A group of Maine forest rangers and other responders from Downeast headed for New York City on October 31st to help with the disaster caused by Hurricane Sandy.
According to the maine.gov website, the Maine Forest Ranger Incident Management Team (MEIMT) was “requested through the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC), a mutual aid agreement which facilitates member states sending personnel and equipment to help disaster relief efforts in other states.”
Some will ask, “How can they be much help? What do forest rangers from Washington County, Maine know about city people’s problems, about pumping out urban basements, about underground power lines and homeless people and looters and gas leaks and flooded subways and garbage piles and senior citizens stuck on the 26th floor?”
That’s not the point. When a crisis grows bigger than one local responder group can handle in one day, the situation calls for more than just lots of extra hands. The extra hands need somebody keeping track of things, taking on the logistics, and facilitating communication—and this can mean anything from making calls to bring in specialized response teams to making sure volunteers have drinking water. This is Incident Management, and I am a convinced skeptic.
How do you know how to manage a big mess? You practice.
Closer to home, representatives of dozens of agencies got together this fall to discuss and plan a simulated emergency here in Penobsot Bay. In the imagined scenario, a commuter aircraft goes down somewhere in the bay between North Haven and Islesboro, close to the county line between Knox and Waldo. Nobody knows exactly what happened but reports are that a lot of people are in the water. The mock disaster could just as easily have been centered around a ferry, or a schooner, or an offshore fishing boat. Think about it: who would respond to something like that? Obviously the local mariners and fishermen would, but a crisis like this would require a lot more resources than they could bring in a hurry. There also could be unusual dangers or complications that the locals might not be aware of. In this practice scenario, members of the United States Coast Guard, the State Police, the Marine Patrol, local emergency management and emergency medical services and fire departments, sheriff’s deputies, harbormasters, ham radio operators, hospital staff, the American Red Cross, local search and rescue groups, and others helped with the planning, and many of them participated in the simulated response at LaSalle Island on October 13th. Members of the Ragged Mountain (Camden Snow Bowl) Ski Patrol and Waldo County government played the “victims.”
Practicing for disaster response doesn’t mean having a crystal ball. We don’t pretend to know how many things can go wrong, or when and where emergencies will happen, or in what new and creative ways people can get injured. We can plan to minimize the chaos, to improve the communications, to direct resources more smoothly, and to avoid making the same mistakes twice. We need to study each severe storm, each wreck, each power failure, and each fire and see what the lessons are. Did one responder group have trouble communicating with another? Let’s take a look at the radio communications. Were all the searchers sent to the same side of the lake instead of spread out? Let’s make sure they get better directions next time. This, too, is Incident Management. As a larger society, we should have learned a lot from what took place on September 11, 2001 and from the responses to Hurricane Katrina. As emergency responders, we know that good communication sometimes saves lives. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) expects all municipal officials—even those in tiny Maine towns—to understand the need for agency interoperability and properly organized responses to crises of any kind. Oh, and no more “ten-codes” and obscure acronyms; now we know that emergency responders should speak in plain English, even on the radio. Thank goodness.
This may be a lot to ask of us, I will admit. We small-town responders jump in our trucks or boats or whatever and run to the scene and do what we can. However, when the problem is really big, a lot of people running around doing whatever they think best without communicating with anybody else is likely not the best way to get things done. Three different people should not give different instructions to the same search volunteer. Ten people cannot be trying to talk on the same radio channel at the same time.
On Matinicus Island, we’ve had some amazing and inspiring cases of everybody rushing to the assistance of people in trouble and saving lives. My neighbors have put out very scary fires, pulled people out of the water, and got the lights back on in the nasty weather numerous times. Islanders often don’t have the luxury of on-duty professionals in charge and we don’t believe we can spare an able-bodied person to run a clip-board. But think about it: a lone small-town fire chief, for example, cannot single-handedly fight the fire and keep track of all the helpers, get more help coming, keep the volunteers safe and busy where they need to be, talk to the reporters, and reassure the family members. It is just not humanly possible; the responsibilities must be shared. When the scene grows large, or extends over a long period of time, or requires more than one type of response agency, the skills and procedures of proper incident management can make the difference between work getting done and general confusion.
A note to our seasonal neighbors: as you read this, don’t just think “Oh, good, those people around the islands are readying themselves to rescue me should I ever have an emergency.” Instead, think, “When I’m in Maine and an emergency happens in my area, what might my role be? How could I truly help? To whom would I go to volunteer?” This is not always obvious in our tiny communities. It might be a conversation worth having.
Eva Murray is a freelance contributor living on Matinicus.