Goals of Command in Coping with Major Incidents - Article Example

The goals of command and control in coping with major incidents In any disaster response system, the command and control system plays a crucial role in coordinating the efforts of rescue and relief personnel. No matter how brave and well equipped emergency response personnel are, they will not be able to focus their efforts effectively unless they receive appropriate, accurate, and timely information and instructions. An effective command and control system must accomplish several basic goals: Appropriate emergency-response personnel must be dispatched quickly to the right place with the right equipment. Responders must be given proper instructions and information. Because the information available changes as an emergency progresses, command and control personnel must be able to supply responders with updated information and orders whenever necessary. Civilians must be provided with accurate, consistent, and timely information in order to be able effectively to help themselves and those around them. This information should be made available on both a “push” and a “pull” basis—that is, it should be broadcast (or “narrowcast”) to civilians who are likely to need it, and should also be available to those who request it, e.g. by calling emergency telephone numbers. Obviously, emergency-response personnel at the scene should provide civilians with the same information and advice as is available from centralized sources, differing only as necessary to conform to specific local conditions. Information from various sources—news media, involved civilians, emergency-response personnel, and others—must be gathered, sorted, integrated, evaluated, and communicated quickly and rapidly. Personnel from various agencies must be able to work together effectively, based on shared information and consistent instructions. This requires that all emergency responders be able to communicate with the same command and control staff; ideally, responders from different agencies should be able to communicate directly with one another as well. Decisions must be made quickly and correctly, and implemented with no uncertainties regarding the chain of command. “Turf wars” must never be fought in the midst of a crisis; and all relevant agencies must be ready and willing to work under a predefined, unitary command structure for the duration of the crisis. Of course, even the best command and control system cannot solve all the problems presented by natural and human-made disasters; but a well-designed and implemented command and control system can ensure that the full strength of the emergency-response system is brought to bear in a timely and effective manner, so that the effects of disaster are mitigated to the maximum extent possible. Components of an effective command and control system In order to accomplish the goals outlined above, a command and control system must include a number of components, which can be grouped into several interlocking categories: policies, personnel, equipment, and practice. (9/11 Commission Staff, pp. 4-6) Policies: In order for the emergency-response system to be ready to function at peak efficiency on minimal notice, policies must be formulated well in advance and effectively communicated to all relevant agencies and personnel. These policies must define how the system will respond to a crisis, so that only decisions specifically related to the unique details of a particular emergency remain to be made during the emergency itself: The chain of command must be clearly set out and agreed by all relevant parties. If the response to a large-scale emergency is to be effective and coherent, all relevant agencies must accept orders from the same source. In the event that one or more key individuals are (or become) unavailable, it must be known in advance who will take their place. (New York City Council, October 2002) Procedures for setting up forward and rear command posts must be defined. Relevant issues that must be considered include the optimum distance between the forward command post and the site of the disaster, the personnel who will be assigned to command posts, the equipment that must be put in place for command posts to function, and so on. Roles for various emergency-response personnel and agencies must be defined so that they can work together synergistically. While flexibility is required to meet unpredictable demands, an efficient response to a large-scale emergency requires a degree of specialization among responders. The roles and responsibilities of various levels of government must be defined clearly and appropriately. While local government is typically responsible for immediate issues of emergency response, liaison with state/provincial and national government agencies can be crucial to ensuring that adequate forces and resources are available to cope with emergencies. Accordingly, the mechanisms for such liaison must be defined in advance, so that communications issues do not impede a fast and effective emergency response. Personnel: It is fairly obvious that the various agencies responsible for “overt” aspects of emergency response need to be adequately staffed and trained to meet their responsibilities—nobody expects to be able to cope with disaster without an adequate number of well-trained police, firefighters, emergency medical personnel, and so on. However, it is equally important to have adequate staff available to handle emergency telephone services and other support functions, which in a crisis may have to cope with a greatly expanded workload. To enable the rapid expansion of such services, it may be advisable to have other support personnel cross-trained so they can double as emergency operators and the like. Equipment: The infrastructure for collecting, evaluating, and disseminating information and instructions must be able to cope with a full-scale emergency, in which all relevant agencies are deployed at or near their full strength. Radios for personnel in the field must have adequate range, must support interoperability among the various emergency services, must support an adequate range of frequencies to allow a large number of simultaneous conversations, and—not to neglect the obvious—must be available in adequate quantities to ensure that all emergency responders remain in touch with command and control personnel. Emergency telephone switchboards must be able to cope with volumes much higher than usual, since it is quite normal for these services to be flooded with calls during an emergency. Practice: It is not enough to define command hierarchies, procedures, and roles; all relevant personnel and agencies must be ready to act effectively in accordance with these policies the moment a crisis breaks out. The only way to ensure that this happens is to conduct periodic medium- and large-scale emergency drills, simulating various forms of disaster in various locations. These drills should include all relevant agencies, from police, fire, and ambulance personnel to hospitals and government officials. If these drills are conducted properly, when a real emergency arises the relevant personnel will know reflexively exactly what to do to set up command-and-control bases, coordinate the various emergency-response teams, make decisions and communicate them, and so on. No amount of single-agency practice can substitute for this kind of inter-agency drill, since failures in emergency response very often occur because of inter-agency coordination and communication problems. Large-scale emergency drills are also essential to ensure that staff have mastered the appropriate skills, and that equipment—particularly communications infrastructure—meets the requirements of a real-world emergency. Command and control in the 9/11 World Trade Center attack The emergency services’ response to the 9/11 World Trade Center attack succeeded in saving thousands of lives; one estimate is that some 25,000 people were evacuated, although it is not clear if this figure represents only those evacuated from the three buildings that collapsed. (New York City Council, September 2002; see also 9/11 Commission, Section 9, p. 316) In this respect, as well as in regard to the bravery shown by the responding police and firefighters, the services deserve a great deal of respect and gratitude. At the same time, this tragedy revealed serious flaws in the command and control system for handling large-scale emergencies in New York City; these flaws contributed heavily to the deaths of three hundred forty-three firefighters and twenty-three police officers in the collapse of the Twin Towers, and significantly increased the civilian death toll as well. (9/11 Commission Staff, pp. 8-9) Throughout the incident, workers in the Twin Towers received contradictory and obsolete advice from the 911 emergency telephone service, when they could get through to the service at all. The service did not have adequate capacity to deal with the volume of calls it received, and there was no mechanism in place to update the information available to 911 operators as the situation evolved. As a result, 911 operators were still telling callers to remain in their offices—the standard procedure for handling a fire in the Towers—after senior fire officers had given the order to evacuate the buildings. (9/11 Commission, Section 9, p. 287 and p. 318) Witnesses have testified that groups of people who had begun to evacuate the buildings were told to turn back, and as a result died when the Towers collapsed. While the UHF radios carried by the New York Police Department (NYPD) and the Port Authority Police Department (PAPD) generally functioned adequately during the incident, the VHF radios of the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) and Emergency Medical Services (EMS) did not. VHF radios can cover longer distances than equivalent UHF radios in open territory, but VHF signals do not penetrate buildings as well as UHF signals do. Normal procedure for firefighters called to the World Trade Center was to receive low-powered UHF “loaner” radios from the PAPD for use during an incident; but this procedure was not designed to handle a major, large-scale emergency. As a result, FDNY personnel at the Twin Towers often did not have effective and reliable radio communications on 9/11. Another communications problem was that a large number of off-duty officers of the various emergency services “self dispatched” to the World Trade Center, and did not have radios at all. (9/11 Commission, Section 9, p. 283; Wikipedia, “9/11 Radio Communications”) Perhaps the most frequently identified problem in radio communications on 9/11 was the lack of interoperability between the various departments’ radios—especially between the NYPD’s UHF radios and the FDNY’s VHF radios. Because information gathered by NYPD helicopters was not communicated to fire personnel, a warning of the north tower’s imminent collapse did not reach firefighters inside the building—many of whom would otherwise have been able to escape. (Dwyer et al, 2002 and 2005; 9/11 Commission, Section 9, p. 309) (In fact, it has been observed that people watching television at home knew more about what was going on in the upper stories of the Twin Towers than the firefighters inside the buildings knew.) While this problem was a real one, it is equally true that interoperability alone is not a solution to all problems. One of the difficulties faced by responders on 9/11 was that there was simply too much radio traffic; often several conversations were being conducted simultaneously on the same channel. While adding more channels could reduce this overload, more channels also mean more complexity for responders. It is possible that a strong system of information consolidation at the command and control level could be more effective in ensuring that the right information is made available to the emergency personnel than merely adding common frequencies to their radios. Precisely because it was such a major and unprecedented incident, 9/11 is of somewhat dubious value as a test case for evaluating the New York City emergency services’ command and control capabilities; even a really well-designed and well-drilled command and control system would likely have encountered problems in such a situation. However, many, if not all, of the problems that came up on 9/11 would also have become apparent in the course of any well-designed, large-scale emergency drill, even if it dealt only with a “realistic” (as of 10 September 2001) scenario. Psychological impact of terrorism As has been frequently pointed out, terrorism is a form of psychological warfare. The goal of “classical” terrorists is to achieve a level of influence over their targeted enemy far beyond what their resources would ordinarily allow them to achieve; to a lesser extent, “classical” (or “modern”) terrorism also aims to bring the terrorists’ cause to the attention of third parties, and to gain credibility with the terrorists’ home audience. The 9/11 attacks, however, appear to have had a somewhat different mixture of motivations: some experts refer to them as “post-modern terrorism”, in which the psychological impact of the attacks on the targeted population is merely a secondary goal, and the actual damage caused to the targeted society (particularly economic damage), as well as enhanced home-audience credibility, are the primary goals. The psychological effect of “post-modern” terrorism on the targeted society is essentially the same as that of “classical” terrorism, but in the former case there is no clear set of demands the fulfillment of which will appease the terrorists; this means that “post-modern” terrorism appears even more senseless and arbitrary to its targets than “classical” terrorism does. The typical effect of terror attacks on survivors, including some emergency responders, is acute stress disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. (Greig 2006) These effects can be mitigated, at least to a degree, by early treatment; it is important to make appropriate counseling and treatment services available to all survivors of an attack, even if they do not initially appear to be suffering from these syndromes. Further, media coverage of spectacular terror attacks can lead even people who were nowhere near the attack, and who have no close connection to any of those involved, to suffer psychological trauma. (It is interesting to note, in this context, that news media reporting on terror attacks in Israel are not allowed to show images of dead people, body parts, or blood; a certain amount of freedom of the press has been sacrificed in order to reduce the terrorists’ ability to influence the national psyche.) Even in the most heavily targeted countries, terrorism (at least so far) is a relatively minor cause of death and injury compared to other phenomena that society takes in its stride—for example, traffic accidents. However, terrorism typically causes fear far beyond its “mathematical” impact; perhaps because terrorists kill and hurt with intent, and perhaps because modern-day terror attacks are highly violent, people at no special risk are apt to worry about being victimized by terrorism even though they are taking a far greater risk every time they get into their cars. This is exactly what terrorists intend: by focusing people’s attention on terrorism, the terrorists succeed in hijacking the targeted society’s thought processes. One response that some targeted countries have taken to terrorism consists of “target hardening”—not of the actual physical targets (although these are defended as well), but of their own populations. People who understand the ways in which terrorists are attempting to manipulate them are less easily manipulated; and while such “target hardening” does not eliminate the impact of terrorism, it does reduce it, particularly for those not directly impacted. 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Accessed at http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/congress/9-11_commission/040519-staff_statement_14.pdf (or http://tinyurl.com/3c4rsf) Thompson, Dennis M, 15 March 2006, “Command and Control of Homeland Security Response to Catastrophic Incidents”, U.S. Army War College. http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/ksil517.pdf Wikipedia: “9/11 Radio Communications”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11,_2001_radio_communications, accessed 15 November 2007 Wikipedia: “Rescue and recovery effort after the September 11, 2001 attacks”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_and_recovery_effort_after_the_September_11,_2001_attacks, accessed 15 November 2007. Read More