Publication Date: Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Our Town: Just a dry run
Our Town: Just a dry run
(April 27, 2005) by Don Kazak
A friend of mine was driving by Palo Alto High School Tuesday morning last week when her heart leapt up into her throat at the sight of fire engines and police cars at the school. Something really bad must have happened, she thought.
Well, no, it was just a dress rehearsal for when the walls come tumbling down.
Palo Alto held a disaster drill on May 19, simulating a 7.3 earthquake on the Hayward Fault, lasting 30-40 seconds.
This was a big-deal drill, involving 300 people, including police, firefighters, top city staff, and lots of volunteers. The idea was to get the kinks out of the system when the real thing happens.
The main feature of the drill was the collapse of a classroom building at Paly. So firefighters poured onto the scene, minus sirens and flashing lights. Engine 3, Engine 11 and Rescue 2 rolled up, with firefighters in full regalia, helmets and turnout coats. Truck 6 pulled in a little later.
There were firefighters and cops everywhere, it seemed. The firefighters seemed casual about the simulation and it would be hard to knock them for not being more serious. These are the men and women who do the real thing when the bell rings.
The unreal sense of drill ended for me when I walked over to the Paly administration building and saw four large tarps laid out in the grass. Red was for the seriously injured victims, yellow for those for whom medical attention could wait, and green was for those with minor injuries.
The fourth tarp was black. Don't ask, but wish you wouldn't be on it.
I not it os reassuring that there is a fire engine running around town with a black tarp tucked away into a compartment.
"We want to find out things we could do better," City Manager Frank Benest said to city staff early that morning before the drill kicked off.
I wondered if anything was learned.
Ken Dueker said yes. Dueker is a reserve police officer and a genial, helpful guy.
He demurred at first when I asked him why a lowly police reserve officer was the coordinator for such an important drill. He works for a high-tech startup, has been a venture capitalist and, oh yes, was once a disaster planning person for a huge oil company called ARCO.
Pure gold, how the city finds someone like him, but he found the city, going through the Police Academy six years ago.
I asked him what went wrong during the drill.
"There were some glitches in communication," he replied. Status reports from the command center at Paly had to go the city's emergency dispatch center and then to the city's Emergency Operations Center (EOC).
"People were walking pieces of paper between dispatch and the EOC," he said. "The critical issue was delay, not mistakes."
But that can be easily remedied, he added. The city has a software program where dispatchers put real-time information into a computer that is displayed onto a large video screen. If such a display screen was installed in the EOC, the people there directing responses would see the same information when it is entered, and could better coordinate rescue efforts.
Dueker said the city needs to do more in involving volunteers in its disaster planning efforts. "The commanders were unaware of the volunteers or in how to use them." Volunteers included members of the Palo Alto Neighborhood Disaster Activities (PANDA) group, with more than 400 members.
There were 18 firefighters and 12 police at Paly during the drill. In a real disaster, the "first responders" would be far fewer because of other emergency needs in the community, said Police Agent Dan Ryan. That makes PANDA all the more important.
No one wants to think about the ultimate rainy day of disasters, but Palo Alto gets high marks for training for that, on its own initiative.
"It's only a question of time before we're dealing with this in real time," Mayor Jim Burch said.
And stay off the black tarp, if you can.
Weekly Senior Writer Don Kazak can be emailed at dkazak@paweekly.com.
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