Communications Watch?

We have an alert state for The Virtual Emergency Operations Center (TVEOC) called "Communications Watch."  So, what does that mean, and why do we do it?

Alert states in an emergency operations center are a way to manage staffing and functions throughout the life cycle of a specific disaster.  Obviously, when the earliest hints that a disaster might occur appear, we do not need every member on duty and a full Incident Command System staff running.  On the other hand, we definitely do need more people and more functions when the crisis is on us.  Alert states give us clear guidelines for people and actions for a developing event so that we can provide effective support to other organizations.  And they allow us to increase both in an orderly way as the situation deteriorates.

On a day-to-day basis we operate routine operations in a Released alert state.  This means we have a Watch Officer on duty, and we check our systems on a regular basis to ensure they are functioning correctly.  The Watch Officer maintains situation awareness, monitoring a variety of sources to determine if there is a potential threat in an area where we provide support to one or more organizations.

 

When a threat starts to develop, or when governmental emergency management systems start to increase their alert levels, we need to increase the level of preparedness for action by monitoring the TVEOC communications links and our information sources more frequently.  At the same time we need to give the membership an alert that activation may be required for an imminent event, and develop initial plans and briefings for response.  Hence we declare a Communications Watch.  

 

A Communications Watch differs from the Warning Orders our Watch Officers send out to alert the members to potential threats.  A Warning Order is a heads up that something may happen with no action required other than increasing personal situation awareness (although we may send one as the first alert in a rapidly developing situation).  A Communications Watch is a set of actions by the staff on duty and by individual members to increase our ability to respond to an event that we can identify as having an imminent requirement for us to initiate operations. 

 

So read your Communications Watch checklist, and the next time a Communications Watch is declared be ready to take the actions it specifies.

It Is Checklist Time Again

We routinely revise our operational checklists when there are changes to how The Virtual Emergency Operations Center operates or to our operational procedures.  Why bother?  After all, with apologies to the bandidos in the classic Western comedy Blazing Saddles, "Checklists, we don't need no stinking Checklists!"

But the reality is that we actually do need checklists.  Operations under the pressure of disaster conditions must be high reliability.  Lost information, bad choices, or befuddled process all have real consequences in delayed or just plain wrong responses to immediate needs.  Regardless of your level of experience, the pressure of the event and the complexity of response will cause you to miss obvious steps if all you have to rely on is your memory of how to do it right.

This is a lesson people who do things that require high reliability have learned.  Pilots, ranging from private pilots to pilots who fly commercial and military aircraft, have checklists to follow for every stage of flight.  Military command center staffs and missile launch crews have checklists to make sure that they can quickly do their jobs in a crisis.  Increasingly medical facilities use checklists for procedures that have a high potential for bad outcomes if the right steps in treatment are not taken in the right order.  The list of checklist users is endless.

Operating an online emergency operations center supporting several organizations is a complex task.  When we operate with only a watch officer the job is single track, but still complex with many tasks to be done and an optimal order in which to do them.  In a big event, with multiple staff members on duty, the checklists help ensure not only that all tasks are completed, but also that they are coordinated between the staff members.

We just completed revision of our online checklists to the new 5 October 2014 edition.  It was time well spent to ensure that we can do the best possible job of supporting other voluntary organizations with effective disaster information management.   

Preparathon Report and Feedback

In September we participated in the National Preparedness Month sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.  Our reply to a request for information on activities conducted posted in the National Preparedness Community is pasted in below:

The Legion of Frontiersmen in the United States is a small, all-volunteer disaster response organization that provides information management services to voluntary organizations through our online facility, The Virtual Emergency Operations Center.  The National Preparathon Month was an excellent opportunity for us to test our readiness with two exercises.  On 5-7 September we ran a combined United States and Canada alerting exercise with a 3 day major earthquake scenario long the US-Canada border for our members and for our Canadian counterparts.  This gave us good baseline data on availability of people (66% of the membership) and on electronic alerting (over 50% alerted in 8 hours from the east to west coasts).  On the Day of Action on 30 September we ran a winter storm scenario to test a new micro-volunteering portal we have installed to allow short term volunteers to provide us warning data on developing events.  We identified some minor technical fixes to our system, took our alert status from Released through Communications Watch in under one hour, and established a format for recognizing and providing feedback to volunteers who provide us early warning data.  We are using the lessons from these  two exercises to prepare for our exercises in October on the 18th as part of the Great ShakeOut and the 25th for USA Weekend's Make a Difference Day.

The feedback from the National Preparedness Community Manager who requested the information on Preparathon activities was:

You guys got a lot of really great experience last month! Glad to hear that you were able to activate your volunteer base and take the lessons learned and apply them to the Great Shakeout. Wow! Great work. Thanks for sharing.

Current Disaster Exercise Schedule

Internal disaster exercises currently scheduled are:

18 October 2014 in conjunction with the Great ShakeOut - test of ability to rapidly go from Released status to full Activation in response to an earthquake event.

25 October 2014 in conjunction with the USA Weekend Make A Difference Day - test procedures for staff scheduling in a disaster.