The Guy Behind The Guy Behind The Guy

Did Anyone Else Notice a Contrast Between Flight 93 and the French New Years Train?

Did Anyone Else Notice a Contrast Between Flight 93 and the French New Years Train with the junior jihadi assholes?

Is it just me? Were there any men on that train?  Were there any sons of DeGaulle or great-great-great-whatever-sons of LaFayette on that train?  This incident reminds me of the Montreal Massacre (ht: RelapsedCatholic.com http://relapsedcatholic.blogspot.com/2005/12/ive-been-saying-this-for-16-years.html)  Did these Frenchmen care about their sisters and mothers?

"If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves." Winston Churchill

New DHS Acting Under Secretary for Emergency Preparedness and Response

Looks like the President has tapped a new head for FEMA:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/09/20050912-1.html

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
September 12, 2005

Personnel Announcement

President George W. Bush today announced his intention to designate one individual to serve in his Administration:

The President intends to designate R. David Paulison, of Florida, to be Acting Under Secretary for Emergency Preparedness and Response.

This is his FEMA bio

http://www.fema.gov/about/bios/paulison.shtm

R. David Paulison
Director, Preparedness Division/U.S. Fire Administrator

R. David Paulison was appointed director of the Preparedness Division of the Emergency Preparedness & Response Directorate/FEMA, in the newly created Department of Homeland Security in 2003. He will continue to serve as the administrator for the U.S. Fire Administration, a position to which he was appointed in December 2001.

As director of the Preparedness Division, Mr. Paulison administers a broad range of programs designed to reduce injuries and death due to disasters, strengthen states and communities and prevent or reduce damage to public and personal property. He is also responsible for enhancing state and local emergency preparedness, training federal, state, and local emergency managers, and conducting a nationwide program of exercises. As head of the U.S. Fire Administration, Mr. Paulison also supports state and local fire service programs and oversees programs to reduce life and economic losses due to fire and related emergencies in partnership with fire protection and emergency service communities.

Before joining FEMA, Mr. Paulison, who has 30 years of fire rescue services experience, was chief of the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department. In that position, he oversaw 1,900 personnel with a $200 million operating budget and a $70 million capital budget. He also oversaw the county's emergency management office.

He began his career as a rescue firefighter and rose through the ranks to rescue lieutenant, battalion commander, district chief of operations, division chief, assistant chief and then deputy director for administration before becoming chief. His emergency management experience includes Hurricane Andrew and the crash of ValuJet Flight 592.

A native of Miami, Fla., Mr. Paulison earned a bachelor of arts from Florida Atlantic University and completed the Program for Senior Executives in State and Local Government at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He received the LeRoy Collins Distinguished Alumni Award and was inducted into the Miami-Dade Community College Hall of Fame. Mr. Paulison was selected as fire chief of the year by Florida in 1993 and holds positions in several professional associations. He is a certified paramedic and as fire chief, oversaw the Miami-Date Urban Search and Rescue Task Force. He is also past president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs.

Go read Babbin

Folks,

Jed Babbin has a great op piece in the American Spectator today.  Check it out at http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=8728

Here's some of it:

"Those obstacles [to interstate first responder cooperation] are akin to those that used to prevent interstate cooperation using National Guard resources. There is an interstate agreement now that enables governors to share National Guard forces at their own discretion. We need another agreement just like it to enable sharing police, fire, ambulance and other first-responders just as easily. (There is one, run by the National Emergency Management Association. It doesn't work because it's tied up in lawyers and red tape. It has to be replaced, right bloody now, with a government-to-government agreement.) [emph added]  If I'm sitting in Austin with a few hundred bored rescue crews sitting by their helos sipping Gatorade and munching PowerBars, and you're in Jefferson Parish up to your waist in water, why shouldn't you get on the phone and ask me to send my guys to you without standing on ceremony? If Judge Chertoff doesn't get such an agreement in place before the end of this week, we should say adios, amigo, and get lost. Amateur hour is over."

Jed is right that we need (I would say at a minimum) an interstate agreement to share first responders during a disaster.  However, I would go one step further.  For the fastest mobilization, we need a pre-existing scalable structure to plug people in to (http://procrastinus.typepad.com/blog/2005/09/surging_law_enf_1.html).  Reduce the confusion about where to go for help and where to go to offer help.  Get all the bureuacratic stuff (4 hour EO classes anyone?) done ahead of time, maybe on an annual basis.

Especially for a no-notice disaster or WMD strike, we need to activate and move immediately.

Katrina Damaged Air Traffic Control Equipment

DefenseTech.org had an interesting post and comments (

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/001789.html#comments

) on 9/7 that linked to a Federal Computer Weekly article (http://www.fcw.com/article90686-09-07-05-Web) about Katrina-damaged air traffic control equipment and the FAA's efforts to fix it all.  Check it out.

September 11th - 4th Anniversary

No blogging today in observance of the 4th anniversary of the September 11th attacks.  Winds of Change has some great posts at http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/005499.php.

Tonight, I'll go to the 7:30 p.m. Mass at Old St. Mary's in the city.  We'll pray for the dead and the living.  Something I'll be thinking and praying about will be the resurrection on the last day.  We speak of it every week during the Creed, but I don't think that most people really give it any thought.  On the last day, those asleep in death will arise, body and soul.  Me, my grandmother, Abe Lincoln, the woman who washed Nero's clothes.  Everyone.  This is what the Cathechism of the Catholic Church has to say about it in paragraph 1038 (http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/para/1038.htm):

1038 The resurrection of all the dead, "of both the just and the unjust," will precede the Last Judgment. This will be "the hour when all who are in the tombs will hear [the Son of man's] voice and come forth, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment." Then Christ will come "in his glory, and all the angels with him. . . . Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left. . . . And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."

My idea for a Flight 93 Memorial

Did you see the design for the Flight 93 memorial?  Go over to Michelle Malkin at http://michellemalkin.com/mt/mt-MALKIN-tb.cgi/2856  to see it.

I don't like it.  I'll write more why later, if I feel like it.

Here's my idea.  Why not have a series of markers along the flight's path?  Could radar records or cell phone triangulation be examined to make it accurate enough within 100 meters or so?  The markers would stretch across NJ, PA, OH, WV, and pack to PA.  Go to http://www.avweb.com/other/911flightexplorer.html and scroll down to see an animated flight path for Flight 93.  At each minute marker, you could stand at the marker and read about the flight, and what was happening at that particular moment.  The marker would tell you the heading, the altitude, etc.  Then you could look up and imagine what the heroes were doing to save us.

Just an idea.

The Nagin, Blanco, and Brown Training Center for Disaster Preparedness and Response

Been kickin' around a couple of ideas in my noggin.  I'd be interested in hearing what you have to say about them.

As we transition to from saving lives to cleaning up to focusing on what went wrong and how things can be better, one of the areas we'll focus on is the training in disaster preparedness and response that civilian leadership receives.  We're obviously going to spend much more money on training, which is a very good thing.

For analogous lessons, I've been trying to think about how the military reacted in the wake of Vietnam.  Most of America may not realize how the miltary transformed itself from a dispirited force to regain its place as the most powerful military the world has ever seen.  There were lots of factors, and more learned commentators than I can better explain them to you.  But one of the main factors was surely the revolution in military training that military leadership developed.  The Top Gun School in California was developed to improve the dog fighting skills of Navy pilots, as was the Red Flag Exercise at Nellis AFB for Air Force pilots.  The Army developed the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, CA for armored forces and the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, LA for light infantry.  (Maybe some Marines out there can talk about how Marine training has improved.  I just can't speak to it.)  What do all of these training centers have in common?  Realistic training exercises with live OPFOR and brutally honest Observer/Controllers to review performance and lessons learned afterwards. 

While we're thinking about what to do with New Orleans, I think DHS should establish there the Nagin, Blanco, and Brown Training Center for Disaster Preparedness and Response.  DHS should bring civic leaders and emergency response officials there for realistic training.  How realistic?  After the daily training is done, let those off shift stay in a powerless dark smelly building as they listen to the gunfire next door at the new live fire range for National Guard and law enforcement.  It would look like a MOUT range (Military Operations in Urban Terrain), but would be geared a bit more to law enforcement and fire rescue, with some bad guys in the middle of a CQB range.

Who would be the observer controllers?  Good question.  It sure wouldn't be the feds at DHS.  If I were President (everybody shudders at once), I would ask Tommy Franks to recruit all his old retired Generals and Admirals and Command Sergeants Major friends to be observer controllers.  Add in some old firedogs and esteemed people in their various specialities.  THESE GUYS need to grade and report the performances of the local, state, and fed officials.  They all have training experience in complex organizations, and chaos, and operating therein.  Since the feds would be there for every training exercise, I would hope that their performance would improve the most.

In fact, I would ask these same Tommy Franks guys to perform audits of all cities' existing disaster plans.  Let's use the expertise we have.

How do you get to City Hall via radio - practice, practice, practice

I'm attempting to blog from my Treo because my network card is acting up. Grrr...

Glenn has a great post up about communications.

I wasn't able to find that stuff about commo at CALL that I wanted to. It seems that they put a lot of stuff behind a firewall, but many interesting academic papers are still available. The paper that I was looking for was about how to improve radio communications. This may be blindingly obvious, but the answer was to practice, even in garrison. Have your radios set up in your offices. Want to talk to battalion? Pick up the radio, not the phone. Forbid phone use within the battalion.

What should a city do? Perhaps once a month, set up and validate the emergency communications system. Then, the next day, use only the radios and not the phones. Wanna talk to the mayor? He's not taking phone calls today so use your radio. A city wide drill every four years is not going to cut it.

UPDATE:  You know, upon further reflection, I don't think we should leave it up to cities to decide whether to use their emergency communications systems every month.  If we're giving them federal taxpayers dollars to buy this comm equipment, I want some accountability.  Congress should pass the No Emergency Communications Systems Left On the Shelf Act.  Cities need to file reports on their monthly communications exercises and the mayor needs to personally sign off on the report.

Katrina and the Army's Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) - Part 3

This is a 1993 newsletter that provides definitions for the same Emergency Support Functions (ESF) that are found in the FEMA .ppt.

If you know that any of the stuff that I am posting is out of date or incorrect or no longer operative, please post it in the comments or shoot me an email.

http://call.army.mil/katrina/disaster_relief/asp/call/93-6/toc.asp

Newsletter 93-6
Operations Other Than War (OOTW)
Volume II - Disaster Assistance

Emergency Support Functions (ESFs)
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)

Appendix A

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is responsible for the Federal Response Plan (FRP), April 1992. The FRP calls for the FEMA HQ and regional offices to "notify federal departments and agencies regarding activation of some or all of the Emergency Support Functions (ESFs) and other structures of the plan." The FRP describes mechanisms and structures by which the federal government mobilizes resources and conducts activities to augment state and local response elements in a disaster or emergency situation. The ESF concept of interface between the Federal Coordinating Office (FCO), the Defense Coordinating Officer (DCO), the Joint Task Force (JTF) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) can be summarized as follows: The DCO serves in the field as the point of contact to the FCO and the ESFs for requests for military assistance. The DCO and Defense Coordinating Element (DCE) coordinate support and provide liaison to the ESFs. Most DOD forces are not familiar with the FRP and FEMA. The FCO and the DCO have a unique relationship - no other agency of the government can bring more resources to bear in less time than the services represented by the DCO. Twelve ESFs serve as the primary mechanism through which federal response assistance is provided to assist an affected state. For a detailed description of each ESF, refer to the FRP. ESF No. 1 - Transportation: Coordinates federal transportation support to state and local government, private volunteer organizations and federal agencies requiring transportation to perform their emergency services missions. Lead Agency - Department of Transportation. ESF No. 2 - Communications: Coordinates federal telecommunications support to federal, state, and local emergency response elements. Coordinates establishment of temporary communications in the affected area. Lead Agency - National Communications System. ESF No. 3 - Public Works and Engineering: Provides engineering support to assist the states in needs related to lifesaving or life protecting. Lead Agency - DOD, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. ESF No. 4 - Firefighting: Manages and coordinates firefighting activities, including the detection and suppression of fires on federal lands, and provides firefighters, equipment, and supplies in support of state and local agencies involved in rural and urban firefighting. Lead Agency - Department of Agriculture Forest Service. ESF No. 5 - Information and Planning: Collects, processes and disseminates information about potential or actual disasters or emergencies to facilitate the overall activities of the federal government in providing response assistance. Lead Agency - Federal Emergency Management Agency. ESF No. 6 - Mass Care: Coordinates efforts to provide shelter, food, and emergency first aid. Operates a Disaster Welfare Information System to collect, receive, and report information about the status of victims and assist with family reunification within the disaster area; and to coordinate bulk distribution of emergency relief supplies to disaster victims following a disaster. Lead Agency - American Red Cross. ESF No. 7 - Resource Support: Provides logistical and resource support to federal organizations during the immediate response phase of a disaster. Includes emergency relief supplies, space, office equipment, office supplies, telecommunications, contracting services, transportation service (in cooperation with ESF No. 1) and personnel. Lead Agency - General Services Administration. ESF No. 8 - Health and Medical Services: Provides coordinated assistance to supplement state and local resources in response to public health and medical care needs following an emergency. Lead Agency - Department of Health and Human Services U.S. Public Health Service. ESF No. 9 - Urban Search and Rescue: Locates, extricates and provides for the immediate medical treatment of victims trapped in collapsed structures. Lead Agency - Department of Defense. ESF No. 10 - Hazardous Materials: Provides federal support to state and local governments in response to an actual or potential discharge and/or release of hazardous materials following a catastrophe. Lead Agency - Environmental Protection Agency. ESF No. 11 - Food: Identifies food assistance needs in the aftermath of a major disaster or emergency. Obtains appropriate food supplies; arranges for transportation of those food supplies to designated staging areas. May authorize food stamp assistance. Lead Agency - Department of Agriculture. ESF No. 12 - Energy: Coordinates the provision of emergency power and fuel to support immediate response operations as well as to provide power and fuel to normalize community functioning. Includes producing, refining, transporting, generating, transmitting, conserving, building, and maintaining energy systems and system components. Lead Agency - Department of Energy. When the FRP is activated by FEMA, each ESF is granted tasking authority over its supporting agencies. Since DOD supports every other ESF, its role in disaster assistance is proportionally larger than any other agency's role.

Katrina and the Army's Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) - Part 2

CALL also has this RAND study posted at that page below - The Army's Role in Domestic Disaster Support - An Assessment of Policy Choices.  It's undated, but seems to be from the mid 90s.  The material inside might be out of date, but it's interesting reading.

It also spells out and explains some of the acronyms from the FEMA .ppt briefing.