The IDHS was formed in 2005, when five state agencies were combined, including homeland security, emergency management, the state fire marshal and state building commissioner. Wainscott said public safety is the department’s No. 1 goal and that the combination of roles in the IDHS has helped the state broaden its view of what public safety is and see the interrelations between the disciplines.
To capitalize on lessons learned, Indiana created District Response Task Forces, units that are staffed by local emergency response personnel who can help with the response to an in-state or
how they have aided emergency response.
Question: What are the District Response Task Forces, and why were they created?
Answer: The District Response Task Forces were born out of a realization during our planning events for a catastrophic earthquake. Indiana is a member of CUSEC, the Central United States Earthquake Consortium, and in partnership with seven other states and FEMA, we embarked on a catastrophic earthquake-planning mission about five years ago. Out of that, part of the realization became that if a large earthquake occurred, such as the one in 1811-1812 along New Madrid, that any or most of the resources that would be needed for response would have to be somehow adjudicated and spread within those seven or eight states that would be affected.
We realized that we were going to have to do more to put ourselves in a position to take care of ourselves earlier and longer. … So the idea came that we’d develop 10 District Response Task Forces. Our state is divided into 10 Homeland Security Districts, the smallest being five counties and the largest being 13 counties. They were originally formed by looking at resources, population, number of hospitals and numbers of state police. … Our District Response Task Forces are really basic public safety functional needs — that being basic law enforcement, fire suppression, emergency medical services, a Type III Incident Command Team as the command element, and a service and support element that provides for the care and well-being of the task force members so it can be self-sustaining for up to 72 hours. The impetus behind this was to be able to create a public safety surge into an area that’s been affected by a disaster, to augment and support the local affected public safety folks, support the incident commander, provide additional resources and then for a variety of needs.
The task forces have been constructed such that each of those five core components could be deployed separately or in combination with one another. If just an incident management team is needed to support a local community, we can send that, or if they just need extra law enforcement help or EMS help or whatever it might be, those components can be broken off and sent forward to assist those areas.
How are mutual aid requests handled?
The task force is first and foremost an asset of the district itself. It serves as enhanced mutual aid for the folks within those district boundaries, so they can use them if they have a local emergency or a large special event that they need assistance for. They can reach out and have a trained, well formed group that can come in and assist any of the communities within their district. Second, it becomes a state asset in that when there is a disaster in another part of the state, those task forces or components of the task forces can be activated under our state’s mobile support unit law. Those groups then become pseudo-state employees in a sense that they become state assets — the state takes care of the salaries, expenses and so forth. And third, they also become assets that are deployable out of state through EMAC [Emergency Management Assistance Compact] support or EMAC requests, and it gives us a great deal of versatility with the people who are already rostered, trained and organized to respond quickly and stay for a period of time if needed.
Can you give an example of how the task forces have been used to aid emergency response?
Our first deployment of one core component was in 2010 when we had some flooding in southern Indiana. We deployed an incident management component from one district to augment a county that needed help with organization for sandbagging operations and flood fighting operations.
In March of this year, we had a very serious series of tornadoes, one of which was an F4 that was on the ground for some 50 miles in southern Indiana. We activated a complete task force, which is all five components, and deployed it to Washington County, Ind., to support local operations there and augment their needs.
We also activated our state Incident Management Assistance Team and deployed them into Clark County to supplement Indiana Task Force One, which is our search and rescue. We followed that with a series of core components of incident management teams from the other districts that supported emergency operations centers in some of the counties and also supported the expansion of the incident command post and the incident management area of operation that was occurring particularly to support the debris removal operation that was quite extensive over those counties.
It gave us the flexibility to give a surge of public safety folks to back-fill support, augment local responders and then also gave us the opportunity to use those other core components such as our incident management teams to support the management and operations of the response and recovery activities in those areas. The goal with any of these components is when they’re dispatched into an area, they’re not there to take over, they’re there to support the local affected public safety and elected officials, and support the existing incident command.
Based on feedback from the districts, are any changes going to be made to the program or how do you see it evolving?
I think this spring, particularly the March activations with our tornadoes, really affirmed the premise and the intention of the program. From my perspective, this way of operating is and will continue to help the way public safety operates in Indiana.
One of the things needed to understand the task forces themselves: We are not asking any one community to bear the burden of supporting these task forces. The task force will have a few people, sometimes one person from a department and sometimes two to three from an agency, but they will come together with others from other counties in the district to make a task force. The intent is to make it sustainable because it’s based off the things that they’re doing every day — basic law enforcement, firefighting and EMS — and also does not strip communities of their ability to protect themselves because we’re not taking all of their law enforcement or a majority of their firefighters.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with the readers of Emergency Management?
I think the key here is the willingness. When something bad happens in the response world, we all want to help. And, from our experience — we deployed about 600 or so Hoosier responders to Katrina and helped in Biloxi and that area. The lesson we learned is that while we made it happen and they did good work, preorganization, pre-definition, pre-rostering — the gathering of information on those folks on the front end would have helped us on the back end for financial reimbursements for the agencies and those kinds of things.
We’ve incorporated those lessons learned into the development of our task forces. We have developed the information on equipment usage, costs and so forth so it helps us. Not only are people anxious when things happen, they want to go help, but typically on the back end, if you’re not organized and don’t do it well, you can torpedo the good things.
