ShakeOut!

An estimated 3 million people participated in The Great Central U.S. ShakeOut last Thursday, an exercise encouraging citizens to “drop, cover and hold on” in a simulated major earthquake drill.

Drop, cover and hold on is the recommended action to take when you feel the ground shake significantly beneath you. Drop means to go to the ground yourself, before the shaking has a chance to knock you down. Cover means to seek shelter and get underneath something sturdy, like a table. Hold on means you should grab ahold of your shelter until the shaking stops.

2.8 million Americans in eleven states considered in the New Madrid Seismic Zone– Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois – registered to participate at shakeout.org. Indiana participants did their drill on April 19.

In 1811 and 1812 the New Madrid region experienced a series of magnitude-7 quakes. The most recent major quake in the region was a 4.7-magnitude earthquake in Greenbrier, Ark., a small town north of Little Rock.

The central U.S. ShakeOut is organized and coordinated by the Central U.S. Earthquake Consortium, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the U.S. Geological Survey and dozens of other partners.

Hagerty Consulting, an Evanston Il., consulting firm, specializes in emergency management and preparedness. It assisted FEMA on operational plans for a New Madrid earthquake similar to what will be drilled for in the Great ShakeOut, and is an active partner to many federal, state and local emergency management agencies.

In anticipation of the exercise, SecurityZone spoke with Hagerty consultants, Brock Long, former emergency management director for the State of Alabama, and Matthew Hochstein, currently Hagerty’s Project Manager on the firm’s FEMA disaster readiness engagement.

The two discussed the benefits of having exercises like the Great ShakeOut, and how emergency management works in the context of today’s government.

SecurityZone: The Great Central U.S. Shakeout is coming up. What’s been Hagerty Consulting’s role?

Hochstein: We recently completed for FEMA the planning for the New Madrid Seismic Zone earthquake scenario, a similar scenario to the national exercise that will occur in May (May 16-20). The Great ShakeOut sits in between the drafting of NMSZ plans and the national exercise. It’s a way to continue to build up public knowledge of the threat, and increase overall public preparedness.

[The National Level Exercise (NLE2011) is a White House-directed, Congressionally-mandated exercise in preparation for a national catastrophic event in the NMSZ. It includes the participation of all appropriate federal department and agency senior officials, and goes far beyond the earthquake drills taking place during the ShakeOut.]

To properly exercise anything you need to have a plan in place first. … That includes logistics. That includes sheltering. All the major operational activities that would take place — search and rescue, communications — what is actually going to occur at the county level, the state level, the FEMA regional level, and then ultimately FEMA headquarters and other Federal and private sector partners.

Long: [Earthquake exercises] made us look at our own capabilities and where shortfalls are for an event of that magnitude. It helped states to have more interaction with the federal government emergency-support function (ESF) partners to really understand their capability.

The concern is that when you’re servicing eight states [in the Central U.S. Earthquake Consortium] that could be impacted, from the federal government standpoint, what’s the priority? How do you prioritize where resources go?

We were able to sit down with these ESF partners to understand their capabilities, learn what they think will be available. It also provided us exposure of resources we may not have been aware of.

SecurityZone: Is that Hagerty’s role in preparing for large-scale disasters, to be a middleman between the states and the Federal government?

Hochstein: In March 2010 FEMA released a regional planning guide [for catastrophes, including earthquakes]. It provides a 5-step process on how to do operational planning and how to get it from the startup phase, essentially a kickoff meeting, all the way to a completed exercise.

The role of someone like Hagerty, or any other consulting firm is to help facilitate that process. One of the main parts is to form courses of action, or, how you’re going to address a shortfall operationally, like what’s the strategy going to be to help address the fact that you don’t have enough urban search and rescue teams?

Long: As a former director, a lot of these states do not have the staffing resources to be able to coordinate, write the plans, do something of this magnitude.

The economy really started impacting state emergency management agencies three years ago. It doesn’t allow you to hire when you lose positions due to attrition. So many of the states are operating on reduced staff, and staff have to multi-task.

For example, we have an earthquake program manager in Alabama who also runs the hurricane program. We just didn’t have the dedicated staff members to be able to pull together separate programs.

The consulting arena provides experienced professionals that have been there who can help pull this together. The state level of government doesn’t have the ability to do it to that large an extent.

SecurityZone: Competition for government funding is intense, how do you convince decision-makers that disaster preparedness and mitigation is a priority?

Long: Prioritizing resources is a tough job. For an event of this magnitude it’s very complicated because you’re dealing with not just multiple states, but multiple regions. For example, the water, ice and MREs (meals ready-to-eat) in the first 72 hours is probably the first and most important thing next to search and rescue teams.

Search and rescue teams and live-saving commodities are the most important resources you’re going to need in the first 72 hours. These are not infinite resources. There are only certain contractors that can actually bring in the bottled water.

The role of FEMA at the Federal level is trying to provide a 50,000-foot view of, “Here’s the true situation for each of the areas that are hardest hit. We need to prioritize all resources and equipment there first, get search and rescue teams there. And work you’re way out to areas that were not as heavily impacted.”

Hochstein: [With New Madrid earthquake planning] Hagerty was helping FEMA and the states manage, this is not an exaggeration, a stakeholder group that is probably in excess of 2000 people that are directly impacted by the earthquake.

States requested a real insight as to how FEMA was going to pre-designate the national Federal-level assets in an event, so that [states] could figure out, “I know I have X coming from the Federal-level then I can figure out the delta between X and known requirement through some type of strategy.”

Hagerty helped the states voice that concern with the help of the Planning Division program office at FEMA headquarters. Eventually we were successful in getting FEMA to pre-designate what those Federal assets were going to be.

Once that occurred, the state leaders and FEMA and all of the national agency leaders came together for a two-day workshop to discuss how their resource allocation would work in the event. They would never have gotten to that point if the concern from the states wasn’t bubbled up to FEMA headquarters.

Brock: Ultimately though, this country’s got to do more to build a preparedness culture. Basically the first 72-hours after a disaster are really on citizens. Help is going to come. The Federal government is going to come. The states are going to do what they can but it’s not going to be immediate, you know, in an event that large.

I feel sometimes, in the emergency management community, we fail to be that blunt with citizens and say, “Guys, you have to do your part.” We need to stop looking at citizens as victims and start empowering them to be somewhat self-sufficient. Be your own hero.

Protect your house. Be adequately insured. Make sure you’ve got supplies to handle your family for the first 72 hours.

That’s just something we have to take a hard look at. Are our national “be ready” campaigns really working? And how do we get funding and preparedness messages down to the local level into their hands so that they can tailor messages and deal with the communities they live and work in every day.

Stovepipe messages from the Federal government on down, they are not effective, in my opinion.

SecurityZone: Are there mitigation benefits that come out of a public event like the upcoming Great Shakeout?

Brock: The bottom-line about the mitigation program, there are different pots of money that are provided to do mitigation. There’s structural mitigation and non-structural mitigation.

Structural mitigation, money to keep buildings from collapsing in the pre-disaster arena is not great. If you divided the PDM funding, pre-disaster mitigation money that was made available to emergency management at the state level, and divided it up among the 50 states you’re maybe looking at $2 million per state.

SecurityZone: It’s been cut even more in the current appropriation.

Brock: Are you going to take $2 million and make a realistic dent in mitigating an area? I’d argue that you can’t, because mitigation has to be a culture. You’ve got to get everyone mitigating their facility, their communities.

In a state like Alabama that gets hit a lot – we have a lot of Federal disaster declarations – a large portion of PDM funding becomes available to us. The problem is that mitigation becomes more of a recovery, reactionary program.

Once everything’s been blown out and wiped off the map, now we go in and rebuild and mitigate.

We’re still living in a very reactive society even though mitigation’s intent is to build resilient communities. We have to take a hard look at how that money is structured, and putting more money out there to doing structure retrofits, getting legislation passed so that when you build a new school it has to have a tornado-safe room that can handle the building occupants. Making sure that we’re building smartly in these earthquake fault zones that we know exist.

The converse is that, you know, it increases the cost of building and the cost of doing business. Right now we’re in an economy where everybody is pinching pennies to an extreme. It’s a difficult situation.