September 27, 2007
To prepare and protect: UW Emergency Management at work
It was about 8 a.m. on the morning of April 24, 2007 — a normal school day — when news of the accident came in. A tanker truck carrying hazardous chemicals had overturned near the corner of NE 45th Street and Brooklyn Ave.
The spill’s plume, or area of impact, was spreading toward the UW, placing the campus community in danger, remembered Steve Charvat, director of UW Emergency Management. “The leak continued and got larger, and the plume went from immediately around the ‘Ave.’ to up to a mile downwind — which included major parts of the campus.”
You don’t remember this major new story? Don’t worry, it didn’t really happen. It was the annual campus emergency exercise, coordinated by Emergency Management, a sort of expanded tabletop simulation this year given the ominous title “Operation Dark Cloud.”
Within about a half hour of the pre-advertised beginning to the exercise, nearly 80 key campus decisionmakers — managers and administrators called Emergency Responders for this scenario — had reported to the Emergency Operations Center located in the Bryant Building, near Lake Union, to share information and address the concern.
And so for about four hours that morning, these campus representatives acted as if the danger were imminent — a scenario made more realistic by phone calls, faxes, e-mails and runners all arriving at the center demanding information and guidance. In such situations, UW emergency responders must decide whether to advise the campus community to evacuate or to “shelter in place” — to hunker down and wait for help, taking advantage of emergency preparedness packages created for just such a purpose. As chemical spills tend to dissipate over time, sheltering in place was the right advice for that day’s simulation.
After the morning’s hustle, the exercise was evaluated and its strengths and weaknesses noted for a detailed follow-up report.
This was the fourth such simulation to be held at the UW. The first, in 2004, was called Operation Jumpstart and imagined a major earthquake. Operation Detour in 2005 imagined a regionwide blackout, and in 2006 a flu pandemic was simulated.
The simulations in 2004 and this year were the only ones to make use of the Emergency Operations Center, which will move in early 2008 from the Bryant Building to the UW Tower, the building the UW has purchased from Safeco.
This year’s “Dark Cloud” exercise was the first to make use of Web EOC, an online information-sharing system now used by the City of Seattle and all 39 counties of the State of Washington. Web EOC provides wide access and real-time information-sharing to help managers make informed public safety decisions quickly. “It’s sort of like an online chat, but it’s much more powerful,” Charvat said. “You could be in South Africa and you can get into the system and find out what’s happening.”
Overseeing such simulations is just part of the work done by UW Emergency Management. Charvat, its director, said the office’s overall message is not unique to their office but is reflected by all those who work in emergency management: “Emergencies and disasters are everyone’s business.”
He said Emergency Management is designed to assist the campus community in four basic functions: Emergency preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation. The four functions create a sort of cycle, he said, with no beginning and no end.
- Preparedness: Those things that a person, a group, an organization or a government can do before a disaster or an incident occurs. Charvat said the office is ready to provide emergency preparedness presentations to any member of the campus community.
- Response: “Response is sort of the sexy part of emergency management,” said Charvat. The UW is served by the City of Seattle for fire and disaster protection, but history has shown that in major disasters, it can take several days, or longer, for help to arrive. That’s why the UW has created its own Campus Emergency Response Teams (CERT), to act as first responders in the case of an emergency.
- Recovery: When the earth has settled, the fires have been extinguished or the flood waters have receded, this is the process of putting the institution back to where it was before the event. “We are the coordinating body to make sure the UW is working with the city, the county, the state and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA),” said Charvat. The UW is eligible to receive 90 percent of all costs for recovery, he said, but it can take years to come in. For example, the Nisqually earthquake happened on Feb. 28, 2001, but the UW received its last reimbursement check for fixing damages this April. “And we met the national average,” Charvat said.
- Mitigation: Preparedness is getting ready for an event you know will happen, while mitigation aims energies toward lessening that inevitable damage. “It’s what can we do right now to get rid of the threat, or modify the threat so that it doesn’t impact us as much.” Charvat cited the example of the ongoing “Restore the Core” project, renovating and upgrading campus buildings for safety.
UW Emergency Management also oversees grant applications — and in many cases acts as principal investigator — for campus colleges, offices and units, for both disaster preparation and recovery after the fact. Charvat said the office “has been designated by UW administration to be one-stop shopping for searching out and applying for emergency, disaster, preparedness and Homeland Security grants.”
Since 2004, Emergency Management has had a hand in bringing more than $2 million in grant money to the UW, with another $1.5 million in grants pending. The money, which is passed through to other campus entities, has been used to support disaster preparedness campuswide, paying for, among other things, improved security systems, the new bomb-sniffing police dog Kali, the CERT program and its training, equipment such as chemical decontamination suits, communications systems, and outreach events such as QuakeFest, a Universitywide disaster preparedness event held last fall.
Since 2004, UW Emergency Management also has overseen distribution of an annual, competitive grant for disaster preparedness and response open to all UW offices and units. These are one-time grants designed to encourage the campus community to address key vulnerabilities in their facilities or operations. Generally speaking, successful grants have addressed one or more or the following principles:
- Improving the sharing of needed information campuswide.
- Training or equipping campus emergency responders.
- Assessing and protecting University assets and infrastructure.
- Providing for continuity of business before, during and after large-scale disasters.
- Informing the University community and visitors how to prepare for and operate in an emergency environment.
The projects must be able to be completed within six to nine months of the notice of award, and are best when they benefit more than one campus unit. Over the past three years, the internal UW grant has funded 16 projects designed to enhance campus crisis communications.
The simulated chemical spill imagined that morning in April was determined to have been relatively successful. But preparedness is an ongoing process, and so the exercises and simulations will continue. The next one will be a regionwide event held throughout the Seattle area on March 5, 2008.
What disaster will occur? Take a guess from the name of the coming exercise: “Sound Shake ’08.”
