships. And getting to know your emergency responders is so critical. At the Georgia Archives, and since I ran the whole program, I could do an awful lot that I don't do so much in my job right now because there are other people who run the building. But I ran the building as well. And so we would invite the fire department to take a tour of the building at least twice a year, the whole fire department. Some people shy away from that. Well, they're going to fight me for violations and that sort of thing. No, that could happen. But the fact is you get to know them. And then when the fire alarm goes off and you've got a problem, the fire chief arrives. You know that person, and that person trusts you when you say, you know, we really need to be careful about this, that, and the other. When we would give a tour, we would say, you know, these things are very important. If there's any way we can keep water away from this particular area of the building, that's the best thing for us. And the same with police, fire, all of them. Some people I've heard about through connecting to collections when we had conferences, people talking about, you know, I baked cookies and took it to the fire department and got to know them. It's all about relationships. Will they insert you in the ICS Command structure? They certainly will. During a major crisis, they're going to have an incident response command center somewhere. And in our state, we had a seat at that command center so that we could be there to keep an eye on record issues, especially if they were affecting local governments and state agencies and things like that. So it can happen, but it only happens when you get to know the people in some way. It doesn't always happen even then, but it won't happen unless you get to know the people. Yeah, great point. A lot of people are chiming in that they have done something similar where they have created relationships with first responders, open houses, tours, and tours are great too because, you know, they're going to give you advice to help you as well. That's right. I actually became very good friends with the director of our state emergency measuring agency, and I had breakfast with him this morning, in fact, and he was laughing at me if you're trying to do this in one hour. And I said, well, I'll get it done somehow, but it's worth doing. Yeah, and Lori Foley, our vice president of emergency programs, is putting up a link about Alliance for Response, which is a mission is to connect cultural communities with the first responders. And a lot of things we say is to, you know, take your steps to make sure you're prepared and help them do their job. So, meeting them in the middle sounds like a good idea as well. I have another question from Andrew Robb in D.C. He is curious, David, any advice for situations where some, but not everyone, is using ICS? He says this happens frequently with minor incidents. And you always have a difficulty when the incident stretches out beyond your repository because within the repository, as long as the management is on board, they can sort of force everybody to use ICS. One of the things that you have to do when people come to help with recovery is to brief every person who comes in to take part in the recovery. That's part of the ICS plan, and they lay it out. There has to be a briefing for all people coming in. And that could be someone coming to say, I'm here to help in some way, but it could be a peer institution that wants to help. The first thing is to give them the briefing. And I think if you have like a one-page summary of what ICS is and why you're using it, that's one good way to build that confidence in it and get people to buy into it. ICS is a really useful tool for managing crises, and I think it's very evident once people see it. And so you will get a lot of buy-in from people who say, I understand what you're doing and I'll fit into the mode that you're using. If they definitely will not fit in, and you have the ability, then in my opinion, I would just ask them to leave and not help with the response because I would rather everybody fit into the same structure. If you don't have that luxury, take them out to lunch and get them out of the building. I don't know. You want to kind of neutralize them in some way because you don't want it disrupting the overall response. And maybe, I don't know if you can type it up quickly, but if there are any other details you can give me, I can try to respond to those. But I hope I'm answering that question. Sure. Oh, we have about three more minutes. I have another question from Lynn. She wants you to just clarify that using ICS, you can use it regardless of whether or not it's a FEMA-declared disaster. Is that correct? Absolutely. And ICS is just a protocol. It's a structure. You could use it as a plan of church service, I suppose. I mean, you can use it for anything. So you don't need a FEMA-declared disaster to use it. And your police department, the fire department, are using it without FEMA-declared disasters many, many times. Okay. I'm going to give the chat box just a couple seconds to see if you have any last questions. I'm loving looking at the chat. I hope to be able to read them all afterwards because some of them are flying by too quickly. But I love the fact that somebody said that their local emergency management office does table top exercises, which is great. I think a lot of times, if you can get involved with your local emergency management office, then they can feed you up into the state and federal levels as well. Oh, let's see. Linda actually has a clarification. It looks like I posed her question incorrectly. She's curious, by the time it's a FEMA-declared disaster, you will be well into response mode. Can you still use ICS once you're in that response mode? Definitely. I think it's not too late then to regroup and say, okay, we've got into response mode and now we need to move on to ICS if we're not in that mode. But if you're using it to respond immediately, you can get into that mode very quickly. And you'll be in that mode by the time FEMA-declared the disaster. The thing is, if you're using ICS, even if you're not using ICS, if a disaster looks large enough that FEMA might declare a disaster, you need to begin documenting so that if there's any chance of any reimbursement, you've documented them from day one. You don't want to wait until they declare something and then go back and document. Okay. Let's see. We have just one more minute left. Sure. Let me just mention Andrew's comment here. Some people are in response while other people are in recovery. I think that's very true because recovery can last a very long time and it can begin very early for some people and then begin later for others. I think a lot of times when you get to recovery mode, you tend to be on your own at that point. And so the responders may still be around and may be doing things, but the recovery of your own collection and your own facility is probably going to be less to you and your vendors and such. And so you need to be ready to deal with that, certainly. All right. Well, that is all the time we have, folks. Thank you all for joining in and being so patient with us at the beginning. And, David, thank you so much. This was so helpful and such a great way for us to celebrate Mayday. Excellent. I thank all of you. Thank you. All right. Good afternoon. And hopefully it's looking nice in the spring like where you are. Take care.