OIL SPILL > Montana Governor's pullout of Unified Command Shows How Much We've Regressed

photo courtesy of scientificamerican.com

Governor Schweitzer of Montana withdrew the state from Unified Command, citing ExxonMobil's "secrecy" and communication failures. This is distressing because it is one more giant step away from unified and collaborative response. The whole concept behind NIMS and ICS is effective collaboration as a key to response effectiveness. But, I believe collaborative response is very much in danger, largely as a result of the federal response to Deepwater Horizon.

1. It now seems almost a political necessity to trash the Responsible Party. Admittedly, Big Oil is a pretty easy, juicy populist target. Gov. Schweitzer appears to have taken some lessons from President Obama in turning on and trashing the RP. It appears at this point that when the parties get together behind the scenes everything is lovey-dovey and then publicly the governor does all he can to discredit the company.  Yesterday, the head of gov and public affairs for ExxonMobil blogged about the collaboration: In meeting with some of the many individuals, agencies and officials on site here in Montana, I am continually impressed by the collaborative efforts in the cleanup operation. With their help, EMPCo is making real progress in the cleanup and response effort. But today that collaboration appears to be dead. I suspect that it continues on behind the scenes with good people doing all the kind to minimize the damage, but the political thinking seems to be that it is better for the public to perceive no collaboration.

2. EPA in charge. The EPA is making it very clear that it is in charge of the response. Release from today on the EPA website said: EPA is also directing and overseeing cleanup activities since arriving at the site. That means that EPA is also in charge of communications including media access and who attends what meetings. But the Governor says he is withdrawing because Exxon's media access restrictions and secret meetings. Something doesn't square here. My suspicion is the governor is angry with the federally-led response but finds it politically more acceptable to focus the blame on Exxon than EPA.  For more

Preparedness Exercises 2.0: Alternative Approaches to Exercise Design That Could Make Them More Useful for Evaluating — and Strengthening — Preparedness

Another great article written for NPS.  This document is 19 pages long and took about 40 mins to read.  Great charts/graphs and statistics.  If you are a planner of exercises...read this article.  It discusses what type of exercises produces what types of results...for inquiring minds..

As one component of a preparedness program, exercises of these varied types are seen as a versatile tool that can help contribute to achieving a variety of different goals. Though taxonomies of exercise objectives vary in the literature, most include the following:³

• Planning — Exercises provide a structure to advance planning for a particular incident scenario, identifying problems and explore their solutions in focused way.
• Interagency Coordination — Exercises can act as a venue for members of different agencies to meet and interact, to build relationships that are important to effective coordination in a real event, to identify issues potentially falling in gaps of authority, jurisdiction, etc., to test mechanisms and technologies for interagency information sharing that might seldom be used in routine events, and to identify if there are agencies “missing” from plans that would be needed at a large scale disaster, accident, or terrorist attack.
• Public Education — Exercises can act as an “event” that, by being covered by the media and discussed publically, makes it possible to teach the public about the capabilities of response systems, creates the opportunity to educate them about preparedness actions they could take, and informs them about preparedness efforts of their local, state, or the federal government.
• Training — Exercises can make it possible to expose response staff to rare incidents and their unique demands — rather than their encountering them for the first time at a real emergency. Such simulations make it possible to teach responders or volunteers specific tasks, practice equipment use, and to learn or refresh other knowledge specific to an unusual incident.
• Evaluation — Exercises have been used to evaluate emergency preparedness activities in a variety of ways. Such evaluations range from very broad, qualitative assessments (e.g., ensuring all significant issues were considered in planning) to very detailed, quantitative studies (e.g., directly measuring the patient throughput of a medical facility). More elab

Video > SDF in the News - State Defense Forces Part 4

Video > SDF in the News - State Defense Forces Part 3

Video > SDF in the News - State Defense Forces Part 2

Video > SDF in the News - State Defense Forces Part 1

Great resource > OSHA's etool for ICS

[This is way better than sitting on a hard metal, folding chair for 3 days, watching 258 power point slides...]

ICS/UC implementation:  http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/ics/prepare_implement.html#Organizational

Main OSHA ICS website for etools:  http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/ics/index.html 

[please leave comments at bottom of page, thank you!]