[CTSARA] An Interesting Three Days With Senior City Police/Fire/SEMS

[Jon Perelstein]

For the past three days, I had the privilege of attending ICS 300 training
given by the City of Stamford for senior fire, operations, and police
personnel.  I was invited to attend in my dual roles of SARA President and
Stamford CERT communications officer.  Among the other attendees were a
Stamford Fire and Rescue Assistant Chief, a Stamford Fire and Rescue Deputy
Chief, a Stamford Fire and Rescue Battalion Commander, two Stamford Police
Captains, four senior SEMS personnel, three Coast Guard officers, some
senior people from Stamford Operations, senior fire officers from a couple
of surrounding towns, and Chris Munger.  Ted Jankowski (our Director of
Public Safety) sat in on the course but is already well advanced beyond the
ICS 300 level.  The course was taught by specialists brought in from the
FEMA training center at University of Texas - Austin.

It was a grueling course.  They don't play around on the classroom
exercises.  I was teamed up with the two Stamford Fire Chiefs, the two
Police Captains, one of the SEMS Captains, and one of the Coast Guard
officers for the exercises and it was interesting to watch these people at
work.  I noted a couple of very positive things:

-  There was good camaraderie between the Stamford Police, Fire, and SEMS
people.  As opposed to what one hears about some places (e.g, New York
City, Boston), Stamford Police, Fire, and EMS seem to get along and are
focused on working together.  Each classroom exercise was a different
scenario and they had no trouble deciding which entity was best suited to
take the leadership role in the incident -- a decision that was not
necessarily clear to an untrained observer like me (e.g., explosion and
fire resulting from terrorism).

-  There was also good camaraderie between the Stamford people and those
from other towns/the Coast Guard.  In most cases, they clearly knew each
other and even when they didn't (they didn't know the Coast Guard people),
they were welcoming and open.  Hell, they were even welcoming and open to
me.

-  The Stamford people weren't afraid to admit that there was something
they didn't know and to reach out for help.  For example, one of the
scenarios was a railroad freight train derailment involving burning white
phosphorous and molten sulfur.  The fire chiefs fully admitted that they
don't get much experience with that kind of thing in Stamford and were
immediately on the phone to a clearing house fire departments use to get
info on fighting a type of fire with which they are not experienced -- and
in the simulation were immediately calling in an expert to help them
evaluate and manage the fire fighting.  By the way, the usual approach with
something like white phosphorous is to let it burn out because you can't
put water on it (white phosphorous reacts with water in very nasty ways)
and it's almost impossible to put foam on that much white phosphorous.

They even had a little fun by making me the incident commander for a big
city fire -- and then walked me through the steps of figuring out how to
manage the fire fighting.  Things like calling up special equipment,
keeping the firefighters fed and hydrated, rehab (keeping the equipment and
firefighters operational while fighting the fire), getting additional
supplies, working with neighboring communities for mutual aid, etc., etc.,
etc.  It was done as a learning exercise to guide me through all the
different kinds of things that fire chiefs/battalion commanders have to
think about.  And holy cow, it's a lot more complicated and a lot more
difficult than it appears on "Rescue Me" or "Emergency".

I don't think I'm going to be riding up on a fire truck next time there's a
fire, but it did give me some good insight into how the City works in a
major incident.

73s
Jon, WB2RYV