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This information paper looks at some of what it will take to plan, prepare, equip and train our First Responders, Disaster Relief and Emergency Response Organizations for the next catastrophic event that may befall this great nation. The fact of the matter is there are already more tropical storms/hurricanes forming in the Atlantic and possibly headed our way. In all probability we will not get the opportunity to fully recover from Katrina before another disaster reaches our shores. Indeed, we still have people living in FEMA trailers and temporary housing from hurricanes last year. To be sure the next problem we face may not be an act of nature; we still have the ever present and ominous threat of terrorism to deal with. We cannot afford to put our preparations on hold while we work to recover from this event; we as a nation have too much to lose if we are not prepared, to the best of our ability, to deal with these situations.

Hurricane Katrina has given us many, many examples of what we need to do to be prepared for any future event. These are hard lessons that we must heed and learn from if we are to prevent the problems we now face from occurring again. Between the events of September 11, 2001, hurricane Katrina and several other storms and disasters we have proven to ourselves and the world that we can mobilize what amounts to an army to respond to an event. We have the National Guard, Active Duty Military, Emergency Medical personnel, Law Enforcement personnel, and thousands upon thousands of volunteers working around the clock in response to the devastation of Katrina. Where we fall short is the planning and preparations that will help to mitigate the unforeseen effects of such an event. Sadly, the death toll of Katrina will continue to rise, the “disaster” is not over by any stretch of the imagination. Each day the numbers are still going up due to illness and infection from standing, contaminated flood waters, thirst, hunger, heat and degraded medical capability. We need to continue to prepare ourselves to avoid our current shortfalls even while working around the clock to respond to the current situation.

In the past few years alone we as a nation have suffered a multitude of events and disasters, granted, some worse than others however, I do not intend this to be a history of national disasters lesson. I also do not intend to play a “Would of, Should of, or Could of” blame game. Hindsight is 20/20 and no amount of pining over what could have been will change the course of events or help us to recover. We must push forward while we objectively analyze these events and then use the strengths to build on and shortfalls to learn from if we ever wish to mitigate and minimize the effects of any future event.

I believe the first thing we must come to grips with is that these events are not localized, contained occurrences. Yes, the World Trade Center was in New York, the Pentagon in Washington DC, and New Orleans in Louisiana. Given that, the effects of the devastation, problems and issues caused by these events are national or at the very least regional, state lines do not exist and have no bearing on the effects of these events. The effects of this type of event cover a very large geographical area and affect millions of people. The City of New Orleans may have spent millions of dollars and hours of work and preparation for an event such as Katrina but the reality is this storm and the resulting levee failures destroyed all of that work and preparation. The World Trade Center ceased to exist except as a pile of rubble. Just as these events are regional, our response capability must also be regional. We must always consider the worst case scenario we can imagine and use that as a guide during our planning and preparation.

The initial response, rescue and recovery must be and is always our first priority during/after an event but every public and private agency in a particular area or community is a vital part of the infrastructure of that community. The goods and services provided each day are an essential part of how and why a community or city functions and exists. Every public and private agency must plan and prepare for continuity of operations after a catastrophic event not just the first responders and emergency organizations. The Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP) is intended to ensure continuance of essential functions across a wide range of potential emergencies. Essential functions are those that enable agencies and/or organizations to provide vital services, exercise civil authority, maintain the safety and well being of the general populace, and sustain the industrial/economic base in an emergency. The primary purpose of a COOP is maintaining essential work once the safety of your personnel has been assured. The first consideration must always be the security and safety of your personnel since no amount of equipment and preparation can help if there isn’t anyone to implement the coop or utilize the equipment.

While there is no way to plan for every possible contingency, we have a large number resources available along with many past events we can analyze and learn from in our efforts to develop a good emergency response and COOP. These events cover a large number of situations and scenarios i.e. the attacks of September 11, 2001, US Embassy bombings, hurricanes tsunamis and the list goes on. These past events give us ample opportunity to analyze, plan and war-game some of the essential issues, procedures, policies and training we will need to develop a valid and viable COOP. The primary manager(s) and other key personnel should be thoroughly involved in the COOP process. This helps to prevent the omission of key elements and processes that are inherent to the success of our COOP.

What are the Key Elements of a Disaster Relief plan or a COOP?

The following are some key suggested questions that the COOP should address:

What are the Objectives of a COOP?

COOP background documents:

COOP is a good business practice, and part of the fundamental mission of agencies as responsible and reliable public institutions. Since 1988, a number of documents have built the foundation for COOP in federal agencies:

These and many other COOP related documents are available for download at: http://www.fema.gov/library. They can provide very useful guidelines, information and suggestions to help us begin the preparation process.

Fly-away kits:

To be prepared for various types of breaches of security, attacks or different types of emergencies, each critical section or operations center should have a “fly-away kit.” At a minimum, this should consist of COOP checklists, key contact lists, diskettes, removable Hard Disk Drives or CDs/DVDs with critical files, any specialized tools that are routinely used, maps and specific directions to alternate sites, records, and any other information and equipment related to an emergency operation. A “fly-away kit” should contain those items considered essential to supporting contingency operations at an alternate site. You should designate a key official and one or more alternates (preferably more) to pick up the kit(s) in an emergency. You should also, if possible, keep a duplicate fly-away kit at your backup facility or at some other off-site location.

The term “Fly-Away-Kit” can be misleading. It is simply a term applied to a Mobile or Portable kit or set of equipment and items we need in order to provide for continuity of operations in an emergency. A kit or set of supplies and equipment that we, or as stated above, designated personnel can take with them to a new location and set up to begin limited or emergency operations.

This, in itself, raises a multitude of questions. What kind of equipment do we need? How much equipment should be in the fly-away-kit? How do we move or stage this equipment? How do we maintain current files and data in the kit? Where do we stage this equipment? Where do we plan to operate from in the event we must implement our COOP? The answers to these and many other questions are as diverse and the type and size of organizations themselves. There is no “One-Size-Fits-All” answer to any of these questions. The organization itself must determine exactly what the critical elements or services they must continue or provide in order to maintain an emergency level of operations. For some organizations it could be as simple as one or two workstations and a means of satellite communications and for others it may be a large and fully functional command center.

In this “Information” age most organizations have critical information and data that changes on a day-to-day or minute-to-minute basis. The infrastructure we know as the Internet has made it possible for us to instantly have access to a plethora of information we need and use every day. What happens if we can’t access this vital information lifeline because the communications links, we don’t even think about while we sit in our offices working, have failed? What happens if we must vacate our offices and have no access to the information and data we have stored on the organization’s servers? How do we contact and account for all of our personnel? All these questions and many, many more are the purpose and driving force behind a good COOP. That is what it means – Continuity of Operations the ability and capability to continue to provide emergency response or critical goods and services during or after an event.

A good continuity of operations plan will take a great deal of planning, preparation, and training to be truly effective. Training is included because no matter how good your plan is, if no one can implement the plan, it will fail. The COOP should be tested on a regular basis; some “Experts” insist quarterly while others claim bi-annually or even annually is sufficient. The frequency of COOP testing and validation should be set and adjusted depending on the level of training, experience and proficiency of the staff that has to implement it. I would utilize the results of initial and subsequent COOP testing and training to determine the frequency needed to train and maintain the desired level of proficiency. At a minimum, managers must verify that all the information is up-to-date, that contacts, facilities access, and the call trees are correct on at least a monthly basis. New employees must also be trained and informed of the COOP as well as how and where to find the equipment, documents and instructions in an emergency.

Like many other situations we find ourselves in on a day-to-day basis, we must always plan for the worst and hope for the best. We sometimes find out that the worst we can imagine and plan for falls short, things get worse than we ever dreamed. A good and recent example is hurricane Katrina and the city of New Orleans, actually the entire Gulf coast. All of our facilities have been destroyed or at the very least inundated by as much as 20 feet of water. Literally nothing left behind is salvageable; it is gone, indeed, we are lucky to be alive. In this particular case, even the alternate sites we have planned for are gone. What things can we plan and prepare to insure continuity of operations in this type of horrific disaster?

First we must identify and define exactly what are the critical operations or services we must provide or maintain. Once we have identified what these critical operations are we can begin to define what we must have in terms of supplies and equipment and what we must do in order to provide and maintain them. Some of most obvious things we might need are Shelter, Power, Communications, transportation, operational equipment such as radios, vehicles, rescue equipment, power tools, hand tools, chainsaws, computers, servers, networks, paper, pencils, bottled water, emergency food rations. Our plan will include all of these and a multitude of other items we determine we would need in order to provide for the safety and security of our personnel, conduct rescue/recovery operations and continue the all the other operations and services we have determined are critical.

Shelter – We can choose any number of buildings or facilities to house our emergency operations center (EOC). The process of choosing a site for the EOC must be based on a thorough, objective Risk Assessment and consider the security and safety of our personnel; in the event of an emergency, disaster or attack will this facility be safe? Will it be structurally sound after an event? Will personnel be able to get there? What are the possible obstacles we may encounter and what is the distance from our primary facility? What is the distance from known high visibility targets? What are the probable routes to and from the facility? Will there be routes to the facility open? The list of questions is quite long indeed.

The choice of shelter and location ended up being a devastating choice on September 11, 2001. The EOC or emergency operations center was located inside one of the twin towers which ended up being the target of the attack and subsequently the EOC was destroyed along with the towers. An event on the scale of Katrina leaves no usable facilities in the entire area. We must consider the possibility of supporting and conducting our operations a great distance from the event, our original location or facilities. It could be the next city, the next county or a neighboring state.

The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center had been targeted by terrorists prior to September 11, 2001; on February 26, 1993 a terrorist car bomb was detonated in the parking garage of the north tower. This, I believe, and in my opinion, tends to identify the World Trade Center as a primary, high profile target for terrorists. I will not pretend to understand the decision to place the EOC in that location and I’m quite sure there were very good reasons for doing so and the decision was made by people much better informed and more intelligent than I am. From my past experience some of these reasons were probably; available space for the EOC, centrally located, power, including backup generators was in place; robust communications architecture was in place just to name a few. Remember though, after the attack of 9-11 all of the power and communications grids were non-functional, the space disappeared along with the rest of the Twin Towers, the radios and equipment used by various first responders were not interoperable, etc. etc. etc. I do not claim to be more intelligent or smarter than the planners who made these decisions, in fact I’m far from it.

That being said, there is no possibility of identifying every potential problem for any particular facility or circumstance and it does absolutely no good to second guess at this point but we must try to learn from these past events and identify, eliminate or mitigate as many of these potential problems as we can during the facility selection phase of emergency response and continuity of operations planning or COOP.

Now, since we have identified what our critical operations are, critical facilities, items and equipment we will need in order to continue our critical operations, we must procure, prepare and train with it. We will need to protect the equipment in storage and during transit in the event of a disaster or attack. We must either pre-stage the equipment at a pre-determined emergency operations center or it must be mobile enough to get it there during or after an event. In most cases, extensive training for a number of our key personnel is necessary. In all cases regular training events, exercises and equipment/facility maintenance are needed to ensure the equipment and facilities meet our requirements and that our personnel can implement our COOP.

Given all this and more, we have stacked up an enormous, and still growing, list of things we need and things we need to do, let’s try to simplify as much as we can. The T²C³ concept is designed with these things in mind. Smaller, lighter, more powerful, protected, integrated, easier to setup, use and maintain, all these and much more are fully integrated into this concept. It is generally and widely accepted that for equipment procurement, COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) products are the best, most cost effective solution available to us. At the same time, we know from experience that a collage of COTS thrown together never works. We, as First Responders, Emergency Management personnel, businessmen and women generally do not have the luxury of having Systems Engineers with us in an emergency to make all of our equipment work for us the way we need it to especially under adverse conditions in fact it is very highly unlikely. So, how do we get the most for our money and ensure the equipment will meet our needs? Easy answer - T²C³.

The T²C³ Group of Companies have spent many years developing this concept, series of products, integrating COTS/GOTS (Commercial Off The Shelf/Government Off The Shelf) equipment and the development of procedures designed to alleviate and mitigate these problems and many more we haven’t even thought of or discussed yet. What is T²C³? When stripped down to the bare essentials, T²C³ is a concept, a thought process that is geared toward a mobile, difficult and perhaps hostile environment. The basis of this concept is that the mission critical functions, services, systems, information, communications and other requirements we have during a disaster or attack can be continued. The equipment must work, we must be able to operate it, and it has to be interoperable with all of the other entities and agencies we may find ourselves working with in a particular situation. That’s a tall order to say the least but there are many things we can do to help us at least try to get to this point.

The T²C³ Group of companies have developed a unique concept, approach and set of solutions designed assist us in our efforts to be prepared for emergencies, disasters or attacks. First, perhaps we should seriously consider taking our shelter or emergency operations center with us. A T²C³ Shelter or tent designed to meet our requirements for size and capability would eliminate most of the problems mentioned earlier that are associated with selecting an existing facility. We could then identify any number of potential locations to set up our emergency operations and choose the appropriate one(s) when needed. We could locate our emergency operations center outside an affected area and quite literally move it closer as the situation permits. This way we have a secure, environmentally controlled work area no matter what the circumstances. We can provide security and shelter for our personnel and equipment in any situation. If we are a government agency and deal with National Security level information our shelter can also be a TEMPEST protected T²C³ mobile SCIF. If we simply need a place to work out of there are a multitude of T²C³ shelters that would suffice, many of them modular and can quite literally grow as additional personnel and capabilities arrive on the scene. As an integrated part of our system, a mobile shelter is as important as any other part. Recent events prove this to be true.

There are a few guiding principles we adhere to for every project we undertake.

Behind each of these ten items there are many years of “lessons learned” from hard earned experience. Some of the most obvious are:

High Availability and Reliability – this is the Bottom Line, our equipment must work. Our communications lines must be open. We have no use for paperweights and no matter how wonderful or expensive our equipment is, if it does not work and do the things we need it to do, it is a paperweight, flat out useless. Along this line of thought we also have the issue of power. Our equipment is useless to us if we cannot power it up.

T²C³ strives to provide only the best, most reliable and field proven COTS equipment available on the market. We utilize an extensive testing and vetting process for each and every piece of equipment we integrate into every system, large or small. We work with an organization from start to finish on the requirements that must be met and situations that must be planned for. We integrate comprehensive power solutions into every system and subsystem. We insure every item, system and sub-system can be powered by any available power source, AC or DC. We build an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and standalone capability into each system to both protect the equipment and insure that operations can continue even with unreliable, dirty power. High Availability and Reliability is the result of all this effort.

Functionality – every item of equipment must have the functionality and capability to perform the tasks we need under many diverse and often adverse conditions. The hardware and software must be selected and carefully engineered to provide us the tools and work products we must have and use to be effective in our response and recovery efforts. It is simply not enough to go to Best Buy and purchase “one of each” item of hardware or software we think might come in handy in an emergency and stash it away. We must consider what we must accomplish to be effective and then through careful planning, training and effort choose those items that will make it possible to be successful. Part of this is to use tools and products and software that we use all the time in performance of our day-to-day operations. Doing this insures our personnel know how to use the hardware and software. An emergency is not the time to learn how to use a new piece of software or hardware. There are many considerations involved with the functionality aspect; one of the biggest is training. The biggest and best equipped emergency command center will fail if it stays locked up in storage until it is needed and our emergency personnel have never seen or worked with the hardware and software.

High Mobility – we must be able to take our equipment with us and be capable of functioning in any number of unforeseen situations. I believe we can establish as a fact that disasters, attacks and emergencies will always present us with a multitude of unforeseen situations and obstacles we must deal with and overcome. In the military we always planned each mission or operation down to the smallest and most minute detail. Even so, we always had the aphorism “no plan survives the first firefight, no matter how good it is” in mind. Simply put, every situation is different and there is no way to plan for every contingency or possibility. The personnel on the ground and conducting emergency operations must have the ability and mobility to locate or move the EOC to the safest and most effective location for any given situation. Perhaps in our planning we identify multiple locations as possible emergency operations centers depending on the situation at the time. We rarely have the funding to properly equip each potential site or location so it follows that our equipment needs the ability and mobility to move with us.

Part of the T²C³ concept is mobility. We work hard to tightly integrate each and every item of equipment into functional and logical subsystems that are properly cased in environmentally sealed and when possible shock isolated cases. In most situations, if it is physically possible, we only use our own patented airline carry-on sized (9” X 14” X 22”) cases to accomplish this integration. By using these cases we make mobility an inherent part of the system, we build it in. These cases are tough, small, and the resulting subsystems are

easy to move or transport by anyone with average strength and mobility. Some of the Marines who have used our cases and equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan emphatically state that they are the best tactical cases they have ever used. The cases stack and interlock to provide stable pallets for transportation down to furniture in the command center. The equipment stored within these cases is fully protected from all environmental hazards we may encounter. There is, of course, equipment that simply will not fit into a case this small, in this situation we select the best, smallest and most practical environmentally sealed case we can find to fill the need.

Just as an example, I recently put a six case system together for a short demonstration that would provide all of the infrastructure and satellite communications links (128kbps in this case) for a small to medium sized emergency command element or emergency operations center and it all fit, easily, into the trunk of a Crown Victoria. Upon arrival at the designated demo location, I was able to unload the equipment, set it up and be fully functional in 20 minutes perhaps less (without assistance). Many of our Emergency Command Centers will fit on a 4’ X 4’ pallet in the back of a standard pickup truck – complete with power and environmental control units.

Interoperability – we must be capable of working and communicating with any number of other agencies, organizations or in the case of the military, units. The more interoperable our equipment is the better we can communicate and work with other organizations. The better and more diverse our lines of communications the more effective we can be in performing our continuity operations.

Interoperability gives us options and capabilities in the performance of our mission. The T²C³ Group only utilizes equipment proven to be built on open standards. By strictly adhering to products built on open standards we are able to provide the largest range of interoperability possible. We work very hard to avoid using any proprietary hardware or software in our systems or subsystems.

There are times and certain requirements dictate that proprietary items are essential to the mission. In these situations we work to minimize the impact of these items on the overall interoperability of the system or subsystem. We eliminate special connectors and cables making field replacement possible. We change the power supply and inputs to a universal standard etc. If we, as an organization, can avoid it, we should never lock ourselves into a certain item, piece, part, software or hardware that is only available from one source which may or may not be available to us in an emergency. Doing this also heavily impacts the availability and reliability of our system. It means the difference between being able to go to the nearest radio shack and purchasing a replacement cable and the system being unusable because we do not have that cable to make it work.

Scalability, Flexibility and Adaptability – these three items go hand in hand with Interoperability. We need the ability to scale our equipment, capabilities and communications up or down to meet our requirements at any given time and for any number of situations. To do this we must have equipment that is flexible enough to support many different configurations or capabilities and we need this flexibility to adapt our procedures and equipment to meet our mission requirements which, remember, can and will change frequently and rapidly. Another “what if” is the possibility that not all of our emergency equipment survives an event or is available to us immediately after an event. The parts and equipment we do have must be capable of functioning in a limited or standalone mode or we are back to lugging around a paperweight.

T²C³ is tightly wrapped with these capabilities in mind. We design our systems and subsystems to be fully functional either standalone or integrated with any number of other systems and subsystems to build out an entire emergency operations center. We firmly believe that it should not take a Systems Engineer to integrate our systems and subsystems into a larger more functional system as it does with a collage of COTS products hastily thrown together. We strive to insure that anyone with basic knowledge and minimal training can first and foremost, use the systems and also to bring these systems together to produce the desired size and capabilities for any situation or scenario an organization may face.

Initial Cost and Life Cycle Cost – every organization or government agency has limits on the amount of funding available for day to day operations and even less for Continuity operations. Even so, we have little choice in the matter; we must plan and prepare for the possibility of disasters or attacks. The cost of equipment purchase, maintenance and upgrades can be very significant depending on the organization and what critical operations must be continued in/during a catastrophic event. Nothing is cheap but there are many ways we can limit the costs involved and still insure we have the necessary equipment to perform our missions even on a strict budget.

By utilizing equipment that is field proven we avoid the costly mistake of purchasing equipment only to find out that it either will not perform as we expect or that fails in one way or another. This also avoids the purchase of the most expensive and “latest” technology since it is not proved out yet. By purchasing State of the Market rather than State of the Art equipment we stay current with the best known technology and with strict adherence to our open standards policy we insure that several generations of technology can be integrated into our systems in the future.

Just for clarity purposes, the difference between State of the Market and State of the Art is nothing more than the amount of time an item or technology has been available on the market. State of the Market items or technology is an item or technology that has been on the market for a period of time and has withstood extensive use and testing by consumers while State of the Art items or technology is the newest, latest and greatest technology that was introduced today. It has not been vetted or proven out and is always more expensive that State of the Market technology, in most cases, much more expensive. If we purchase State of the Art technology we assume a certain amount of risk that the equipment will work, that it will be reliable, and that it will continue to be available in the future. Risks are what we are attempting to mitigate so why would we introduce additional risks in the equipment we procure? We also pay premium prices which if we wait six months will be much lower since there will always be something newer, bigger, better, more powerful available at that time.

At the beginning of this paper I stated that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. I cannot show anyone reading this the perfect answer to all his/her equipment problems but I can show a few of the items we have developed and fielded that could be a significant part of the planning, equipping and preparation for any type of emergency, first response or disaster recovery organization.

Shown are a small number of the systems and subsystems we have developed to show the range of scalability and capability of the T²C³ product line.

Simple environmentally sealed cases, wide range AC/DC power products, integrated subsystems and complete emergency command centers.

The items and equipment I’ve shown above represent a small fraction of the equipment and possibilities that are part of the T²C³ concept, solutions and line of equipment. By integrating the systems and modules we need we can reduce the size, weight and cost of our emergency planning and preparation and at the same time insure we have the items we need to accomplish our mission. There are many, many additional modules available. A short list would include:

1. A large number of tent and shelter configurations (indoor and outdoor models).

This list could go on and on, but the point is, T²C³ gives us the ability to design and develop a solution based on the requirements and needs of our particular agency or organization. We can very quickly develop the “Fly away” equipment package we need to accomplish our mission under the most adverse conditions we can imagine and/or identify with our Risk Assessment and we can count on our equipment to work when we need it most.

Our starting point must be determined by and supported by completing a good, thorough and objective analysis of our mission, capabilities, assets, liabilities and risk. With the information we develop by accomplishing this analysis process we can begin the process of preparing ourselves and our organization to conduct emergency or continuity operations for any disaster or situation we are faced with. The more prepared we are to cope with a disaster the better and quicker we can mitigate the effects of that disaster. This translates into saving lives and reducing the widespread anguish and suffering caused by any number of horrific events.

The information in this paper only represents a small fraction of the issues and considerations encountered when putting together a valid Emergency Command Center or COOP. It is intended only as a short primer or source of information to get us started. I do not claim to be an expert or to have more than average intelligence, only to having a good deal of related experience that will hopefully help to mitigate some of the problems we are facing now and bound to face again in the near future.

There is a great deal of information and many helpful guides available on the web to keep us moving in the right direction. Some agencies must be prepared to function at all times even during the worst of an event while others must be prepared to begin limited or critical operations immediately after the event occurs. With the right equipment, detailed and carefully executed planning, preparation and training we can insure our agency or organization is prepared to continue operations in any situation. The T²C³ Group stands ready to assist any organization or agency in these most important and critical aspects of emergency response and disaster recovery – preparation, equipping and training. When “I think it’s good enough” isn’t the correct answer, T²C³is…

AdHoc Systems Inc.

A Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business

chris@adhocsystems.net

(915) 256-1124

http://www.adhocsystems.net

A member of the T²C^3™Group of Companies