US Federal Community Emergency Response Team (CERT)

Wow! Big topic. I’ve now spent months — no, years — thinking about and working on how those of us who are not severely impacted by an event such as the 2017 NorCal Fires can help our neighbors. I’ve explored our local CERT project, our 211 Information and Referral Service, Recovers.org, our county Office of Emergency Services and VOAD. I go to meetings, review Facebook pages and Twitter, talk to people in grocery store lines. In all these venues the problems and issues converge to the same four points of failure:

communication, information, middle management, scaling

The local San Francisco public radio station, KQED, has been investigating the fire response, most recently in

North Bay Fires: What Took Authorities So Long to Warn People?

 Here’s the comment I posted there today (Jan. 25, 2018):

There’s no question that communications were inadequate from the onset of the Wine Country Fires and they still are. I followed the Lake County Fire communications two years ago and have been following this fire since Oct. 9, the morning after the start. While blaming individuals and agencies may serve as an outlet for our anger it doesn’t help solve the problem so that we will be better prepared to respond to the next emergency. @Karen (see comment below) has suggested Sonoma County OES be moved under the Sheriff’s Office. I don’t have an opinion about whether that would be an improvement but I do know that wouldn’t be enough. 

I see four points of failure: communication, information, middle management, scaling. I’ll write about each of these in my blog, Musings from Liza Loop. I’m now participating in ROC Sonoma County, the local long-term recovery group being set up to address the needs of fire survivors for the next 3 years. The four failure points emerged immediately on that terrifying night almost four months ago and are still plaguing us. First responders did a heroic job but were overwhelmed as were the “official” recovery response teams. To fill the gap hundreds of us “ordinary citizens” jumped in to address individual pleas from fire victims for shelter, supplies and emotional support. Instead of “playing nice” together most of the governmental and nonprofit agencies treated this army of volunteers as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

The four failures are eerily similar to what businesses experience when they grow too fast. Business leaders have developed strategies for coping under these circumstances but local government agencies aren’t taking as much advantage of this expertise as they might. Now is the time for serious work on building a functional public-private partnership — as we recover from this most recent disaster and as we prepare for the next one. Shifting responsibility from one government agency to another will not stimulate the kind of “learning organization” behavior we need to create more effective disaster response during both the emergency and recovery phases of a disaster.

If we want to improve our emergency response systems we need to remember that “the government” isn’t some group of alien beings placed on Earth to take care of us. We are the government. We are the ones who must ameliorate the points of failure. Sometimes we do this by becoming “official”, by crossing that invisible boundary between ordinary citizen and elected, appointed or employed government operative. Sometimes we serve on an advisory committee or commission. Sometimes we just attend and speak up at hearings and town hall meetings. Sometimes, as I did, we just jump in and volunteer. However you choose to participate, keep in mind that crossing the boundary doesn’t create instant geniuses who now magically know how to eliminate the points of failure. There’s as much systems knowledge outside the government boundary than there is inside. Let’s ensure that the know-how that is so profitably applied in the private business sector is just as effectively brought to bear for public benefit in the inevitable next disaster.