Special Board of Aldermen 06-08-2021 Page 5
requires us to coordinate with the variety of agencies both here within the city but also at the State level. It
incorporates a concept called “Emergency Operations Centers” which are the location. Sort of the nerve
center of all emergency activities during a major emergency at any level of government. It also covers
some of the key requirements for public information. So information out to the public and businesses, how
we coordinate with other agencies that are pushing information out to the public, and how we work with the
news media and also social media now to get information out to the community.
It also covers Resource Management. So what's the process for requesting resources from other agencies
whether they be at the State or the federal level? How do we track resources? How do we know when
resources are out of service, need to be repaired, need to be rehabilitated, or when we can demobilize
them and send them home? It also covers the requirement for training and credentialing responders and
staff. The things that are necessary to ensure that our leadership — the people who are responsible for
supervising emergency responders are qualified to do so and that they’ve had the appropriate training
that’s needed for that.
Then the final thing that it covers in NIMS that’s applicable to this specific plan is interoperability and
communication systems. Making sure that all of our systems that we have that are used to allow public
safety to communicate, Public Health, Public Works are able to communicate with each other and not
siloed within specific departments or agencies. So this national doctrine really serves as kind of a required
effort to try to resolve the issues that were found during 911. You'll see in this emergency operations plan
update that there’s a lot of language that refers back to our adoption of NIMS.
Now one of the things | had mentioned in one of the earlier slides was that this plan talks about the
responsibilities and requirements of different departments. What we’ve done is we’ve used a framework
that the federal government has developed called “Core Capabilities” and you’ll see there are 15 on here
ranging from public information and warning, to law enforcement, to mass care services which is sheltering
and feeding, and what it does is it covers which department are responsible for these different types of
activities, which partners that they will bring in to assist them with this and that includes businesses and
other nonprofit entities, and what essentially are the things that are needed in order to provide these types
of services during an emergency. So this is kind of a good way to understand how those things are
organized and our plan covers each one of these.
It’s also important to note that the plan covers how we activate our city’s emergency operations center. So
for many of you, you’re probably familiar that that’s over at the police department in the classroom. That’s
where we bring all the city departments together typically during emergency situations. Again | say
“typically because during COVID we actually completely threw this concept out the window and decided to
do a virtual emergency operation center instead.
Another important thing that this plan talks about is the coordination between Public Health and Emergency
Management. So many of you probably are aware that the Public Health Division also has emergency
management responsibilities. Their focus is on public health emergencies. Much like COVID, ora
bioterrorism incident, or some sort of environmental health emergency. What we’ve done in this plan is
outlined the responsibilities both for the emergencies that are non-public health in nature as well as those
that are public health lead incidents. So in those types of situations where Public Health takes the lead,
Emergency Management we provide support to them and the same goes in the inverse where those
emergencies that are major storms and those types of things, Emergency Management takes the lead and
Public Health provides support to us.
So the next steps with this specific plan, again, the Promulgation by the Mayor is the next critical step
where the Mayor will sign off on the document to say that the city has adopted it. But also we use some
grant funding from the State as well as FEMA to update this document for 2021. So we'll do a grant close
out and get our reimbursement for the time that was dedicated to updating this document.
The other key thing that is going to take place as part of this process is incorporating all of the lessons
learned and analysis that we’ve done from the COVID response. We had been doing that over the last
