When Should You Activate Your Emergency Operations Center?
It was an early evening in San Francisco. My workday done, I had stopped at our local BlockBuster on my way home to pick up a few videos for the family. As I was making my selection, I noticed out of the corner of my eye one of our MUNI buses pass by, shaking the building. As I was focused on my video selections it took me a few minutes to realize that a fleet of MUNI buses wouldn’t have been enough to shake the building. BlockBuster was on the basement level of a solid concrete building.
Earthquake! But not a very big one as no one else seemed to have noticed. I went out to my city vehicle and began to hookup my laptop to verify location and magnitude. I was still fiddling with the modem connection when I got a call on my cell phone from one of my staff. Mayor Willie Brown, Jr. had just directed the activation of the emergency operations center (EOC). My first reaction was, “Why?” But I was new to the job and was definitely not prepared to dispute my boss.
When I arrived at the EOC, most of the city department heads were already gathered and as confused as I was. As we were getting organized, the Mayor arrived with an entourage of media reporters, a slight breach of our security protocols but again, not a hill I was prepared to die on. The media took some background footage (what is known in the trade as “B” roll), verified nothing serious was going on and left. We closed the EOC shortly after.
It turns out that we were the only jurisdiction in the San Francisco Bay Area to activate our EOC that night. Consequently, we dominated the news coverage. Every station carried background footage of our department heads talking animatedly on the phones. (The fact that most were calling their families to explain being late was not important.) The message the public received from all this coverage was simple but powerful. We had demonstrated that no matter how small the event, the city government was ready on a moment’s notice to do whatever was necessary to protect the public.
A powerful message for the public, but an equally powerful lesson for a new emergency manager. Mayor Brown taught me that evening that it was not enough to be prepared, you also must show you are prepared. Communications consultant Art Botterell’s Fourth Law of Emergency Management notes that, “Perception is reality.”
Many new emergency managers are understandably hesitant to activate an EOC for lower-level events. There are costs associated with activation and a commitment of personnel and resources. New emergency managers often fear being accused of overreacting. But there are distinct advantages to activating your EOC.
The first, as demonstrated above, is public perception. During the rolling blackouts in California in 2000-2001, our planners soon realized that the blackouts were largely an inconvenience that did not pose a major risk to public safety. We were able to mitigate what little risk there was by forcing the power company to provide with the locations affected by each block of circuits that we were then able to overly on our GIS street maps to identify critical facilities and intersections. Since we knew when and where the blackouts would occur, we could provide early warning and preposition public safety resources as needed.
But there was still a great deal of concern on the part of the public. We evolved a three-tier system to match the power company’s levels. These consisted of conference calls with our task force and ultimately a partial activation of the EOC. We coupled this with a public information campaign that explained the reasons for the blackouts in simple terms that were easily grasped. All this went a long way to easing public concern.
Activating an EOC carries advantages beyond public perception. Each activation is an opportunity to test notification and activation procedures. It is an opportunity to review to test communication systems. It also an opportunity to conduct training on EOC protocols and support systems.
The process we evolved was simple. We conducted an activation as we would in any disaster or emergency. When our team was present, we provided a briefing on what we knew, and team members conducted assessments in their assigned areas. Once we determined there was no threat to public safety, we would conduct a very brief tabletop exercise of what we would have done if the situation had been worse. We ended with a brief after action review focused on problems with EOC systems and protocol.
We didn’t have to wait for events either. Our EOC was activated at various levels to support public safety operations on occasions such as New Years Eve, special events, or public demonstrations. The plus here was that lead agencies got the advantage of support from other agencies that might not have been present in a field command post. We also had agreements for specialized usage, such as support to the police department in the event of an abducted child.
After my first major fire in San Franciso, we were unhappy with the sheltering operation that followed the fire. I was part of a task force assigned to solve the problem. The first question I asked was, “Why didn’t we use the shelter annex in the emergency plan?” The answer was, “Oh, that’s just for disasters.” It took us several years of hard work to change that attitude. Don’t let your EOC be “just for disasters.”