[quote=ki4buc]
- 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.
Our HVA is long completed...risks are (each is half as likely as the previous)
Winter Storm (Ice), River Flood, Wildfire, Land-Based Hazmat, Aquatic Hazmat, Military Aircraft Crash (we get a lot of training traffic from Willow Grove), Pandemic.
In addition, there is a need to refine the Mass Casualty Incident plan for a school bus accident and we also need to look at the plans for the private elementary school in terms of evacuation - it's nowhere near the flood zones, but if they have a fire and need to get the kids out, we don't have anywhere to send them.
Let's see, what else...we have no commerce to speak of in the area. The largest employer in the township is a private school with about 25 employees, then the concrete production plant/quarry, with maybe 10 people working there, and after that I think the next biggest employer is the 3 people working at the post office. Maybe the real-estate office has 4 people, I doubt it. You could print a list of all the businesses in our township on two sides of a sheet of paper.
As far as "work missing people" during the last floods, when I was in the fire company, we had a bunch of guys who showed up to help - and all of them suffered consequences at work ranging from loss of vacation days to docked pay AND lost vacation days. By the 3rd flood, the number of volunteers dropped by 75% and those who did come tended to arrive after work.
As far as elected officials, here's the verbatim from the PEMA Documents:
A. The elected officials are responsible for the protection of the lives and property of the citizens. They exercise primary supervision and control over the four phases (prevention, preparedness, response and recovery) of emergency management activities within the municipality.
B. A local Emergency Management Coordinator (EMC) shall act on behalf of the elected officials. An Emergency Operations Center (EOC) has been designated by the municipality, and may be activated by the EMC or the elected officials during an emergency. A Deputy EMC and Alternate EOC have been designated to function in case the primary EMC and/or EOC are not available.
C. This plan embraces an “all-hazards” principle: that most emergency response functions are similar, regardless of the hazard. The EMC will mobilize resources and personnel as required by the emergency situation.
D. The EMC and elected officials will develop mutual aid agreements with adjacent municipalities for reciprocal emergency assistance as needed.
E. The municipality will embrace and utilize the National Incident Management System (NIMS) and the Incident Command System (see below).
Anyway I have NIMS and ICS training already, from my national firefighter certification testing and other training I've done, so the basic concepts of ICS are clear...I just think that the org chart and responsibilities I'm creating is rather funny...all the NSF functions and ICS roles are crunched. No problem with the span of command exceeding 7 people!
Of course, the county has resources, as does the state...none are local, and as we learned in the floods, all of the MOU's with agencies and municipalities matter nothing at all when you don't have people to actually do the work. Notebooks and clipboards don't do evacuations, don't do river rescues, don't pump out basements, don't deliver medicine and can't deliver supplies - only people can do that. So that's going to be the focus of the planning round one - getting the pool of people who can help and who want to help and then getting them their roles and stuff defined. There's going to be at least 2 tabletop exercises before this plan is finalized.
Start with training the school staff with basic disaster stuff (evacuation, first aid, etc).