Governance: Who Is In Charge?

In just about every review of the Katrina disaster, the conclusion said it wasn’t technology and technology matters; it wasn’t individuals not wanting to help; we had just an enormous outpouring of people trying to help. But where things broke down was in governance and who’s in charge and who’s allowed to help and who’s not allowed to help. And how do you work across levels of government?

The comment period for the National Response Framework, which is supposed to be the game plan for the future, was just completed. However, from Cira’s perspective, what FEMA will do is clear.

Clearly it is a state/local issue first to deal with the involvements of whatever the incident is says Cira. “States will handle probably 70 disasters a year where the feds are never involved. It’s only in those jurisdictions when all of a sudden it goes beyond their means that you need to call the feds in for whatever issue it is, whether that’s more shelters or food or water.”

Cira explains that the concept of unified command is now trying to be really embedded within the state EOC and they will work with Federal Coordinating Officers. “We are insisting that they be assigned by state now. So that it’s not if the disaster happens tomorrow it’s not the first time that they’ve ever met each other. And if we continue to do that it will go a long way.”

Cira is confident that FEMA is making strides. “I think FEMA, over the 11 months that I’ve been there, is absolutely much better prepared. I think as Director Paulson has said in numerous speeches there’s an old FEMA and there’s a new FEMA.”

“The difference in the people that are there now, at least in new positions that have been created, are more proactive than they are reactive, so I know almost within the hour of any disaster of national significance.

According to Cira, on local events the Director’s on the phone with the governor or the mayor of where ever the projected damage is trying to look forward; not to interfere, but to find out what is it that the jurisdiction may think it is going to need.

“On the planning side I would say that the legislation from last year is really important to two areas. FEMA’s about ready to hire it’s senior law enforcement official which will report directly to the Director, and that is to make that tie between us and the law enforcement community, with a fairly well respected person from that community.”

Then there are the Regional Advisory Groups. Cira says that FEMA’s head count “literally is going to be put in the regions versus the headquarters. And that regional advisory group will be a group of senior people from those affected states who will help that region plan for the effort.”

An example is a scenario that starts in New Jersey and affects the entire Northeast Corridor.  “It’s not about your state anymore,” says Cira. If there was something that happened in New Jersey, the whole of the north east corridor would freeze up, you couldn’t get a car in there if you wanted to. So it is a regional effort.”

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COOP and Planning Essentials

On this issue Cira has found unevenness in the efforts by state and local officials.

“We sent out teams to nine southeast states. And the level of planning that was in one state versus another varied tremendously,” reports Cira. “So it comes down to the planning of do you have an evacuation plan? And the communications requirements that go with that plan. Which ambulances are going to go to that location, where are the ambulances coming from?”

“It’s that planning that one that has to do at the local level that will make this. Then when the feds come in and then if there’s a plan, everybody will know who is on what channels. Without that it will be another disaster.”

Planning, planning, it’s all about planning. And dollars. CIOs and COOP planners struggle because they can’t get the dollars, the resources, and the top level attention on the issue.

“I think we are in bad shape on COOP planning across the board,” says Cira, “because if you are a CIO -- whether it’s state or a local jurisdiction -- it comes down to dollars. Whether it’s a data center, your network, your radio network, it’s all about the dollars to actually put that in place and then the training.”

Cira is worried it still will take a “major failure” to get more state and local attention to COOP planning. “Once you’ve had a major failure then you get a bit more attentive to the problem. But most of the states I’ve seen we are not in as good a shape as you’d like to believe.”

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Crossing The Great Divide

Fairfax County Virginia is in the heart of the National Capital Region (NCR). Located just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC, Fairfax would play a leading role in any emergency preparedness and response scenario affecting the NCR.

Wanda Gibson is the CIO/CTO for Fairfax County. Recently she was named one of the top 5 influential IT women in the country by CIO Magazine. She got that honor for her role in coordination of a lot of the communications issues in the DC metro area.

But her first responsibility is to Fairfax County. “We have a strategic and tactical plan to create an interoperability strategy for the systems to support our first responders in law enforcement, including our police, our fire, our EMS, our sheriff, emergency management 911 Center,” says Gibson.

“It’s a very complex and ambitious undertaking which includes both the systems side as well as the communications side, for which we have also prepared a public safety architecture supporting an infrastructure environment that secure and robust and reliable in order to be used under these different circumstances.”

Gibson explains that Fairfax has tied its GIS systems and wireless broadband as part of that overall strategy. “That’s something we’ve been working on and also some of the neighboring local jurisdictions are partnering with us on developing requirements for that. So we are very excited about that.”

Building Regional Plans

Gibson was the past chair of the Metropolitan Council of Governments  CIOs committee which was working on ways to tie together the 21 jurisdictions that make up the NCR, which actually crosses three states. “We know we have to work together, because in different levels of emergency circumstances, we are always working together,” says Gibson.

For Gibson that means crossing jurisdictional boundaries continually responding to things on the Beltway, Springfield Interchange, the Wilson Bridge, and the American Legion Bridge on the other side in Montgomery County.

So in Washington, DC where some would say nothing gets done because no one will work together, Gibson and her colleagues  know it is critical for them to be working together on a regular basis and in addition to a big major scenario.

“We’ve created a strategy in the NCR, we call it the NCR Interoperable Program by which we would actually build up and create a reliable, robust and secure infrastructure for our First Responders to be able to use,” says Gibson. “They have dedicated paths; they can actually get their work done more quickly and as they cross jurisdictional boundaries they can have the continuity of the communications that they need.”

Seamless Interoperable Communications

“I think we have made tremendous progress, our radios are all interoperable,” says Gibson. “We’ve actually integrated two systems -- one dedicated to public safety and one dedicated to public service.”

So that means in an emergency event you can bring together all kinds of agencies that provide support with trucks, plows and buses for evacuation and all citizen needs.

“In addition to that we have mutual agreements where we have provided interoperability between our different local jurisdictions in terms of channels,” says Gibson. “Also based on some of these opportunities provided by these UASI grants, we have radio caches now that actually support if there are any other responding NFTs that come into play so that everybody actually is on the same communications. That is basically well underway and actually had actually been started in prior years.”

The goal according to Gibson is to create even better interoperable communications, “because everybody’s using data now, we are all digital, everybody is relying on information and data to do their jobs. That is an area which we are driving toward enhancing and creating that same sort of interoperability without bearing undue cost burdens of doing upgrades of back end systems and making everybody have to have the same technology.”

Vigorous COOP

Today reality is the entire government needs to be online 24/7, because  people are relying on government to provide services in the event something happens. Gibson, like her other government colleagues, knew she had to have a plan in place that allows continuous operations.

“What we did is we linked up our telework strategy with our COOP,” explains Gibson. “We found we weren’t quite as far behind in terms of being able to function because quite honestly we have a very vigorous telework program.”

“So all other kinds of societal issues have morphed together to help us have a COOP and we are now just polishing it off and making sure that all the details are worked out,” reports Gibson. “People are already online and they can function and do a lot of government services remotely, we actually are in pretty good shape. What we are doing though is laying that human personal element to COOP planning.”
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Future Visions

Tim Peterson, FCC

I think that we are making progress and we are getting better and better prepared. We are concerned about interdependencies a good bit. I look at interdependencies from a traditional and nontraditional standpoint. Traditional meaning I’m in the utility arena so the traditional interdependencies would be electric, gas, water, communications to see how those groups work together.

But we are trying to broaden our vision to look at other nontraditional interdependencies. For example in our bureau we are dealing a lot with hospitals and health care providers, which typically is not a traditional interdependent group with the FCC, but we are finding that we are learning a lot from them and they are learning a lot from us and we can help them in their emergency communications planning and give them some other ideas on how to make sure that they have resilient and redundant communications that would be available in the time of crises.

Bob Dix, Juniper

“We are better today than we were yesterday; we have a long way to go. This is the first time in the history of the TopOff 4 series that the private sector has a seat in the master control cell trying to give real time information about the impacts in the venues and nationally as a result of this exercise and the scenario around that.

The good news is there is an enhanced awareness of those interdependencies both in terms of the networks, the IT and communications element, but the reliance that the government and industry have on one another to be successful in prevention, response, recovery and reconstitution in the event of an incident of national significance. We are better, but we still have a ways to go.

Wanda Gibson, Fairfax County, Virginia

My vision is it’s seamless. Something happens and everything comes into place because all of these issues that we’ve talked about have actually been worked out. There is also a common message, which is a very important part of this because people live one place they work another place, etc.

They need to have good information quickly that’s accurate about what to do and how things are going to be handled when they are away from home with their children with their families. So I have a vision that this is actually going to come together and though the commercial sector and progress and in this country, this nation over time, some of that is going to actually naturally occur.

Dr. Doug Himberger, Booz Allen Hamilton

Are we better prepared? Sure, I think we are because what this is about is that plans aren’t important; it’s planning that’s important. So planning makes us think about the right things and ask the right questions. So we are thinking about the right things and we are asking the right questions and it leads us to the kinds of things we see in the headlines.

We are asking for things, we are training for things, we are exercising for things, we are doing the things that we are talking about today. So we are bound to be better prepared. I just don’t see any other end state. And by the way, I think that it’s this road. It’s the road to preparedness that’s important. There is no end state of preparedness; it’s the journey towards preparedness that matters.

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