#142 “Building an Enhanced Next Level SitRep & Northern California’s endless Atmospheric River Event”

Support our show by wearing our swag! Check out the shop here: www.thereadinesslab.com/shop/merchHow to build an Enhanced Next Level SitRep: 1. Sources – this is how you justify decision making. The more you have to follow your gut, the less information you have. Do not create chaos through guess work. With an atmospheric river… we know where the wind will blow and where the water with run. Sources should be anything that you will use to help build your sitrep. Some data sources will be live, others static. Some subjective, others quantitative I typically have 30-40 sources that I will run through each morning, including some with monitoring (like warnings or alerts) that can tell me that there is a major change or update. 2. GIS [Build a GIS tool] Obviously we will want to create a visual or the area of the county or hospital campus, by building, and the proximity to flooding and wind damage or potential cascading impacts. 3. Understand Cascading Impacts, by location [If then statements] Based on the sources, GIS tool, and understanding cascading impacts- from several if than statements for vulnerable areas. 4. Compare Known actions within Plan vs Reality [Identify Resources and staging – add as layer to map] Are the resources in your plan available, up to date, and readily available? If not, or there are new resources available – track this. Create a list of resources and staging locations. This is standard ICS so probably is not a huge shocker of an idea. What is surprising for most people is the idea that it’s included in a sitrep… which you would think is standard, but not always. For a hospital campus system… I would quickly confirm quantities of on-site resources like PPE and food. 5. Identify Unique Actions that must be taken, current ops period, 3 days, 1 week, response to recovery [work with stakeholders to achieve full scope] This is the fun part. Either set up a working group, with each stakeholder providing input on their actions… or set up a meeting and confirm. The real trick here is to get people to think in advance, despite the chaos in the moment. Always push for stabilization then normalization. Capture action items. 6. Current State of Lifelines – Viewer & and Stats Hands down, the best place I have seen do this is Florida. Hurricane Harvey was extremely effective because we developed the fundamentals of lifelines, but the viewer concept was already in highly sophisticated and in play in Florida the year before. If you must, you can set metrics for success in a response… but it’s much better to work with leadership to determine standards for: Normality Improving Degrading Stabilizing I would consider the following color system: Normal – Green Improving – Yellow Degrading – Red Stabilizing – Blue A side note- for ADA compliant, you may want to identify with something different. However, I have seen people use every version of cross hatch, vertical lines, horizontal lines, thick dots, thin dots, large symbols, text, etc. You might just have a seizor just seeing all the different lines. So, my suggestion would be to use the colors, with an overlay of black text with a white mask. For a county, you can make a county wide map with tabs for each. For a campus system, I would separate this by facility. I would also pre-idented priority facilities, such as research centers or in-patient/ resident facilities. 6. Simplify [Create an overview] – this is what it will look like by the time you are done setting this up. I would make this on ESRI platform or a similar live viewer. You should make a PDF version and save / add the previous sitreps to help with timeline tracking. Logo on the left corner Disaster Name or identifier Date / time range for when the information will be valid Name of person in charge of compiling information followed by a team if necessary Subject or Title: Enhanced SitRep Lage Full Center GIS map – An active map with the disaster overlayed, anticipated/ forecasted areas of impact, layer with cascading impact high hazard locations, Layer of current state of lifelines, as pre identified in the plan, and a layer of deployed resources. BLUF: Action Items by agency/ group Name the agency, provide the high priority missions with specific tasks. If you are only going to answer for your EM internal group- provide what you are going to do. – make it bullet point Name the areas of concern and why (bullet point) Provide opinion: Name an issue, what the team should do about it Next: Priorities Bullet Point type out the priorities of each stakeholder Next: Current Situation Bullet point stats Number of people/ staffs displaced Potential Financial Impact Geographic area of impact (as needed) Timeline viewer of the Lifelines, with pre-identified metrics for normality, improving, degrading, or stabilizing 1-2 Paragraph form explaining issues, as needed Next: Anticipated Impacts Bullet point locations with stats and time/ date range depicting when the issues will occur Next: Cascading Impacts – If then Statements Name a location followed by if X occurs this will happen, rate the likelihood of occurrence Lastly: A link to sources [a static list] If you put all of this together, you can have both a live viewer and a 2-page (front and back) PDF that will tell leadership everything they need to know about the incident. Public Relations will be able to speak to the media about the current status with accuracy. And most importantly, you will only need to update information as it changes. During a response, the missions grow then stabilize, the decrease. It may start off as simple as, “life-saving, life sustaining.” Then it will change to areas of focus after the full scope of the disaster has been captured, finally, priorities will decrease once locations are fully caught up to needs. If you do this correctly, your sources and stakeholder input will pre-fill your GIS map, action items, and areas of concerns. You can then do analysis to think beyond the current operational period and identify gaps that leadership should be made aware. Whomever will read your enhanced Next Level Sitreps will follow this train of thought as they read down the 2 page report: 1. Understand the incident scope – Answers the question of Why 2. Provide actions – Answers the question of how 3. Names resources – Answers the question of what 4. Provide impact overview with timeline – Answers the question of when 5. Sources – Answers the question of trust 6. All of this combined answer the question of who needs to be involved