Borough staff are dusting off and re-tooling their emergency management plans after last week’s tsunami scare.
Public Facilities Director Brad Ryan is the borough’s Incident Commander, a job description that includes overseeing agencies and individuals who respond in a disaster and directing contingency plans. During last week’s tsunami warnings, Ryan was on his way home from vacation and borough staff were unsure of who was in charge.
While police chief Heath Scott took the lead, the flow chart describing who was responsible for what aspect of emergency response included names of people who no longer lived in town.
“Many of these names are not active,” borough manager Debra Schnabel said this week. “Many of them don’t live in Haines.”
Ryan said while he was interim borough manager, it was brought to his attention that the command structure needed updating. He met with volunteer firefighter Roc Ahrens to start that process before he left for vacation.
Besides assigning new positions and having staff members receive updated training for emergency response, the borough also needs to identify an Emergency Operations Center. Scott used his dispatch area as the EOC during the tsunami response. Ryan said it’s best for the EOC to operate in a location away from the police department, which has a defined role that operates under the umbrella of the Incident Commander.
“It’s always been in the fire hall,” Ryan said. “The simple vision is a bunch of phone lines, some computers and some mapping programs. An EOC needs to be isolated from the interaction that happens with the fire department doing their thing and the police department doing theirs.”
The borough also received a tsunami inundation map created by researchers with the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The map shows, in a worst case scenario, that the public safety building would be swamped by incoming water.
“Our tsunami risk is low enough that in reality it’s probably fine,” Ryan said. “But you might say that about all emergencies. They’re all low risk. You’re just planning for the worst.”
Ryan said the borough will use the public library as an EOC in future responses.
Ryan also wants to explore rebuilding emergency food stores and medical supplies. Last summer borough staff discovered pallets of expired MREs—field rations eaten by the U.S. military and given to civilians during natural disasters along with supplies of moldy neck braces and field cots.