Lessons learned in Los Alamos
Few communities are threatened simultaneously by wildfire and radioactive waste, but all can learn from the successes and failures of the Cerro Grande response. Capt. Robert Repass, emergency management coordinator for Los Alamos County, makes the following recommendations.
Communication
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Include amateur ham radio operators in the response plan. Phone systems, including cell phones, get overwhelmed quickly in emergencies. The Los Alamos County teams used amateur ham radio operators to bridge multiple agencies using multiple frequencies.
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Set up a contact point for residents. When you evacuate your whole town, you have thousands of people who want to know what is going on. We found that our dispatch was getting overwhelmed. To avoid that problem, set up a phone bank, staffed by volunteers who can answer residents’ questions.
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Incident command
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Establish a multi-agency or multi-jurisdicational incident command system. Los Alamos County and the Los Alamos National Laboratory ran separate emergency operations centers. Both agreed that one EOC would have been much more efficient. (The two are developing a joint EOC scheduled to be ready by 2003.)
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Conduct large-scale exercises across agencies and jurisdictions.
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Security
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Establish an access control system. We had contractors and county employees who needed to get into certain areas and multiple police agencies trying to determine who could and could not enter. As a result, Los Alamos had to develop a badging system to control access to the evacuated area.
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Media
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Keep the media in the loop. For a large event, the media will show up in swarms. They will commandeer the cell phone network and hotel rooms. Plan to locate the media somewhere close to your center of operations. Obviously, you are not going to let them into your EOC or into your decision-making areas, but the media needs to be in the immediate vicinity.
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Building codes/environmental concerns
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Pass more stringent building/fire codes and ordinances, including those that mandate sprinklers.
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Educate residents about the need to thin out wildland areas that are choked with fuel. They have to understand that cutting down relatively few trees now can save many times that later.
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Animal control
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Include animal control in emergency response plans. Many residents believed they would only be evacuated for a few hours. As the hours stretched into days, the county’s animal control officers rescued more than 700 dogs, cats, birds, and even horses. It was an area that had not received much attention in the county’s plan, so it had to be developed on the fly.