DHS Hometown Security Website Aims to Help Prepare Your Business for Emergencies

At the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Assistant Secretary for the Office of Infrastructure Protection Caitlin Durkovich recognizes how hard it can be for emergency managers to distill the message of preparedness for citizens and businesses.

With the rise of global terror, the threat landscape has become exponentially more complex, making it harder for first responders and others to communicate even basic security information. “But this is the new normal, this is the world that we are living in now, where we are going to see attacks on soft targets with frequency,” she said.

To convey the significance of that reality, emergency managers need a concise message.

The new DHS website Hometown Security aims to deliver just that. “Keeping it simple is sometimes the most important thing you can do in this business, and that’s what this is: just a very simple framework, a very simple message,” Durkovich said.

Launched this spring, Hometown Security gathers a range of existing DHS incident-preparedness tools along with a new fact sheet to help direct small and mid-sized businesses to free tools and resources. DHS says the intended audience includes restaurants, clubs, grocery stores, places of worship and other venues where people may congregate.

Easy-access tabs encourage businesses to Connect, Plan, Train and Report, defining these four basic concepts as the rudiments of preparedness. Each tab gives concise instructions in the essentials of the craft: Exercise your emergency communications plan; report unattended vehicles or suspicious visitors; and develop evacuation and shelter-in-place plans.

This basic guidance is surrounded by links to more detailed information. Visitors can drill down for direction on active shooter preparedness, chemical security, cybersecurity and several other topics.

Early users within the emergency

management community say they see a place for the new DHS asset in their toolkits.

‘It’s Quick’

Kevin Cleary is more or less up to his neck in mass-crowd events. As director of preparedness in the Baltimore Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management, he stood watch as a record 135,256 people gathered for the Preakness Stakes in May to see Exaggerator cut short Nyquist’s undefeated record. In July more than 350,000 braved sweltering heat to take part in the annual Artscape cultural celebration. Thousands gathered for a series of some two dozen gay pride happenings at the end of July. And this fall the city is slated to host a weeklong series of events leading up to the christening of the USS Zumwalt, a new Navy warship. Cleary calls it “a robust special events season,” which seems an understatement.

To ride the swell, he has all the usual tools of emergency management at his disposal, including online resources from FEMA and the city’s own Corporate Emergency Access System. He said he welcomes the new DHS tool.

“It is good because it’s quick. The business folks don’t want to be overwhelmed with stuff they don’t need,” said Cleary. It’s helpful too that he can send the public to a site that he and they are ready to trust. “It’s good to have something we can point people to that isn’t just ‘Oh, I asked my neighbor across the street who is a retired police officer.’ You can Google something and get 20 different links, but this is a much more definitive source. This is an authority figure.”

Members of the first responder community likewise are giving the site a warm reception.

“I think people will find this empowering. To get on this site and find this information, and be ready to take that back and act on it: The value of that can be just incredible,” said Col. Melissa Hyatt, formerly chief of patrol and now chief of special operations and development in the Baltimore Police Department.

In her experience, business leaders especially are eager to get the kind of information offered here, and she’s always ready to welcome a new means of providing it to them.

“We present at these business forums on things like active shooter preparedness, and people will always ask: How do I plan? What do I do for my business? We assist them with making those plans, but this offers a one-stop resource. It gives people an added level of preparation,” she said.

Hyatt said it’s important, too, that the website is more than just a one-off. From the emergency manager’s office, down through the first responders and across the preparedness community, the new site builds on an existing relationship between emergency planners and DHS, at least in Baltimore.

She pointed to 2014’s Star Spangled Spectacular, which drew more than a million people to the city to view tall ships, Navy gray hulls and the Blue Angels flying squadron. “There were events in the city and county,” she said. “There were events across an enormous footprint, things happening at all hours involving people from all over the world, things happening on the water, entities in the air.”

DHS was deeply engaged, providing expertise in areas like threat assessments, critical infrastructure assessments and threat mapping, said Hyatt. “When you are the incident commander, these are priceless resources.”

More recently, DHS Protective Security Adviser Ray Hanna was on hand this spring to help prepare for Light City. This inaugural festival drew some 400,000 people to more than 50 attractions including performances, concerts, food vendors and a children’s area. It was the first big public event following weeks of civic disruption around race issues.

“This was our first major event after the unrest, and we worked very closely with DHS,” Hyatt said. “It made us want to be proactive, to talk about things from the local level all the way up to the federal level.”

Hyatt said that kind of collaboration in the early stages, aided by tools like the new website, helps local officials make best use of DHS resources.

“It benefits all of us to have these partnerships active and ongoing, during the planning process. That way we’re not trying to involve them in our plans at the point where something has already occurred,” she said. “The more people you can have at the table for brainstorming, the better it is.”

DHS officials say that’s the spirit they’re hoping to engender in the emergency management community, and they hope the emergency management professionals in turn will utilize the new website to light that same spark among business leaders.

“We hope they will use this site to work with businesses and the public,” Durkovich said. “We have to work together to create a culture of resilience.”