As some of you know, I left the fire company at the beginning of this year, for complex reasons. Well, now after a series of discussions, I'll be Emergency Management Coordinator for our local area after a short procedural bit of work is done. There's all kinds of interesting and complex planning. One thing that I've immediately noticed is that the template documents they have provided from PEMA (the PA version of FEMA) don't really deal with Internet and SMS messaging well...so I'll be updating the communications plans accordingly. Any other Local Emergency Management Coordinators here, speak up, would love some tips and pointers.

Martin"
Do you have a USFS dispatch center any where in your area? If so go there and ask for the contract equipment list. This will tell you where all the dump trucks, electric genertors,buses and other types of Veh. It will also list porta potty contractors, water trucks, small fire trucks and any other equipment to set up a quick city in the field. You can also get work crews, and camp help. hope this helps.

Martin:
This might interest you http://ncsushi.com/

Nothing in it actually works...that's a shame.

I'm just getting familiar with a similar gig so don't have alot of recommendations, but alot of EM orgs are just opening up to new communications methods, from the Internet to SMS to social networks, blogs and twitter, yours shouldn't be too far off if they haven't accounted for these media yet. Don't worry, it takes someone familiar enough with technology to evaluate and make some recommendations, against some familiar criteria: is it secure (or in certain contexts does it have to be), is it survivable, and is it cost effective (not just in dollars, but does the new comm run on old equipment, ex. twitter or SMS over your existing blackberry devices)? FWIW it may be a generational thing but I can't see the benefit in twitter yet, but a local Red Cross organizer thinks its the bees knees for informing alot of folks quickly. I need to set up an account...

Good luck Martin, let us know how it goes.

Are you looking for generic tips, specific to communications, or both? I would assume both.

Funny I have been useing it for years. I will look around maybe I have a CD of the program if you are interested.

The ONE thing that Twitter is good for is mass notification. It's simple, it works (mostly) and, quite frankly, it's the best way to reach people and to get reports back.

You don't even have to know you're using twitter to subscribe to an announcement stream.

It's definitely great for mass coordination, uses less bandwidth than voice and allows for field operations with minimal setup time.

My biggest challenge is that they give you a NIMS derived ICS template that has in excess of 30 unique job functions painstakingly defined with checklists and action plans.

If I took every single elected official plus the fire chief and myself - that's five people. If I add in all the people who want to work in Emergency Planning, that brings it up to 7. We don't have a police department, a public works department, our local "road department" is 2 part-time guys. We don't have a public school, no public water or sewer.

So I look at the ICS tables with all the ESF designators and "to do" lists for each ESF and I chuckle, because if I actually filled even half of those positions, the administrative staff would outnumber the available volunteers by about 6:1.

So the challenge is collapsing as much of the structure as possible without killing it entirely, delegating up to county where I can and coming up with a more realistic approach than the full NIMS model, which I find to be wildly over-complicated for non-urban environments with 100% volunteer staffing at every level up to and including elected officials.

First off, I'm not an EM Coordinator, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night (and pursuing a degree in EM, have 5 years volunteer exposure ).

I would say you're on the right track, that's one of the first things I'd do!
Couple of thoughts come to mind (take 'em, or leave 'em):

• ESF's are usually representatives from agencies. You don't have a lot of them, so effectively, they must be covered by the next higher level of government. Also, elected officials usually don't participate in response. Think about the "correctness" of people like a Mayor running an ESF, etc. Separation of branches an issue? I don't know.
• You can assign multiple ESF's to a single entity
• Use Memorandums of Understanding( MOU's) to fill in your gaps, if you can.
• Use your county EM and state EM resources! They're there to help you succeed (I hope!)
• Do a Hazard Vulnerability Analysis [HVA] so you can find out what kinds of disasters/emergencies you'll be up against. You might find that all of the "important" ESF's are on one person!
• Check state law, you may be able to combine your efforts with neighboring jurisdictions, effectively creating a Regional Emergency Management Agency.
• Recruit more volunteers. Normally, big emergencies and big disasters bring commerce to a halt. Work probably won't miss your volunteers when they come to help you. Maybe get an MOU from key volunteers employers.

I'm sure some of this is obvious, and stuff you've thought of. If you want to toss around a couple of ideas, PM me. There are people I can ask too, one who has 40+ years in Fire/EMS/EM and has his own consulting firm.