DICE DoD's Interoperability Communications Exercise: if you aren't prepared—you're rolling the dice

CHIPS, July-Sept, 2008 by Sharon Anderson

"In many cases, and the [Minneapolis] bridge is a good example, it took a series of about four phone calls from the governor to the Secretary of Transportation to the Secretary of Defense."

The general discussed the specialized assistance that the DoD can provide that often doesn't exist at the local or state level.

"During the hurricane season this past year, Hurricane Dean was threatening the Texas coast. The state of Texas has a very well-developed hurricane response plan, but one of the areas where they had a requirement for support was in evacuation of unique medical patients, some critical care, some very aged. That capacity doesn't exist in large numbers in an individual state. DoD was asked to provide capability to move some of those critical care patients.

"In Minnesota, when the bridge collapsed, the state had a very good capacity to respond to the structure failure and in the first response to those injured. However, the state, and truly anywhere in the federal government, you did not have capacity to put divers in the water to operate in that environment to help recover the remains of those killed, so DoD was asked to provide Navy salvage divers to go in there," Renuart said.

Both Renaurt and Cannon talked about how pre-scripting consequence management has led to quicker and better coordinated response efforts.

"In 2006, we had 44 pre-scripted mission assignments with four other federal agencies--DoD being one of them--the main one. Today, we have over 240 with 31 federal agencies. That is a tremendous difference in a year and a half's time. We don't want to wait until we are in the middle of the event to call our friends at DoD and say, now we need some help," Cannon said.

The comprehensive domestic response structure relies on continuous information sharing and contact among support providers for crisis planning. Providers emphasized that procedures are planned collectively so that each agency can respond to an emergency without hesitation.

"We look within each of the 10 FEMA regions [for] the kinds of events that could occur within that region that you can somewhat predict, not the timing, but at least the type of event. Then we begin to try to identify those shortfalls in capacity that may exist among the states or among the various federal partners and look out into DoD to see how we might help fill that gap," Cannon said.

Although the formal request for assistance must go through all the appropriate levels for approval, providers are simultaneously planning their relief response.

"There is a process involved, but underneath that, we have the agencies talking to each other in real-time almost as the event occurs. You can look at floods in the Midwest in the last few days--FEMA, DoD and the states were all talking to each other about what might be needed if the flooding level began to expand beyond what was predicted," Cannon said.

Inter-talk-ability

While interoperability between agencies and response times improved tenfold, improvements required a cultural shift in how agencies were organized to provide emergency support.