The literature review identified the need for developing objectives for the incident and the ability to communicate those objectives to all officers involved in managing the incident. The material presented in the NFA courses, Command and Control of Natural and Man-Made Disasters and Executive Analysis of Fire Service Operations in Emergency Management, emphasized the need to collect and analyze the information provided by companies in the field to develop incident objectives. Further, that information should be used to develop a written Incident Action Plan (IAP) using standard Incident Command System forms. Auf der Heide (1989) specifically stated the need for such written documentation.
Form 202 (Incident Objectives) is the key to effective action. It is the initiator of the planning and control process and the place where Command begins to form and direct the organization. The form allows Command to describe all desired objectives and priorities (Auf der Heide, 1989, p. 153).
The fire department operational plans reviewed for this project all directed that either the ICS forms, or agency designed forms containing the same information, be used for all responses to severe weather emergencies.
Organization
The ability to organize and manage resources is critical to the success of emergency operations during severe weather emergencies. The review of the literature indicates a need to have an incident management system that is congruent with daily operations, but gives incident managers additional tools for comprehensive management of information and resources. The enhanced ICS should have the “look and feel” of the system that personnel work with on daily operations, but should provide fire officers with the capabilities to manage the extraordinary demands for resources that a severe weather emergency can trigger.
The advanced ICS organizational components of Incident Complex and Area command described in the NFA class, Command and Control of Natural and Man-made Disasters, provide such organizational tools to an organization. The Palm Beach Fire Rescue Department has taken those ICS tools and incorporated them into their Hurricane Response Plan as Battalion Command and Department Command. Each of those levels of organization and management have clearly defined roles and responsibilities that are described in the plan.
Resource Assignment
The information reviewed for this project revealed a need for organizations to make more effective and efficient use of its resources during response to severe weather emergencies. This resource management and assignment is very closely allied with the previously mentioned need for an enhanced ICS. A fire department must recognize that the normal operation of receiving an E-9-1-1 call from the public and then dispatching resources according to a response protocol in a Computer-Aided Dispatch System (CADS) will quickly consume available resources, and that those resources may not be going to the situations where they are most needed.
Different system must be in place to allow managers to receive the field assessment reports from front-line personnel, analyze that information, and then deploy resources where they can be most effective. In many cases this creates the need to operate outside of the parameters of the CADS. The Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) cannot function as the centralized entity receiving requests for service, processing those requests, and dispatching resources. The reviewed organizations designate that the overall incident manager must become responsible for the overall deployment of resources to subordinate commanders in the field. Those subordinate commanders then become responsible for the deployment and management of their assigned resources for as long as they have situations in their area of responsibility that require resources.
Incident Safety
Severe weather presents many safety hazards to emergency response personnel. Strong winds, both rotational and straight-line, lightning, torrential rain, and hail all present significant threats to emergency responders. Fire department policy for response during these events, and non-response as well, needs to be predicated on a knowledge of the science of weather and the hazards.
The literature review indicated that great advances have been made in the abilities of meteorologists to more accurately predict severe weather. The advent of Doppler Radar in the late 1980's dramatically increased their capability to detect rotational winds, those associated with tornados, thus enabling weather centers to give the citizen population more advance warning. However, that warning may only occur minutes before the storm strikes.
On the evening of April 1, 1998 and F3 tornado touched down near the town of Coatesville in Hanover County. . . . A Severe Thunderstorm Warning was issued at 6:45 p.m. and upgraded to a Tornado warning at 6:50 p.m. Despite the nearly ten minute lead time for the warning, there were two fatalities associated with this tornado (National Weather Service, 1998, http://tgsv5.nws.noaa.gov/er/akq/Hanover.htm).
Emergency response personnel need to become familiar with Doppler Radar technology and how to interpret what the radar is showing. The number of Internet websites that provide Doppler Radar imagery has increased dramatically in recent years. One of the best found in this research project was Intellicast.Com, www.intellicast.com, which offers Doppler Radar views for entire United States. It also offers all three major Doppler Radar products: base reflectivity, velocity, and precipitation. The Intellicast site also gives the viewer the ability to see all three products in motion over a six-hour time lapse.
Emergency responders should also develop a working knowledge of identifying approaching severe weather based on visual clues such as cloud formation, changes in windspeed and direction, and the direction from which severe weather approaches their locality. Airline pilots receive extensive training in such weather observation for use in their approaches for landings. This allows them to confirm the technical information provided to them by instruments such as radar, and to react appropriately when conditions change faster than the instruments can react to the changes. Emergency responders can find themselves in similar circumstances, especially when they are in the field and do not have access to technical information from sources such as Doppler Radar. A sound understanding of weather dynamics can help field commanders make more appropriate decisions to protect the safety of their personnel.
Strong winds present a physical hazard to personnel and vehicles just from the force of the wind that can blow vehicles off the road and overturn even large vehicles such as pumpers and aerial apparatus. Additionally, winds cause trees to fall, utility wires to come down, structures to disintegrate, etc., creating “missiles” from the resulting debris. The reviewed fire departments all stipulate in their policies at what windspeed emergency response will cease until windspeeds diminish to acceptable levels.
Torrential rains associated with severe weather, especially hurricanes, can present a number of safety hazards including: (1) localized flooding; (2) road washouts; (3) mudslides; (4) persons trapped in swift water: and (5) persons trapped in vehicles trapped by swift water. Fire department vehicle operators need to be especially cognizant of the hazard of road washouts particularly given the gross vehicle weights of today’s fire apparatus. Personnel need to be familiar with areas in their response area that are prone to flooding from heavy rains and avoid driving through moving water until the stability of the road can be established.
Persons and vehicles trapped in swift water present a significant life-safety hazard to both the victim and the rescuer. All first responders should be trained in initial response techniques for such incidents and apparatus should be equipped with the proper personal protective clothing and personal floatation devices for all personnel. Structural firefighting clothing is not appropriate protective clothing for swift water rescue operations, and can become a liability if personnel fall into the water due to the weight of the waterlogged material. Personal floatation devices rated for recreational purposes and “Mae West” style devices are not appropriate for the dynamic situations presented by swift water.
DISCUSSION Many fire departments, including Chesterfield Fire Department, are committed to providing the highest quality of service to every emergency call for service that they receive. However, when the observer looks at the dramatic increase in calls for service, and the short time span when that increase occurs during severe weather, it is clearly evident that those expectations cannot be met. For three selected storms in Chesterfield County in the 1990's (a tornado, a micro burst, and a tropical storm) that percentage of increase in the number of calls for service ranged from 300 percent (a tornado) to 597 percent (a tropical storm). Such dramatic increases in a short period of time severely taxed the resources of the department because there were no policies and procedures in place to manage these drastic deviations from normal operating procedures.
The results of the survey of fire officers in the department are interesting and puzzling in light of the lack of policy, procedure, or training provided by the department for response specific to severe weather emergencies. Company Officers, first-line supervisors, receive no training regarding the safety hazards associated with response to severe storm emergencies. They also receive no training on the importance of the preliminary, or “snapshot” assessment, and the “windshield survey” and how to complete those two vital incident assessment functions. Company Officers also do not receive adequate training to enable them operate in an independent mode of incident management, i.e., managing incidents and resources at the tactical level while Battalion Chiefs adopt a more strategic level of management at the battalion or county-wide level.
The survey responses of the Middle Managers were equally contradictory given the lack of severe storm related training that they have received. The low number of that group that has been exposed to formal strategic-level training, such as that offered by the NFA and EMI, would seem to suggest that the comfort level of the majority in dealing with severe weather emergencies is rooted in their past experience of dealing with such emergencies. That experienced-based learning may be very narrow in scope (based on their position in managing previous incidents) and short on application to future incidents (based on the size and magnitude of the previous incidents). The lack of formal training for that group as a whole presents a consistency problem as well as a possible negative influence on their ability to work collectively on large scale emergencies.
Weather
The research for this project revealed a large body of information regarding weather that the author had never been exposed to, certainly not in the context of response to emergency incidents. Though the literature review indicated that thunderstorms are very common, the potential for danger, especially from a supercell thunderstorm, is probably not common knowledge in the fire service. Although less than five percent of all thunderstorms are supercells, they (supercells) cause a disproportionate number of deaths, injuries, and property damage associated with severe weather. Supercells can also produce:
