Featherstone has worked in numerous crises in Los Angeles, including the 1992 riots, the 1993 firestorm, which burned more than 14,000 acres, and the 1994 Northridge earthquake. He was selected as fire plans officer for the 2000 Democratic National Convention, for which he developed the department’s operational and tactical plans.
Earthquakes, mudslides, fires and terrorist threats all are potential disasters in Southern California. How do you stay on top of all of it?
We must be prepared for a plethora of natural hazards, and also the potential for some man-made disasters that are unintentional. We have basic preparedness, and we have preparedness specific to certain disasters — what we call “triggers.” We think preparedness is a lot of sharing of preparedness efforts across many different types of disasters, but there’s also a certain amount of specificity depending on what the disaster is.
Are the fundamentals the same in terms of preparedness and planning for all disasters? If so, what are the fundamentals?
There are some common denominators in disasters or emergencies. One of the things that we look at in emergency management is sometimes called The Five Pillars: situation status; resource status; commander’s intent; whether the commander’s intent is at the tactical level, the strategic level, the grand strategic or policy level; and information management. A standing objective in our [Emergency Operations Center] is crisis information management — how we manage the message. What is going on? What are we doing about it? What would we like the public to do to assist themselves and to assist us? And the final thing is to have processes: a planning process, a prevention process, a response process and a recovery process.
The people of L.A. are used to fires, earthquakes and everything else. Does that make it easier, or in some ways harder?
Yes to both of those. “Used to” is an interesting phrase because we have our share of fires and other disasters and catastrophes here in Southern California. But we must be careful that we don’t become jaded by these emergencies and crises. So it’s a constant struggle every day to get the message out — to make sure we have a message that goes out that is effective for the response community, the prevention components and the general public.
And citizens must realize that they become first responders in times of crisis. How do you get that message across?
That message is very important. We understand how critical messaging is and we do regular routine messaging — day-to-day messaging — but we also have specific messaging that we push out in times of crisis or potential crisis. We found that by managing the information, it’s a force multiplier for the response effort.
