EIIP Virtual Forum Presentation — May 27, 2009
First Responder Critical Incident Guide
A Field Guide for Essential Response Functions
August Vernon
Author
Amy Sebring
EIIP Moderator
The following has been prepared from a transcription of the recording. The complete slide set (Adobe PDF) may be downloaded from http://www.emforum.org/vforum/FirstResponder/FirstResponderGuide.pdf for ease of printing.
[Welcome / Introduction]
Amy Sebring: Good morning/afternoon everyone. Welcome to EMforum.org. Every now and then in the Forum we will devote a program to a new book that catches our interest and today we will hear about the First Responder Critical Incident Guide from Red Hat Publishing. This field guide provides essential information, especially in those situations when a specialized response team may not be immediately available. Please note that a one page flyer is available as a handout. [http://www.emforum.org/vforum/FirstResponder/Critical%20Incident%20Guide.pdf]
There is a related survey on our home page which asks, "Is your local response planning coordinated with regional response teams? Yes or No." Please take time to participate and review the results thus far.
Now it is my pleasure to introduce today’s guest, the author of the field guide. August Vernon is currently an Assistant Coordinator for the Forsyth County, North Carolina Office of Emergency Management, where he returned after spending a year in Iraq as a security contractor. In Iraq he was involved with conducting long-range convoy security operations, including experience with several IED incidents and combative engagements.
Mr. Vernon has been employed in Emergency Management for eight years and has also served as a member of the fire service and a fire service instructor. While in the U.S. Army, he served as a CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear) Operations Specialist.
He currently teaches courses in Incident Management, Emergency Management, HazMat Operations and Terrorism/WMD Planning-Response, and has served as technical reviewer for the development of six different training films produced by the Emergency Film Group.
Welcome August, and thank you very much for being with us today. I now turn the floor over to you to start us off please.
[Presentation]
[Slide 1]
August Vernon: Thank you very much, Amy, and good afternoon, everybody. First of all I’d like to thank the EM Forum for the invitation today to participate in this. This is a great opportunity and it’s also a learning experience. I’ve taught a lot of different classes, but this is the first time I’ve done something in this format. It has been a learning experience.
What our goal is this afternoon is I’d like to talk briefly about the recent book, "The First Responder’s Critical Incident Guide" from Red Hat Publishing, for which I did serve as the writer. I will start off by discussing initial thoughts that were behind the project, and then the publishing and review process, which was somewhat of a lengthy process. Then, obviously, we can take any questions or comments that you have.
[Slide 2]
When it comes to the guide, one of the first major factors I looked at when designing and implementing and coming up with the guide, was we wanted to look at a cost-effective tool, a cost-effective guide, that was for one, very easy to read, very easy to utilize, with some simple guides and directions that any responder or any military person can follow, even those that are new to public safety or the military with limited training in these types of incidents.
The publisher and I had discussed several different options and came up to have both a paper version that can be used in training such as your classes or in-service training, and the other version, we’ll talk about later on, is a very durable material that is tear, mud, and water resistant, and is definitely designed for use in the field.
We also wanted to focus on producing a guide that was multi-agency, multi-level, multi-discipline that could really cover a lot of different agencies from a lot of different aspects. What we’ve come up with is a guide that can be utilized by fire departments, EMS, law enforcement, Emergency Management offices, military assets, and special response teams such as hazmat teams, tactical response teams, bomb squads, weapons of mass destruction and other types of specialized teams.
One quick note, as I was prepping for this, for coming on air, I was going through about 300 emails, and I had two that I thought were kind of applicable to today’s presentation. The first was according to the DEA website (which you can go to at DEA.org) in 2008, there were 6,783 clandestine drug labs and clandestine dump sites in the United States.
Also, I’m sure you’ve seen, this morning in Pakistan there was a suicide attack using a car bomb which they’re saying right now killed at least 30 and wounded over 250. Both of those kind of go along with what we’re going to discuss and what the purpose of the guide is.
[Slide 3]
This is what I’d like to call our mission statement for the guide. As you can see and continue to see, our primary focus was easy access to information and responder safety, which is obviously always our number one priority in these types of situations.
One of the factors that started me thinking about a guide and looking at putting together a guide, was around 2006-2007. I teach a variety of these topics for these classes, such as mass shootings, planning and response, IED response, clan lab awareness, etcetera. What was happening after each class and still continues to happen, is students in a variety of agencies and jurisdictions would always request additional information. Things that they would call maybe, "Could we get a cheat sheet, or a response template?" that they could take back to their respective agencies because they enjoyed the class and saw there was good information in the classes, but they would like to have some kind of access to those materials if and when it was ever needed. That was one decision to take those classes and take a lot of this information and turn it into easy to use format.
Also, based on my experience when I was in Iraq, we would occasionally conduct what we’d call "just in time" training, or for those who have served in the military, "hip pocket" training, and I felt a lot of times that if we’d had affordable guides to conduct that type of training, it would have been very helpful in that environment.
[Slide 4]
This is a list of the majority of the topics or scenarios that are covered in the guide. On the majority of these incidents, if they were to occur in any community, big or small, whether it’s a mass shooting or a bomb threat, or a clan lab, the first agencies or units typically seen on these in your community are your first responders: those front lines folks such as your law enforcement officers, fire fighters and EMT paramedics.
There will be specialized teams that are going to be requested en route to assist these agencies, your agencies, but one of the things we have to look at is how long will it take to get these specialized resources and assets to your community, your scene, to help the responders deal with whatever the situation is. You have to look at how long will it take to get a tactical team, or a bomb squad or a hazmat team, or a clan lab team, or a weapons of mass destruction team onsite to assist in your community.
Obviously, in some areas, this can be a large amount of time. If you’re dealing with any of the scenarios you see listed here, 20 or 30 minutes or longer can definitely be a difficult window of time to try to manage that incident without the specialized resources to assist you. I feel that the guide provides some response functions that all responders, from big agencies or small, can utilize to make sure that number one, they meet the needs of the incident, while number two, providing a safe response. That’s what our focus is, is safety.
It definitely attempts to assist with identifying with number one, on the recognition, number two, the identification, and number three, response issues that may be faced with those scenarios that you’re looking at. Listed on this slide are some scenarios that I felt were important to be addressed, because they’re either a current threat, scenarios that we’re having to deal with now, we’ve dealt with in the past, or they could be what is called an emerging threat—scenarios that we could possibly face at some time in the near future.
[Slide 5]
One of the guiding factors that I looked at, was that when you look at field guides, and I have several of them and I’m sure the majority of agencies do, the majority of field guides that are available right now are 100-200 pages in length. That was one reason we kept ours to under 40 pages. That was one of our goals, to keep this a manageable size.
One example is the DOT Emergency Response Guidebook, or the ERG, that I’m sure everyone should be familiar with, that is over 300 pages in length. That was obviously a consideration. All those guides, including the DOT ERG, are excellent resources and we recommend that you do use those. But I felt that a more manageable field guide would be a lot shorter in duration and a lot easier to use in the field.
One way I did this was, if you remember that list of scenarios, we looked at each situation or response and kept it to only one or two pages in the guide. For example, bomb threat may be only one page, and clandestine drug labs may be only two pages. That was part of our process of keeping it smaller in size. Obviously, with some of those topics, we could have made 20 or 30 pages each.
It was difficult to take maybe a 4 hour class and fit it into only 2 pages. We had to make a lot of decisions on what was the key information, what were the important bullets that needed to be covered, to make this a user-friendly guide and make sure we get that critical information in there. This is one process where the review committee that I’ll talk about, came in and tried to work through some of these questions.
I also discovered, and some of you may have had experience with this before, that some of the existing guides, whether using them in exercise or actual calls, they were hard to read, number one. I’ve had folks complain to me that they’ve had glasses on and they can’t read the letters in some of those guides. The lettering size is too small. We looked at that. Also, trying to read some of these in low light or nighttime conditions was very difficult.
One of the ways we looked at that and tested it out, is as we would get samples of the guide in, I would take those into a dark closet at night and try to read it with a flashlight to insure that we were able to read it. We made sure the lettering was the proper size, and even those of us who wear glasses can read it. If you’re in low light or nighttime conditions, maybe having to use not the best light, it is still legible. We tried to work through that.
Also, the guide, each section is color-coded, titled and numerically numbered to each one of those scenarios to make it as easy as possible to find. If you ever have to find one of those scenarios in a hurry, you have several means of doing that.
[Slide 6]
As I stated earlier, we do have two versions of the guide. I explained a little of the thought process behind that. One of those is the durable field version. This one has also been called the amphibious version. One of my purposes was I wanted a guide that could be dropped in the water, get mud and oil on it, get stepped on, get stuffed under the seat of the command vehicle, and when you pulled it out it was still usable.
We had to do a lot of research on that. The publisher worked with a large number of vendors for us to identify the right materials. That process in itself, while this was being written and reviewed, took almost a year. One of the ways we did this, to make sure that it met everyone’s goals and requirements, was we would take a sample page as we got them, and put it in a sink of water and let it sit for several hours.
To be honest, we did this with some other samples we initially received and found out they did not work as advertised. They had been advertised as water-resistant, and you would put it in water for a few minutes and it would shrivel up, or wrinkle, or tear. We really tried to test all of these as we were putting them in the guide.
The guide is also tear-resistant. The best way to test this is, I gave the guide to my kids, and I let them try to tear them up. Kids are a great field tester for durability. If it can survive my 7 and 10 year old sons, it can definitely survive use in the field. We tried to do that.
We’re looking at, can we read this in low light conditions? Can you read it due to lettering size? Is it tear-resistant? Is it water-resistant? We worked through that process.
[Slide 7]
Also, as we continued on through the guide production, it has gone through an extensive and detailed final third party review, obviously looking at all those incident safety concerns, the illnesses, injuries and death that can occur to responders and military personnel and even civilians in the population we’re trying to protect. We obviously wanted to make sure that the information was detailed, current, and safe.
I do definitely owe special credit to the reviewers on the technical committee, all of them who have a tremendous amount of knowledge, skills, and ability. Several members of those committees spent and extensive amount of time on the phone with me, and exchanging emails to answer my questions and try to work through those points of discussion.
[Slide 8]
The review committee that we pulled together, and these were just responders and those that work in the committee, reviewers, 17 of them from United States, Israel, and Australia, and they represented law enforcement, bomb squads, tactical response teams, fire departments, hazmat teams, Emergency Management, EMS and military special operations. I do thank them for their help in this process because it was lengthy for them also.
This continues to be an ongoing process. Now that even the guide is available for purchase, the next step that we have done is we have sent this guide out to several field testers. We’ve selected several very busy public safety departments and some large public safety training sites in the U.S. and got copies of those guides to them to basically field test them and make sure they’re accurate and utilize them.
We want to make sure that the guides will always have the most current and accurate information. This is a continuous process and we could almost see the next edition of this as soon as 2010. That will be based on the feedback and input that we get back from the field testers and others that have these at hand.
[Slide 9]
All the information that is listed in the guide, we wanted to make sure is open source information. We did have to remove some materials from the guidebook to make sure we maintain that. What that means is that there is no classified information, there’s no sensitive information of any type discussed in the guide.
Part of the process as the guide was being reviewed was to insure that we did not provide too much information to the wrong people—people that maybe could use this information against our agencies or against our operations or utilize it for the wrong purpose. That was very important to us.
It was important that the information in the guide was number one, current and accurate, and number two, does not reveal any information that might be helpful to the bad guys. That could include terrorists or criminals, or any other type of individuals.
[Slide 10]
As I stated earlier, whether you work in a rural area, suburban, urban or metropolitan area, specialized teams, such as special response teams, hazardous device units, hazardous materials teams, clandestine drug lab teams, could take a long time to arrive on the site of your critical incident. Once again, the guide will provide some direction and control until assets arrive on the scene. Even upon their arrival in your jurisdiction, you will still have to assist them and work through that scenario, whatever it is.
The primary focus is that the guide provides the response functions that our responders and military personnel can utilize to make sure they’re meeting the needs of the incident while providing the safest response for the responders. It is geared towards our first responders. It could be utilized by incident commanders and it can be utilized by specialized team leaders to assist in their command and control of these specific scenarios.
[Slide 11]
As always, the caveat is that we always want everyone to be familiar with this guide or any other guide you’re utilizing it prior to an actual emergency. We don’t want the first time someone opens it is if when they respond to an incident. Obviously, you need to train and review these before you put them into operation.
One way that can be accomplished is that I would definitely suggest that agencies utilize this guide during your planning, your training, and your exercising efforts. As I said in the beginning, it could be used in a classroom, workshop, and in-service training settings. It could also be utilized during table top and functional exercises. The field guide is not intended to replace formalized training, just to supplement it. We obviously want to make sure that training is an ongoing process, and that never really ends.
[Slide 12]
I can definitely tell you that during the writing and review process that definitely determine that in no way can this guide cover all the problems and contingencies of every type of incident out there that will be faced by first responders and military personnel. We have just tried to provide some basic guidelines that can be used in a variety of situations by a variety of agencies. There was just no way to really cover every scenario that could happen.
It’s obviously suggested that you always utilize your agency’s guidelines and procedures. We did base this guidebook on commonly used practices, laws, regulations, reference guides, but it is not meant to set a standard for any operation. What I will recommend and as they tell you Emergency Management to always go back and take a look at your SOPs and SOGs and planning process, especially if your operating procedures or operating guidelines are ten years out of date. You may want to go back and take another look at those and review them.
[Slide 13]
If agencies are interested, for ordering information, for additional information on the actual guide and a variety of other public safety materials and reference materials, and special operations and hazardous materials and incident management, you’ve got the link on there to redhatpub.com. They do have bulk purchases available for these. That question has come up.
Amy has implanted here, and I guess, Amy, you can open that up. What we’re trying to open are some virtual sample pages that are provided by the publisher. If you’d like to take a minute when it opens up, you can actually scroll through. This is just a sampling, this is not the entire guide. This is just sort of a sampling of the guide. You can scroll through that, flip the pages, zoom in and out, and we can take a minute or two to do that if you’d like to. I actually think this is a pretty nifty little tool.
[Sample Pages]
http://view.vcab.com/showvcab.aspx?vcabid=caeSjlegSepehh
Amy Sebring: I know you haven’t mentioned the cost on this, but one of the things that struck me was that the cost is very reasonable.
August Vernon: That was the purpose from the beginning, especially in today’s world, the way the situation is now, to try to come up with a cost efficient guide. We looked at doing a larger textbook or a larger guide, obviously the cost just to produce that and proof the materials and do photographs and a lot of things that go along with that, the cost would obviously continue to rise. That was another reason to try to keep it smaller in size, and most cost efficient, especially in today’s world.
[Slide 14]
I’d like any opportunity that I have, when I’m giving classes or presentations or any opportunity I have, I always want to remind everybody to keep in mind our military personnel and even our contractors who right now at this point in time are serving in very high-risk locations, and not just Iraq and Afghanistan, but across the globe, and just always ask that you keep them in mind.
[Slide 15]
I’ve attached my personal email to the presentation if someone has an offline question they want to send me, or comments, and I will try to get to those as quick as I can. I will tell you I usually have numerous, numerous emails that I’m trying to work through so it may take me a day or two to respond to you.
Amy Sebring: Thank you very much August. Now, to proceed to our Q&A.
[Audience Questions & Answers]
Question:
Isabel McCurdy: August, can you write in the book? And if so, what writing tool do you use?
August Vernon: That’s an excellent question. We had sampled that with some of the other materials and I really don’t have an answer for you. What we found out, though, is if you were able to write on it, it was more subject to damage from water and items like that. I would almost say if she would send in her email or something, I will go back to my office and take a pen and try to write in one, and send her a response.
Question:
Amy Sebring: When did this come out? And have you gotten any feedback from users out there?
August Vernon: It actually came out about a month ago. No, we haven’t gotten a lot of feedback yet. We sent it to the review committee, and we have just sent it to the field testers. Really we have not done a lot of advertising yet on a lot of information in the guide. We’re looking at, it will probably be several months to begin and to continue that progress. In fact, our review team members and our field testers probably just got this in their mailbox last week.
Comment:
Amy Sebring: It sounded like you had an international panel of reviewers on this.
August Vernon: Yes, I was very fortunate, including a representative from Australia and a representative from Israel. These were just gentlemen I had worked with on other projects in the past. These were all individuals that I knew in a variety of disciplines and communities and I reached out to those individuals and they all agreed to help and provide input. I’m fortunate to know some of these individuals.
Question:
Amy Sebring: Do you feel like this guide is U.S. specific, or do you think it’s more general than that?
August Vernon: I think it’s pretty general. It can be utilized in a lot of different places. With the Israelis and the Australians, some of the terminology is different, some of the wording is different, but the general response is going to be the same. We’ve already had a discussion and inquiries about doing this in Spanish and looking at some overseas opportunities. We’ll use this initial one and get some feedback on that, and see how we move forward, but the Australians and the Israelis were happy with the product and they said they could definitely utilize it.
Question:
Amy Sebring: I’m going to ask you about the suicide bomb scenario. I wonder if you think we’re really ready for that kind of incident to occur here?
August Vernon: That’s almost a loaded question. I think we’re probably a lot better prepared since 9/11. That was sort of a recognition that those situations could occur here. And unfortunately we’ve had a lot of experience with that specific scenario in Iraq and Afghanistan. Remember back in 1997 in New York City, we almost had a suicide bombing that was just a few hours away from occurring in the subways.
The threat is there. Do I think we are prepared? We’re a lot better prepared than we ever have been as far as training and equipment and resources and planning and multi-agency focus on that specific scenario. Are we always 100% prepared? Probably not. There are obviously more things we can do to prevent that and prepare for it.
I think the fact that we haven’t seen one happen—there’s a lot of good things happening as far as investigations and intelligence that are preventing these even though you don’t hear about it, you never hear about the scenarios that have a positive outcome. I think we’ve done a pretty good job of preventing them.
If we have one happen, and from personally being at those incidents in Iraq, it’s going to be pretty catastrophic, very horrific, and we’re not used to those types of scenarios that for example, that you see in Israel, where they have a lot better prevention in place to respond to those scenarios. If and when it happens, it’s definitely going to be a pretty terrible situation. Once suicide bombers have made that decision to move into their target, whatever that may be, they’re very difficult to stop at that point in time.
Question:
Rick de Oliveira: Does the guide integrate / explain the use of ICS forms for extended operations? In particular how do you think the guide explains shift change planning and execution?
August Vernon: That’s a good question. We looked at even creating incident command system forms for small, medium, large incidents for each scenario. In this guide, this is more of a tactics kind of guide versus, with ICS we’re looking at those strategies and those objectives.
With ICS, regardless of whether it’s a flood or a terrorist bombing, a lot of the same information on doing the general command staff positions, and span of control and unity of command, and doing those key positions and doing what needs to be done as far as ICS forms. That will really apply. Once you’re familiar with those basics, you can apply those to any one of the scenarios that are on here. We don’t provide that detailed information yet.
Maybe we can look at that a little more as a further option. Once you’ve got the basics down for ICS, for planned events, or incidents or emergencies, that those will very easily apply to any scenarios that are listed here.
Question:
Avagene Moore: With your background and global experience, are there one or two common problem areas that you have seen across a variety of disasters? If so, what are they?
August Vernon: I think everyone on the forum knows what my first answer will be—communications. Regardless of the radio system, whether you’ve got 800 MHz or 900 or whatever system you’re operating off of, that’s not always the biggest problem, whether we’ve got bunches of radios or one radio.
The biggest problem with communications is face-to-face, that personal communications back and forth. That is the biggest issue. We did a large exercise here locally with over 600 responders 2 years ago at a mall, and communications was our biggest issue, our biggest hindrance. It had nothing to do with radios, it was that personal interaction.
I think regardless of a military setting, or a public safety setting, or an emergency management setting, that communications, that sharing, exchanging information and ideas, they always like to throw the term out, "unified command". You can’t say "unified command" enough. But I think communications is always an issue.
In a lot of places, and I think everyone on the forum will agree, especially now with the way finances and budgeting issues are, public safety is more of a function rather than a priority. That is the same anywhere and everywhere. It’s what we call the "spare tire mentality". We just support things just enough to maintain that public safety realm in those agencies, versus let’s really try to support them and develop and grow them with resources and funding and equipment.
So I think communications and the difference between a priority and a function, is probably the same pretty much everywhere. That would be my take on that.
Question:
Pattama Ulrich: How could a practice like this be sustained and encouraged at local and rural communities? Thanks.
August Vernon: As far as the guide, that’s one of the reasons we set it up that way. We’ve already heard from agencies that say, "we think this is great for in-service training". You can give it to everybody, and when you need to do that just-in-time or that in-service training and you’ve got that five or ten minutes, you could pull the guide out and almost do a table-top exercise with it, or do a step-by-step if you’re doing drills.
Regardless of if you’re a large jurisdiction or a small jurisdiction, or a big agency, or a small agency, training can always take place no matter how tough times are. The training might not be the best in the world, but you can pull everybody together and do some training.
I particularly like table-top exercises. All you need is a room and ten people and a scenario, and you can actually work for a couple of hours through a scenario, to either test a plan or run through a guideline or procedure. I think one way to do that is just to continue to train.
You always have to have buy-in from leadership. That may be difficult for some jurisdictions and some agencies, to have that support and buy-in from key leadership. Those in the lower ranks may be as well-intentioned as they want, and try to do the best they can, but you’ve got to have that buy-in and support from your leaders.
Question:
Amy Sebring: On the list of types of incidents, do you have any radiological types of incidents?
August Vernon: No, I looked at that as an option. What I found out, there is a tremendous amount of guides already available from the Department of Energy specifically on radiological incidents. If you go to Google and start punching in "rad response, radiological dispersal devices, radiation incidents in hospitals", you’re going to get a tremendous amount of information.
We tried to keep it to what I thought were very specific, violence, terrorist, criminal types of scenarios. That’s not to say if we get a lot of feedback that says, "how come you don’t have rad, radiological response within the guide?" then obviously that may be a consideration. It’s based on the size of the guide and the system that’s in place with the publisher. We can update these almost every year.
Question:
Rick de Oliveira: How are forensic or crime scene elements addressed?
August Vernon: In some of the responses, not as a key issue, but always in the end of most of the scenarios, we always talk about why safety always comes first, responder safety, but we always talk about the evidence values in those considerations. A lot of those incidents that you see on there are crime scenes, and you have to keep in mind those crime scenes considerations, on the amount of responders that are running around destroying evidence, and trying to at least secure evidence.
In a lot of scenarios, the response and life safety must come first, but we do identify that these are criminal acts and that is a consideration.
Question:
Avagene Moore: August, if you were King for a day and could mandate one thing to improve our emergency response nationwide, what would it be?
August Vernon: If I was king for a day, I think somehow some focus enhancement on, and I’ll use this term to fill in for emergency management, but that multi-hazard, multi-agency approach. Emergency management is not just an "office of emergency management". We explain that a lot where we’re at. Emergency management is a process. Our office just facilitates that process, but it takes everyone that is involved in that system, in the process, working together.
Using the example of past events—if we’re in a hurricane impact area, and we know we’re going to be at risk of that, and we come up with a great plan and we shelf that plan, and no one ever looks at it. But when the hurricane strikes, you see the end result of that.
I would try to enhance, you can’t force anybody to do anything, but maybe put some emphasis on that multi-hazard, multi-agency approach. All the agencies, all the jurisdictions, all private industries, have a tremendous amount of resources, if we could just get all the resources pointed in the same direction. That would bring forth a lot of other solutions and address a lot of other issues.
Question:
Kevin Farrell: Does your guide make a distinction between "Hazmat" and CBNRE events?
August Vernon: We really do not go a lot into weapons of mass destruction. That’s another one that I found, there is a tremendous amount of information out there on CBNRE and weapons of mass destruction. We talk about suspicious powders. I’m not going to talk too much about sarin and nerve agents and VX and things like that, because I was trying to pick those scenarios that I thought were most likely, or had been occurring; like suspicious powders and packages.
I’m sure a lot of you remember, and I remember, a couple of years ago when we were getting hundreds of those. Those are things that can occur and have occurred in the past. Once again, it was kind of pinned down to a size situation on how big we wanted to make the guide, how much information we wanted to put in there.
We don’t try to differentiate between those two. We’re very specific.
Question:
Amy Sebring: Do you incorporate any public warning, public information guidance?
August Vernon: Depending on the scenario, we’ll talk about the considerations for evacuations and considerations about the media. This is a very simple step-by-step format. Depending on the scenario, you may need to consider evacuating a certain area, or be prepared for a large media presence. Under that evacuation, that could turn into a ten-page response on when do we evacuate, and how to evacuate.
My thought on that is, we just want to prompt the incident commander. Okay, we’ve got this situation. I may need to consider evacuation. From there, he looks at all the factors—the when, and where, and how, and who do we move, and all those things.
The same thing with the media—the media can be your best tool. We put in there, you do need to consider the media and open a joint information center and that’s what we want to prompt. Once they think about that, and put that process in place, that’s a whole new scenario you’re dealing with when you’re dealing with the media.
We just want to prompt those key scenarios. Even if they ask the question, and I’ve been on situations where we bring that up, "Okay, we took care of A, B, and C, what else are we not thinking about?" This is one of my hopes for this, is that it may just prompt and foster some of that thinking.
We do briefly discuss evacuation considerations for a lot of these incidents, or even shelter in place, depending on the scenario that has taken place.
Comment:
Amy Sebring: That must have been a real challenge, to boil it down to a manageable size.
August Vernon: Yes, it was very frustrating. Just like the questions that have been asked here, it took a lot of work to try to keep all of these down. What I did is take the classes that I teach that are 4 hours long and knock that down to 2 pages, versus an evacuation module, and the presentation could be 3 or 4 slides of information, and knocking that down to one bullet.
[Closing]
Amy Sebring: Time to wrap for today. Thank you very much August for an excellent job, and we hope you enjoyed the experience.
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