CCP 11-19-2001 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Communitv ResDonse to the Threat of "Terrorism - A Public EntiN Risk institute SvmDosium The Incident Command System and the Concept of Unified Command at a Terrorist Incident By Lt. John Kane Sacramento, Calif. Police Department Preface to the Unified Command Discussion When I found out that I was going to be addressing an audience as large and as varied as this one today, I wanted to add some remarks to my Unified Command lecture, These remarks are specifically targeted at the managers and local elected officials in the audience: City managers, county executives, city councilpersons, county supervisors, business managers, security managers, building managers - YOU ARE NOT READY FOR A TERRORIST INCIDENT! And I am hearing that local Chiefs are saying that they are prepared and ready to handle one of these incidents! To properly handle one of these events al the local level requires a huge amount of coordination, training, and drilling between the key players, and this HAS NOT OCCURRED, I want you to take everything you have heard from your local Fire Chief, Chief of Police, or Sheriff about how well prepared they are, and how much more money they want, and just put it up on the shelf for a few minutes as you read this, especially the questions at the end of this inlroduction which I want you 10 ask. If your job falls into one of the key managemenl or elected posilions I have mentioned above, you need to go on your own private fact finding tour, now - and I mean righl now, You need to go on your own tour to determine the actual stale of readiness in your local area, not what you have been told by the various bosses, They have their own interesls to prolect. I don't wanllo get 100 dramatic, but Ihere are lives at Slake, Ihe lives of your co-workers and citizens, so for your own piece of mind I want you to verify what you've been told and make sure your local area is ready to handle one of these events. I had the pleasure of inlerviewing California Slate Senator Nick Petris in the early 1990s for a course on disaster operations I was putting together here in California. Senator Petris' district suffered the Oakland I Berkeley Hills fire of 199 J in which 26 people died and more than 3,000 homes and apartments were destroyed, He investigaled this event from the perspective of how it was managed. His investigation found that each police and fire agency in California had a different prolocol or method on how to handle major incidents, They often had differenl names for similar tasks. The differences in these syslems resulled in some confusion and inefficiency in the management of this event as many agencies came together in mutual aid to help fight the fire and rescue people. It was from Senator Petris' investigation, and subsequent groundbreaking legislation, that California enacted the Standardized Unified Command at a Terrorist Incident J .n. . .