The October 2007 Southern California wildfires were a severe test of the state’s emergency management capabilities. While 1,500 homes were destroyed and more than 500,000 acres of land burned, almost half a million people were evacuated from their homes. The devastating fires were also a test of the state’s new emphasis on public-private partnerships in disaster response.
As the fires began burning across Southern California on Oct. 20, Peter Ohtaki, executive director of the California Resiliency Alliance, and Jill Rulon, senior vice president of the California Grocers Association, made their way to the State Operations Center (SOC) in Sacramento, Calif., to serve as liaisons between the state emergency management team and their member business organizations.
As representatives of the business community, Ohtaki and Rulon were given access to situation reports twice a day and distributed the highlights to partner business organizations and companies via e-mail. They also relayed requests for information from partners.
“One bank requested the evacuation areas by ZIP code so they could assess the impact on employees and customers to put mortgage payment forgiveness in place,” Ohtaki said. “So we were able to put that information together for them.” There were many questions about the impact on utilities in San Diego County, and representatives of the California Utilities Emergency Association also were in the SOC to share information on the power grid’s status.
Photo: Wal-Mart volunteered logistical staff to unload and distribute goods at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego during the October 2007 Southern California wildfires. Courtesy of Wal-Mart.
Rulon worked with suppliers to send food and 300,000 bottles of water to the shelters that needed them most.
“There was lots of media attention on Qualcomm Stadium, so many organizations just sent relief aid there, but actually there were many other shelters that needed aid directed to them,” Ohtaki said. “What went wrong during Katrina went right during those wildfires. People generously donating food and supplies were much better directed.”
The Change After Katrina
If 9/11 was a cruel awakening to the fact that the United States needed to beef up its domestic security, Hurricane Katrina was the watershed moment when people realized that emergency management officials couldn’t respond adequately to major disasters without better coordinating efforts with the private sector. And during Katrina, corporations such as Wal-Mart and other large retailers used their sophisticated logistics infrastructure to help communities bounce back.
“Katrina was a wake-up call to governments that they couldn’t handle the response themselves,” said Lynne Kidder, senior vice president for public-private partnerships at the Business Executives for National Security (BENS). “There were a lot of ‘Aha!’ moments during Katrina — for nongovernmental organizations, private businesses and civic leadership.”
By improving communications with government agencies, private utilities can speed the repair of power, water and other services. An association of grocers can access its network to provide food, water and other supplies to emergency responders and evacuation centers.
Since 2002, BENS has been working to help establish partnerships between emergency management teams and businesspeople with an interest in the community’s resilience. It has established organizations in New Jersey, Georgia, Kansas, California, Iowa and Colorado.
“Before Katrina, this was really a hard sell,” Kidder said. “The business people would say it wasn’t their job, and the government leaders would say they’ve got this under control. That all really changed after Katrina.”
The drive to improve communications with the private sector has been under way in California for several years.
Legislation that passed in 2005 directed government agencies to set up a voluntary program to integrate private businesses and nonprofit organizations into governmental disaster planning programs. In 2006, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Executive Order S-04-06, which called on the California Emergency Management Agency (Cal EMA) to formally make the private sector part of the state’s disaster response system. Cal EMA has signed memorandums of understanding with groups like the California Grocers Association, the California Utilities Emergency Association, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp.
The effort has two main goals, said Tina Curry, assistant secretary of Cal EMA’s Planning, Protection and Preparedness Division. One is to help businesses that have a statewide presence get more situational awareness; the other is to improve resource sharing. Many statewide businesses have sophisticated infrastructure for dealing with disasters and a lot to offer, she said. “The name of the game is becoming more efficient and prompt at prioritizing which things are needed urgently and which can wait. That’s why we have developed a Business and Utilities Operations Center in our Emergency Operations Center,” Curry said. “Every disaster is different and a dynamic situation. We need that ongoing dialog.”
Wal-Mart’s Role
One private-sector player that contributed during the wildfire response was retail giant Wal-Mart. With huge truckloads of supplies being sent to Qualcomm Stadium, Wal-Mart volunteered logistical staff to unload and distribute goods.
“Wal-Mart is good at supply-chain issues,” said David Henry, the company’s emergency preparedness and planning manager. “We get the right product to the right place at the right time.”
The company has an emergency management department with positions that mirror those in public-sector emergency management hierarchies. It also has a 40-seat Emergency Operations Center (EOC). “We have subject-matter experts focused on potential disruptions, such as interstate closures or snowstorms, every day,” Henry explained. “Our emergency management department is good at rallying those experts in transportation, logistics and store operations, and making sure they have up-to-date situational awareness to make decisions.”
In 2008, the company played an active role in Texas during Hurricane Ike. In response to the storm, which damaged 79 stores and impacted more than 60,000 Wal-Mart employees, the retailer donated $2.5 million in cash and merchandise, and provided trucks and drivers to support relief operations.
Just as important, Henry said, was its effort to get stores reopened as quickly as possible to return communities to a sense of normalcy.
“We had a map in our EOC of the southern part of Texas,” he said. “In the immediate aftermath of the storm, we gave the state GIS folks the location of all open stores in the state, and they plotted those along with the current points of emergency supply distribution. Anywhere they were within five miles of each other, they realized they could close a point of distribution. That’s the kind of coordination that can really help.”
BENS Nurtures Partnerships
Ohtaki’s group, the California Resiliency Alliance (CRA), started as the Bay Area BENS chapter and recently became a stand-alone nonprofit organization. A sister organization, the Homeland Security Advisory Council, plays a similar role in Southern California.
Approximately 50 companies and business organizations are CRA members. That may not sound like many, but some of those member organizations pull in leaders from multiple companies, such as the Bay Area Response Coalition, which is a coalition of leaders from the financial sector. Other CRA members include representatives from the Business Recovery Managers Association and the Association of Contingency Planners. “It is really a ‘network of networks’ approach,” Ohtaki said.
BENS’ Kidder said building a self-sustaining partnership such as the CRA is a challenge. Some have been formed around a single event or an exercise, and then faded away once it was over.
“We have learned they have to be built from the ground up. We can’t develop a single model, bring it in and impose it on a region, nor can the federal government,” she said, adding, “In order to become sustainable, it must be locally owned and managed and set its own priorities.”
From Wal-Mart’s perspective, the information flow with these groups is improving, Henry said. In some states, such as Texas, the company works directly with state officials and has access to the EOC. In other states, it works through groups like the Florida Retail Federation or a BENS. Henry said Wal-Mart would like to see more uniformity in how these groups communicate with the public sector. “We see so many different models because we work in 50 states and see 50 different ways of doing it.”
Kidder pointed to the Safeguard Iowa Partnership (SIP) as one of the most robust and effective efforts in the country. “The business community in Iowa has really bought into it,” she said, “and that is the key to effectiveness and sustainability.”
Jami Haberl, SIP’s executive director, said the organization had only been in existence a year when serious flooding hit Iowa in June 2008. During a flood, emergency officials are extremely busy and don’t have time to be fully engaged with businesses. Her presence in the EOC provides them “one-stop shopping” for private industry, she said.
Besides coordinating the donations of bottled water and plastic sheeting for sandbagging, Haberl e-mailed SIP partners with regular updates from inside the EOC. “If they have to make a decision about evacuating an office building, they don’t have to rely on reports from the media,” she said. “Or if they have an issue, they can pick up the phone and call me.”
She said during the floods, trucking companies got access to up-to-date information from the Department of Transportation about the best routes into and out of Cedar Rapids. “That is critical because one of our goals is to make sure there is still stuff on store shelves,” Haberl said.
Iowa government officials were active partners in the development of SIP. “We began to see that if the businesses don’t survive, the community wouldn’t bounce back,” said David Miller, administrator of the Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management Division. “And the businesses saw that if the community suffered, its employees couldn’t come back to work. So it was in the interest of both to get the whole community back up and running.”
Miller said state officials were also driven by the recognition that 65 to 80 percent of critical infrastructure, whether in communications, banking or energy, is privately owned. “We need to understand their emergency response efforts,” he said, “and we need to share information more actively.”
He said Haberl played a key role in the 2008 flood response. “She understood how we worked because she had a public health background, and she could translate that information to business groups. She could give us information from companies about what might be threatened by flooding and why it was important.”
The SIP has teamed with the state to develop an online business resource registry for private-sector volunteer or for-hire assets, Haberl said. “Our biggest goal now is strategic planning about how best to deal with the upcoming flood season,” she added. “We are working on solidifying our communications approach to help mitigate the impact of a flood.”
