DSI Conducts Smith Creek Law Enforcement Exercise for Wakulla County

Individual awards winners include:

The 2009 State Director’s Award: Adjutant General of the Florida National Guard and Director of the Florida Department of Military Affairs Maj. Gen. Douglas Burnett;

County Emergency Management Director of the Year: Manatee County Emergency Management Director Laurie Feagans;

Career Achievement in Emergency Management: Miles Anderson, Florida Division of Emergency Management;

Elected Official of the Year: Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey;

Emergency Management Innovator of the Year: Soheila Ajabshir, Miami-Dade County Department of Emergency Management;

Unsung Hero of the Year: Shirley Collins, Florida Division of Emergency Management.

Program awards winners include:
Preparedness Program of the Year: Jack Beven, National Hurricane Center, Miami;

Response Program of the Year: Center for Business Excellence and Daytona Beach/Halifax
Area Chamber of Commerce – Business Operations Center;

Recovery Program of the Year: Palm Beach County Water Utilities;

Frank Reddish Mitigation Program of the Year: Rebuild Northwest Florida.

The awards ceremony was attended by more than 60 county emergency managers who are attending the two day CIEM seminar. The seminar provides additional individual face-to-face coordination opportunities for each county’s lead emergency management officials. All of the state’s 67 counties have an emergency management program. Florida’s emergency management program is nationally-recognized and accredited by the Emergency Management Accreditation Program (EMAP).
 

DSI Strengthens Washington County Preparedness with Exercise

During a recent multi-hazard exercise designed and implemented by DSI Group, LLC, Washington County found a new resource in their preparedness planning. During a hurricane, particularly one on the magnitude of a Katrina, most fuel supplies will run out quickly. It could take days; even weeks to get new supplies delivered depending on the destruction and isolation.

After the exercise Mr. Joe Taylor, Director of Facilities for the Washington County School District approached Lynne Jordan concerning fuel supplies. Mr. Taylor recognized that with a direct and sustained hit schools might not open for quite some time. He also recognized, other than the County Public Works Department, the School Board had the largest capacity of government fuel in the County.

With much of the hurricane season occurring when school is out (June to mid-August) an early season storm could occur when buses aren’t on the road. Once Public Works dump trucks, heavy equipment, etc. had used its supply, work could continue a few more days by using the School Board supply while waiting for outside help to come.

The problem was how to get the fuel. The School Board fuel tanks were dependent upon commercial power only. Mr. Taylor and the School Board took it upon themselves to wire the fuel depots for generator power. With that done if a disaster strikes the School Board can make its supplies available to Emergency Management.
“This was a resource that made sense,” Taylor said. “It was the right thing to do.”

“The School Board has always been a partner in our program,” said Jordan. “This is just another way we have found to work together for the good of the County.”
 

February 2006 – In February, Governor Charlie Crist was joined by Florida’s Cabinet officers, state agency heads, law enforcement officials, and emergency management officials to conduct the fifth annual homeland security “tabletop” exercise at the State Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee, Florida.

The exercise, which was organized and conducted by DSI for the third consecutive year, is an annual drill where the Governor and top state officials respond to mock terrorism and homeland security threats.  The primary objective of the exercise is to give an opportunity for state, federal and local officials to simulate a homeland security threat, learning the best way to coordinate their response and recovery roles with partner agencies.

Over 120 personnel from dozens of agencies were on hand to participate in the half-day drill, including representatives from the Department of Defense, U.S. Coast Guard, Florida National Guard and the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The scenario of this training exercise was a terrorist attack involving a suicide bombing and radiological event.

For more information about this event or Exercise and Drill services provided by DSI, please contact us today!

Re: “A Heckuva Guy” (Our Opinion, July 31)

Your criticism of Michael Brown aside, your spread of misinformation about the American disaster response system is a great disservice to the public. You gave the impression that the disaster of New Orleans was the responsibility of FEMA. It was not! It was a failure of local and state governments.

The Katrina disaster could never happen in Florida because of the excellent disaster response organizations developed and trained by Joe Myers and the people he brought with him from North Carolina following Hurricane Andrew. In the American and Florida disaster response system, the very first response to disaster is the responsibility of the local government. If the disaster requires more than local government can provide, it requests help from the state Division of Emergency Management. Every dollar spent for response comes from local and state government budgets. After the disaster the local and state governments ask for reimbursement from FEMA (I wrote all of the FEMA grants for the state Department of Health for about five years). In the American government system, no government agency can enter a second jurisdiction without being invited in or under extreme conditions.

I encourage your editorial board to go over and meet with Craig Fugate and his fine team at the division of emergency management and learn how disaster response really works. Stop spreading false information!

JIM CROUSHORN
jcroushorn@comcast.net

A heckuva guy
Converting ineptitude into paydays

In the hours and days following Hurricane Katrina's devastation of the Gulf Coast a year ago, Americans were shocked by the slow response of federal emergency officials.

It was all the more demoralizing because the nation reasonably expected emergency preparedness efforts to be honed because of the considerable focus on post-9/11 security, in which the Federal Emergency Management Agency is included.

No single individual personified the incompetence more than Michael Brown, then FEMA's director. President Bush's incongruous remark in the midst of the chaos - "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job" - surely has found an honored place in the history of political satire.

With the exception of military rescue teams, which put their own safety at risk to save stranded victims from rising flood waters, government agencies performed like a toothless tiger: all growl, no bite.

Top officials at FEMA didn't even seem to know how dire conditions were in New Orleans after the storm, information that was available once news teams arrived and began to report what was happening.

Mr. Brown was forced out of his position not long after the Katrina disaster, when it was clear that he not only performed his job poorly, but also failed to keep his immediate superior, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, in the loop.

Now Mr. Brown is attempting to parlay his poor performance into profit as a public speaker, charging from $2,500 to $10,000 per appearance, according to the St. Petersburg Times.

The ex-FEMA chief spoke last week without charge to a conference of several dozen emergency managers in Sarasota, introducing himself as "a recovering bureaucrat."

While he claims to be Mr. Chertoff's scapegoat, Mr. Brown does accept a portion of blame for not being a more effective whistle-blower - before Katrina made landfall and once relief efforts were under way.

Good of him, don't you think? But in this government town, where being on the public payroll is a more a point of pride than loathing, Mr. Brown's disastrous experience holds a few important lessons:

Government employees at every level work first for the public, not for any individual.

If a public employee is aware of a problem that is a threat to public health and safety, reporting it - including, if need be, blowing the whistle on one's own agency or boss - is more than a responsibility; it's an imperative. Even if it means one's job.

Political appointees are more likely to run interference for the people who appointed them, and maybe not as likely to be held accountable when things go wrong.

That's why accountability has to be more than a catchphrase. It has to be clearly spelled out and as free from political interference as possible.

Mr. Brown presumably would agree.

“Get the Hell Out of Dodge”
The News Herald – Panama City, FL
 

Blue, yellow, green, pink and red paint a bleak picture for Franklin County and its estimated 10,000 residents. The colors indicate storm surge, and they send the message that even the gentlest of hurricanes could be devastating for this sleepy, coastal borough. Emergency Management Director Butch Baker ranks Franklin County as Florida’s second most vulnerable county behind the string of keys that make up Monroe County in South Florida.
 

Franklin County is so flood-prone there are no designated storm shelters. A direct hit by a full-fledged tropical storm would flood every major roadway at some point, Baker said, listing the weak spots from memory.
 

By Baker’s estimate, 80 to 90 percent of residents live within a half-mile of the coast. In a Category 1 hurricane, half of the county would have to be evacuated, and a Category 2 storm would prompt evacuation of remaining residents.
 

“If we got a Category 3, I would leave the county because there’s no place to be,” Baker said.
 

The Franklin County Emergency Operations Center sits behind the Apalachicola Municipal Airport about two miles northwest of downtown Apalachicola. Predicted storm surge from a Category 3 would reach within 150 yards of the EOC building. Add wave action and Apalachicola Bay would be inside the operations center, Baker forecasted.

With hurricane season tipping off Thursday, the retired Air Force master sergeant said he feels “like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”
 

“You’re never ready,” he said. “You just do the best you can to get ready and hope it’s enough when the time comes. We’ve done just about all we can do to prepare ourselves.”
 

Franklin County’s position is made more precarious by a shallowing of the continental shelf south of the eastern Panhandle in the Gulf of Mexico. The shallower water pushes storm surge toward the coast, rather than allowing it to be pushed back out in deeper water, Baker explained.
 

“When water is pushed into a shallow area, it’s got nowhere to go,” Baker said. “Pressure in deeper water pushes down and out.”

Hurricane Dennis tested the continental shelf’s threat last year. The Category 3 storm made landfall July 10 between Pensacola Beach and Navarre Beach, more than 100 miles northwest of Apalachicola.

Damage was minimal in Bay County, but the storm stung Franklin County, washing out roads, beach homes and dozens of seafood houses. Two hundred buildings were lost, Baker said.

“We thought we could handle this. We’ve had this before,” Baker recalled thinking before the storm.
 

But Dennis’ unique path created an unprecedented situation in modern hurricane history. The storm spawned a continental shelf wave that tracked up Florida’s West Coast and might have dissipated, Baker said, had it not been for the shallow portion of the shelf.
 

“Since 1851, we have never had that occur in the Gulf of Mexico before,” Baker said. “No one ever conceived of that happening until Dennis.”
 

The wave raised sea level three to five feet and that, combined with normal storm surge, astronomical tide and wave action, could have created wave tops as high as 20 to 23 feet, Baker said.
 

“Dennis itself was not one of the worst storms, but the combination made it one of the worst storms locally in memorable history,” Baker said. “Folks that have lived their entire lives here said they have never seen water that high.”
 

County Commissioner Jimmy Mosconis and his wife, Ella, rode out the storm at a friend’s home near their fishing camp on the Apalachicola River.
 

Ella Mosconis described the scene she witnessed as a nightmare.

“It was white capping in the marsh, so that was a first,” Ella Mosconis said.
 

Jimmy Mosconis held his hand up to a post outside of the camp’s store and restaurant. He said he had expected up to two feet of flooding, but the water line showed four feet of water inside the store on the shore of Poorhouse Creek, a river tributary.

The camp flooded four times last hurricane season, causing more than $100,000 in damage, Jimmy Mosconis said.
 

Still, the Franklin County native is optimistic about this hurricane season.
 

“You have to be,” he said. “If we had to live our lives worrying about the Katrinas and the Camilles, we’d live in a cave.”

If a Category 4 or 5 were to strike, though, Ella Mosconis fears the worst.
 

“If we did have a Katrina or Ivan hit, I don’t think there would be an Apalachicola,” she said.
 

Baker has been managing emergency operations in Franklin County since January 2005. He held the job from 1999 through 1997, but took leave for a state position before his eventual return.
 

In the last year and a half, Baker has established an operations center with six high-speed Internet terminals and private phone lines. He convinced the county he needed two assistants, and has since put his new hires to work writing grants, creating a list of special needs residents and doing other jobs.
 

The office attained National Weather Service “StormReady” certification last summer, Baker said, displaying a plaque yet to be hung in the headquarters facility.
 

Transportation has been one focus during the last year.

“We have a lot of folks who don’t have transportation,” Baker said. “If we have to evacuate the entire county, we need a way to get them out.”
 

For the first time, the county has pre-contracted with debris clearing companies this year. In the past, Baker said the county relied on its own workers to do that job.
 

“That way we will have people on board that if we get hit we can call and say come dig us out,” Baker said.
 

With 15 to 20 more years of severe tropical weather predicted, Baker said it’s not a matter of if, but when the county will be hit by another storm.
 

His advice: “Each person needs to be responsible for themselves. And if someone says evacuate, get the hell out of Dodge.”
 

Calmest Guy in the Room
Tallahassee Trend
Emergency Management
By Neil Skene

Craig Fugate is the governor’s go-to guy during emergencies.

What do you do when you have one of the most highly regarded emergency-management programs in the world, as Florida does? You keep trying to make it better. You keep having drills. You don’t get complacent. And you don’t overpromise.

Gov. Jeb Bush didn’t play politics with the leadership of his Division of Emergency Management. His predecessor, Lawton Chiles, worked for six years to make sure that the chaos of Hurricane Andrew in 1992 never happened again. Bush stuck with the leadership Chiles recruited and kept building what he now calls a “culture of preparedness.”

Today, even Democrats give the governor high marks for Florida’s handling of two of the most destructive hurricane seasons in Florida history. And the guy who’s helped make things work for Bush is Craig Fugate.
“He’s very low key and very in charge,” says Tallahassee lawyer Steve Seibert, Bush’s first secretary of the Department of Community Affairs, of which Emergency Management is a part. “He’s brilliant.”

Fugate, 46, whose Florida ancestry traces back to Spanish land grants, grew up in Alachua and was active in the Future Farmers of America chapter at Sante Fe High School. Then, in addition to raising cows, he became a volunteer firefighter like his father and his uncle. He went to the Florida State Fire College, signed on as a paramedic with Alachua County and became a lieutenant in the fire department. A management training program led to his appointment as the county’s emergency manager in 1987.

Ten years later, Joe Myers brought Fugate to Tallahassee. Myers had come to Florida from North Carolina’s emergency agency to head the reorganized Florida emergency agency after Hurricane Andrew in 1992. The response at all levels of government was as dismaying then as it was in Louisiana and Mississippi after Katrina in 2005. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and President George H.W. Bush took a lot of blame for Andrew, but everybody looked bad.

“We started looking at how the state needed to completely change ourselves,” says Linda Loomis Shelley, Chiles’ secretary of Community Affairs when Andrew hit and now a shareholder in the Fowler White Boggs Banker law firm. A commission headed by former Senate President Phil Lewis of West Palm Beach got the effort started. The state funded emergency infrastructure through a $2 tax on homeowners insurance policies and a $4 tax on business policies. And Shelley recruited Myers, a Republican.

“He probably visited every county,” Shelley says. “He was somebody they knew and trusted.” He had state money to support local emergency initiatives, and he made it his job to support local authorities during a crisis. And he believed in practices and drills. “You play like you practice,” Myers would say.
In 1997, Myers’ top deputy left, and Fugate arrived. During 1998, they endured tornadoes, wildfires, floods and Hurricane Georges. Fugate says disaster teams were activated for more than 200 days that year.
And then Bush was elected.

“My first announced appointment was keeping Joe Myers,” Bush said in an e-mail interview. “I met with him and told him I wanted him to stay and that he would be given the freedom to lead, and I would help in any way I could.” Perhaps taking a lesson from his father’s travails with Andrew, Bush made it clear that disaster response mattered a lot. “The governor has a line,” says Fugate. “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”
By Sept. 11, 2001, Myers had left for private industry, and Fugate was acting director. Bush called a few weeks later to tell him the job was his for keeps.

Taking control
Fugate has been the calm and steady force at the state’s operations center on the southeastern edge of Tallahassee, where as many as 250 people from public and private organizations gather during a crisis. “We have all of the key resources of the state in the same room, all working toward the same outcome,” Fugate says. “Agencies start solving problems before you have a problem.”

“Craig’s the calmest guy in the room,” says Tallahassee lawyer Steve Uhlfelder, appointed by Bush to head a non-profit hurricane-relief agency. Bush cites Fugate’s “calm resolve and steadfast purpose.”
In February, the agency had a five-hour “tabletop” drill — decision-makers, not responders in the field — that focused on a bird flu pandemic. It’s an annual drill, and Bush, as usual, stayed the entire time. “All tabletop drills help dealing with all disasters, not just the one in the drill itself,” Bush says. They also have a hurricane drill during May, and they practice for such disasters as nuclear reactor failures, terrorist bombs at football stadiums and continuity of operations when emergency systems fail.

It’s hard to miss the contrast between Jeb Bush’s approach to emergency management and George W. Bush’s in the president’s appointment of a FEMA director with no emergency experience and the lower priority given to disaster planning. “You may not like Mike Brown, but there is more truth here than many want to believe,” Fugate notes on his private blog above an article on the fired FEMA director’s testimony about budget cuts and homeland security priorities. But Fugate also saw a lot of weaknesses in the state and local preparations in Louisiana and Mississippi as Katrina headed up the Gulf.

Even in Florida, things still go wrong. As Hurricane Wilma approached, Jeb Bush promised ice and water within 24 hours, but the state couldn’t deliver in some places. Bush stood next to Michael Chertoff, the head of federal Homeland Security, and took the blame.

It was especially painful because the feds, smarting from the Katrina embarrassment, had tried to move in and take control in Florida during Hurricanes Rita and Wilma. According to a Wall Street Journal article last December, which Fugate says is accurate, the Pentagon’s Northern Command, established as a domestic military force after 9/11, tried to take charge in Florida before Rita crossed the Florida Keys last September. On Oct. 18, six days before Wilma hit, a three-star general called the Florida National Guard commander to say he was flying troops into Florida and would set up a joint command. Gov. Bush, says the Journal, called Chertoff to complain and said the federal move was “insulting.”
Fugate struck back dramatically on Oct. 20 during a video conference call with federal officials. He unexpectedly announced the formation of the “Wilma command,” consisting of himself, the Florida National Guard commander and the FEMA coordinator in Florida. Then Fugate announced the “Incident Commander,” who under federal law FEMA had to support, and pulled him into the camera frame. It was Jeb Bush.

This year, Bush is focusing on tougher building codes, a permanent sales tax holiday for hurricane supplies, expansion of local emergency operations centers, new evacuation shelters with backup generators and grants to help low-income people retrofit homes to withstand strong winds.

Fugate is taking more advantage of private retailers’ supply chains. “You always think government is the solution, and you forget about other resources,” he says. During Wilma, one store reopened with supplies of water and ice, and “we were across the street handing out water and ice for free,” Fugate says. Now his agency plans to focus relief on areas that don’t have operating retailers.

Since the showdown last fall, Chertoff has said he does not intend to supplant state authority during disasters but wants to be able to step in when states fall short. Bush has told Congress that federalizing emergency response “would be a disaster as bad as Hurricane Katrina.”

Maybe the federal government instead should hold up Florida’s 14-year journey as a model. “I think we’ve got a hell of a governor,” Fugate says. “He’s put a lot of funding in this program, and we’ve changed a lot of outcomes.”


 

Click pictures to enlarge

February 6, 2006 – This week, Governor Jeb Bush was joined by Florida’s Cabinet officers, state agency heads, law enforcement officials, and emergency management officials to conduct the fourth annual homeland security “tabletop” exercise at the State Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee, Florida.

The exercise, which was organized and conducted by DSI for the second consecutive year, is an annual drill where the Governor and top state officials respond to mock terrorism and homeland security threats.  The primary objective of the exercise is to give an opportunity for state, federal and local officials to simulate a homeland security threat, learning the best way to coordinate their response and recovery roles with partner agencies.

"Our all-hazard approach to emergency planning ensures Florida is prepared to respond to all potential threats, from natural events to man-made," said Governor Jeb Bush. "As we work to instill a "culture of preparedness" within our state, it is imperative that all Floridians have a plan in place to protect their families and their homes."

Over 120 personnel from dozens of agencies were on hand to participate in the half-day drill, including representatives from the Department of Defense, U.S. Coast Guard, Florida National Guard and the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The scenario of this training exercise was a terrorist attack involving a health pandemic event.  “Preparation for pandemic flu is just one element of our ongoing training for all events, such as hurricanes and other natural or man-made emergencies,” said Department of Health Secretary Dr. Rony Francois. “DOH stands ready to keep Floridians informed, engaged, prepared and protected.”

For more information about Exercise and Drill services provided by DSI, please contact us today!