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

[Jonathan Solomon]

Jon

Did it give you ideas on where hams might fit in ?

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On Jun 29, 2012, at 11:16 AM, Jon Perelstein <jon.perelstein at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
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