popular logistics

Excerpts from The Disaster Accountability Project’s comments on the National Response Framework:

• “The NRF inadequately considers the needs of non-English speakers who may be foreign visitors or immigrants… Make the draft NRF readily available in Spanish and other languages spoken by a substantial portion of the population”

• “Make civil service positions less vulnerable to political pressures from above by embracing meaningful whistle-blower protections for all emergency managers, including those with security clearances; and provide an effective and supportive mechanism for receiving disclosures of inadequacies in emergency planning, exercising and response.”

• ” ‘Framework’ is indeed a more accurate name for this product ; but it is not entirely accurate. What is needed is a different product - a plan, not a name change.”

• “The description of the FEMA Director and DHS Secretary’s responsibilities conflicts with requirements of the Post Katrina Reform Act.”

• “Shifting NRF implementation to the DHS Secretary is not consistent with the intent of Congress as described in the Post Katrina Reform Act…The head of FEMA and not the DHS Secretary should be in charge of coordinating federal emergency response.”

• “Some ESF functions may be inappropriately combined, partitioned or privatized.”

• “Not all ‘lessons learned’ are publicly reported or followed up with changes to plans. For example, as TOPOFF 4 prepares to being, the TOPOFF III after-action report still has not been issued.”

• “Federal exercises frequently ignore recovery or give it lip service if addressed at all… Ensure that adequate exercise time is allowed to cover long-term recovery issues in reasonable detail.”

• “Logic suggests that the FEMA Administrator would be the coordinator of the federal response, not the DHS Secretary’s advisor… The roles of the FEMA Director and Director of Operations Coordination appear to conflict, calling to mind post-Katrina confusion.”

DAP release here. Link to Acrobat (.pdf) file of complete comments here.

If you care about these issues - and if you’re reading this, you probably do - the Disaster Accountability Project is asking good questions.

Disaster Accountability Project (main site)

Disaster Accountability Project (blog)

According to Ellen Sullivan’s Associated Press piece, published on Firehouse.com

The nation is preparing for its biggest terrorism exercise ever later this month when three fictional “dirty bombs” go off and cripple transportation arteries in two major U.S. cities and Guam, according to a document obtained by The Associated Press.

Yet even as this drill begins, details from the previous national exercise held in 2005 have yet to be publicly released - information that’s supposed to help officials prepare for the next real attack.

I don’t understand it.

But - Michael Chertoff has started a blog. And, after a recent  post, David W. Stephenson, of Stephenson Strategies, made a comment that actually made it through DHS screening.

I’m not sure he could have gotten the comment onto a commercial flight, though, unless it was in checked luggage.

Check out Mirabile dictu! My comment on Chertoff’s blog was ok’d,  on Stephenson blogs on homeland security 2.0. 

Stephenson is co-author, with Eric Bonabeau, of Expecting the Unexpected: The Need for a Networked Terrorism and Disaster Response Strategy, in the February 2007 issue of Homeland Security Affairs. 

We’ve blogged about this article before - but it’s good enough that I’m happy to shill for it more than once - as I am about HSAJ’s parent organization, the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense & Security.

Between Stephenson, Bonabeau, and Professor Brian Steckler of NPS, I’ve been persuaded of the utility of wireless networks in emergencies - although it’s my contention that, organized from the bottom up - we need more than one system. More about system redundancy and about NPS soon.

Another outstanding resource from Brian Steckler from the Naval Postgraduate School and the Center for the Study of Hastily Formed Networks for Humantarian Assistance/Disaster Relief    -

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been compiling a Responder Knowledge Base, much of which is non-classified,  has what appears to be an encyclopedic collection of information about:

• equipment
• equipment grants
• standards
• best practices

If you’re a registered user (first responder, paid or volunteer, planner - someone with a verifiable legitimate use), there’s an “ask an expert” submission form - and the staff promises to try to answer questions, via email, within a week. I’m going to submit a couple of questions that have been, of late, frustrating my attempts to do some communications planning and budgeting.