What would EMRG do in an emergency?

Written 2008-12-06

An Amateur wrote to me the other day saying that they were not clear on what exactly EMRG would do in an emergency. Looking through the web site, listening to us talk about the need for re-organization of EMRG and the recent posting about terrorism on the email list, left this person with no clear view in their head. It is questions like this that help me see where we are, or are not. I have been dealing with this for so long at an intense level that it all seems very clear to me, but people can't read my mind, so I thought I should provide a short summary.

In an emergency, if our clients require our services (just because there is an emergency does not mean they need our services), our typical role would be to support shelters and community patrols like in the Ice Storm and Power Outage. EMRG clients are the organizations who actually use EMRG emergency communications services. The three main clients are the City of Ottawa Department of Community Services, the Ottawa Red Cross, and the Ottawa Salvation Army. These organizations have identified a possible requirement for radio communications in an emergency and a desire to have EMRG provide that radio communications service. We are not a backup solution for the Police, Fire and Paramedics. They have no plans or requirements for our services and we have no plans, nor the capability to support them.

It does not matter what type of emergency or disaster takes place, our role is to help the humanitarian organizations take care of the population who are either at home without services or displaced and living in shelters. The only difference between a storm, fire, earthquake, terrorist attack, plane crash, building collapse or a giant accident, is the amount of damage and the difficulty getting around after due to debris or security.

Our clients are looking for communications within the City of Ottawa, to link their command centres and headquarters with shelters or community patrols. This is VHF/UHF communications, typically using repeaters. Long range HF communications is unlikely to be required and if it is, we would use a home station as a relay. Home stations are of little value for emergency communications. We need people to leave home with their radio and provide communications from one of the client sites, such as a shelter. Vehicle radios are only of use if a mobile capability is required, either while going to your assigned destination, or during a community patrol.

What We Have Not Been Doing

What I think we have not been doing is practicing and perfecting what we do, both within EMRG and with our clients. I did not engage the clients yet because I believe we should not engage our clients in a more detailed way unless we have the basics in place to support that engagement, which is also the foundation on which to build improvements. This is the reason we have not been in the "practicing and perfecting" phase so far.

The 3 key problems are not having any Training and Exercise planning/coordination capability, along with delays in getting basic voice infrastructure in place.While the technical stuff is getting close and we can put on a push, use something temporary or otherwise make a reasonable showing, without an effective Exercise and Training component, we won't get anywhere sustainable. This is why the reorganization of EMRG is so important.

With these 3 things, Training, Exercises and Infrastructure, we can engage our clients with a reasonable expectation of putting our best foot forward. We need to demonstrate that we are a serious volunteer group. We don't need to be perfect, but we need to be organized and look like we put a little thought into their requirements.

Infrastructure (voice repeaters to support more than one channel from most key locations) We need to be able to get two channels from the Orleans Sportsplex, Nepean Sportsplex, Ottawa Red Cross on Catherine St, City EOC at city Hall, and Community Services Command Centre in Ben Franklin Place Centrepoint. They may not ask for all these at once, but we could be asked for any combination of a few of them. The repeaters are almost all in place (enough to move forward), but we need to complete the end user radios for the Red Cross, EOC and at least 1 portable shelter kit.
Training plan We need the plan and the capability to add and deliver new topics, as identified from interaction with clients. It may be that we need to develop some specific training, or the client may be able to provide some training, but we need to understand where it fits in our plans and be able to help them shape it if it needs to be shaped to fit our skills and time frame. (For example having OFS provide ICS in 2 hours rather than 2 weeks.)
Exercise Capability. We need the plan and the capability to develop a joint exercise with the client. It is not enough to let the client develop an exercise and we just jump in where they put us. We need to help them develop a true test of our capabilities. We had John Senez (before he had 2 kids) which worked well. The Airport exercise took a lot of time for both John and I, but we had a really good role for EMRG, deployed to many locations and worked with several clients. It should have been the beginning of things, not the one and only.

Putting together a simple exercise is not a huge task, but somebody needs to do it. Somebody needs to put together lessons learned and get somebody in training to build up the areas in which we are deficient. Once somebody has done the training, we need somebody to plan another exercise to build skills and test what we learned. This brings us to the big question about whether anyone knows somebody, because somebody needs to be involved to make all this happen.

Back to my original note that we need to move forward three areas, infrastructure, training and exercises, in parallel. Doing this once is difficult for the management team alone and doing it a couple times a year is beyond us. Since we can't get somebody to do all these things, then we need to break things down and get somebody to take on these slightly smaller more manageable pieces. This is the great quagmire that we have been wadding in for some time. We are not a long way from success, but unfortunately we are just as close to failure if we don't make changes.

I hope this helps anyone who was not sure. We are working on improvements to the content on the web site, but that too takes time and I need to multi task between that, the re-organization, technical stuff and the ongoing administration of the organization.

If you have questions, please send them directly to me, pgamble at emrg.ca.

Regards
Peter
Peter Gamble -VE3BQP
Team Leader -Emergency Measures Radio Group
Emergency Coordinator (EC) -Ottawa ARES