IAEM Disaster Zone Column, Avoiding Barnitus
February 2020
The only thing harder than getting people to come to the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) is keeping them there when they think the emergency is over. I call this behavior “Barnitus,” which equates to horses always being energetic when it is time to turn back home and head for the barn. Horses are totally committed to being back surrounded by the happy confines of food and a roof over their heads. This then is the behavior of people who “just want to go home.”
I’ve seen this behavior up close and personal in several different memorable occasions while in the Army. Once when an officer, who was an alcoholic, was told we’d be last in the movement back to base — he had a hissy fit due to wanting the drink that his wife would have waiting for him in the car when she picked him up. I guess you could say the booze was calling to him. Another time, I parked a gun Jeep with four soldiers in it on the side of the road and told them to stay there — because they had three flat tires and I’d send a maintenance crew to their location. Much to my dismay, they were spotted driving on a blacktop road with those three flat tires by a one-star general, the assistant division commander. They just wanted to get back to the motor pool. Their story was I had abandoned them there … yada, yada.
The opposite challenge, of keeping people at the EOC, is to get people to report to the EOC. Their reasons for not wanting to report are many times personal, birthdays, anniversaries, vacations, it’s a holiday, the shift is at night, etc. You can combine the above with those people who don’t see themselves as being part of the emergency response. This can include actual emergency managers, particularly those that have positions not directly related to emergency operations, e.g., public education specialists, administrative staff and event planners.
Craig Fugate, when he was the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administrator, found out that he had a problem, as described immediately above, with many of his national staff not seeing themselves as being deployable to disasters. He fixed this by having the “deployable qualification” included in everyone’s, I mean everyone’s, job description and in future personnel recruitments.
Back to the topic of Barnitus. The typical situation comes when things have slowed down and the emergency or disaster has “stabilized.” It might appear that everyone has things “in hand” and the situation is well understood and there haven’t been any recent requests for information, briefings or resources. This is a danger point in that people stop looking for information and their attention to the incident fades. They might be physically present, but mentally they have checked out. People could be sitting around and chatting with their desk mates about everything — except for the current incident.
One of the things that many people don’t realize is that lower-level jurisdictions typically have been “gutting it out” waiting for the disaster to end and have been reluctant to ask for help. Any surge in needs or a change in the situation will push them over the edge when they will then call “Uncle” and ask for help — expecting it to come immediately. Usually what is needed is people, to help staff their own EOC or crews to help with the response in the field.
In your own EOC, all those idle hands and brains will turn to thoughts of home, family and a warm bed. The longer the duration of your incident the stronger those inclinations will be. They are mentally and physical tired and you are punishing them for keeping them there in the EOC.
Your ability to retain staff in your EOC at that point will be based on the authority you have over your own jurisdictional staff and the strength of your relationships you have established with your other public and private partners. There will be a huge push from many that “they can monitor the situation and coordinate” from home. There is no need for them to be physically present.
One specific example of this last point came from when I was the operations chief for Washington state EOC for a windstorm event. We were in the restoration of electrical power phase of the EOC activation and civilian power crews were coming into the state from other regions of the country. The designated State Patrol representative refused to come into the EOC to speed the passage of these crews through the state, by bypassing weigh stations. He wanted to do it all from home, yet there were other representatives in the EOC who needed to be coordinated with. I ended up calling the chief of the State Patrol, and that got him to report. He, of course, was not a happy camper.
My last bit of advice is that disasters often come in phases. It is a judgment call on your part. Your inability to respond expeditiously to requests will have the blame fall on your shoulders. Do not hesitate to retain adequate EOC representation by agencies until you know the incident is over. And, it is not over, until you say it is over, and you deactivate.
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by Eric E. Holdeman, Senior Fellow, Emergency Management magazine
He blogs at www.disaster-zone.com