How do you handle your communications, your coordination, and your span of control?
BY DAVID W. PARROTT
Emergency responders know that every critique of every emergency incident and drill seems to have some common components. No matter how many “Good” ratings are received, it seems that the “Needs Improvement” column always has some reference to “better coordination,” “better communication,” or “better span of control.” Responders seem to discuss these “problems” after every event. The “annual talking point” between sessions at every emergency response conference becomes, “How do you handle your communications, your coordination, and your span of control?”
THE CORPUS CHRISTI EXPERIENCE
If you were able to find and spend $1.5 million to address these problems in your community, how would you spend it?
Approximately seven years ago, officials from Corpus Christi and Nueces County, Texas, began a process that changed “communications” in the Coastal Bend area forever. Officials from the City of Corpus Christi Police and Fire Departments, Nueces County, the Refinery Terminal Fire Company, and many Port Industries initiated a project that helped us answer some basic response questions in the Coastal Bend area. Although the Corpus Christi area has some unique challenges, you may find some ideas in the Coastal Bend program that can be used in your locality.
Corpus Christi, the sixth largest port in the country, has several large refineries and chemical facilities along its ship channel. In the aftermath of the Texas City Explosion in 1947, several local refineries began looking at industrial emergency response operations in the Corpus Christi area.
THE REFINERY TERMINAL FIRE COMPANY
In 1948, this refining industry consortium formed the Refinery Terminal Fire Company (RTFC), a nonprofit corporation composed of full-time industrial firefighters specifically trained to fight industrial fires within the member companies’ facilities. The RTFC has evolved into a highly professional private fire service that employs more than100 full-time firefighters who work out of six stations that serve members throughout the Gulf Coast of Texas. The fire company also operates a state-of-the-art fire training academy in Corpus Christi.
The relationship between the RTFC and the response organizations in Corpus Christi has historically been very close, but the usual “problems” of communication, span of control, and coordination of service have plagued the responders.
The majority of the refining facilities in Corpus Christi reside outside the city limits. This means that Nueces County has jurisdiction for most refining incidents in the ship channel. Although the jurisdiction for the incident resides with Nueces County, the county does not have industrial fire response capability. To further complicate the matter, the jurisdictional boundary lines of the ship channel industrial district are city streets. This means that the industrial district is in the county, but the district is actually surrounded by the city of Corpus Christi. This reality meant that every industrial incident involved two governmental jurisdictions and a private response organization operating out of three separate dispatch centers with two separate 9-1-1 answering points and a separate private industry radio system.
It is not difficult to visualize the problems that used to be associated with a major industrial incident in this situation. Let’s look at a hypothetical incident that might have occurred within a facility that employs the RTFC.
The incident politically resides within the county, yet it is in the midst of a highly populated area of the city. The response sequence starts with a call from the facility’s security guard to the RTFC dispatcher, who dispatches RTFC resources over a separate RTFC radio frequency. Security then contacts the city dispatch center and the county sheriff’s dispatcher. These two entities tried to discover the extent of the incident from a security guard who knew only very basic information. The various refineries, the RTFC, Corpus Christi Fire and Police, and the county were all operating on separate radio systems and were unable to effectively communicate with each other. Usually, the city and county responded with what they felt were appropriate resources, well after the RTFC was on the scene and inside the plant. Coordination inside and outside the fence became increasingly difficult to maintain, and response coordination started to break down.
This entire “interaction” took place under the watchful eye of the neighbors, who did not care what color the fire trucks and police cars were painted. When they had an emergency, they were apprehensive and wanted the police and fire departments to respond and mitigate their problem. They noticed that response did not seem to be very coordinated. Neighbors can be very vocal when they do not understand the “system.” This is especially true if they think that the system has failed them. Public perception is in fact reality. A very apprehensive, vocal group of citizens started asserting themselves in the early 1990s; these public concerns started the change process.
THE CHANGE PROCESS
We took a positive step toward correcting the communications problems in 1990 when the city of Corpus Christi started using a new 800 MHz trunked radio system. The city made the system available to other agencies and jurisdictions. Since 1990, the system has grown so that now the 800 MHz system is available to most of the response community in the Coastal Bend area. The RTFC, Corpus Christi Fire and Police, the Regional Transportation Authority (bus system), all Corpus Christi utilities, and the Nueces County sheriff were all on the original system. (The 800 MHz system has now grown to include several Coastal Bend agencies.)
Several industrial incidents in the early 1990s caused a rebirth of the Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC). As LEPC work increased, the members of the City of Corpus Christi/Nueces County Local Emergency Planning Committee hired a full-time administrator for the LEPC program. The 1993 hiring of a full- time administrator and the appointment of a part-time vice chairman from industry in 1994 gave the volunteers on the various LEPC subcommittees a continuity of contact that ensured that subcommittee business would be carried out. The emergency response subcommittee was able to work on some of the most immediate response-coordination questions, while the community awareness subcommittee worked to inform the neighbors about the realities of living with chemicals and the emergency response system. Local industry, governmental agencies, and the public formed a partnership through the LEPC, which worked toward mutual understanding and trust.
BLUE PRINT PROJECT
Through the Blue Print Project (proposed in 1994), named the “Emergency Response and Communications during Hazardous Materials Incidents: The Integrated Alert and Notification System,” we devised and funded a comprehensive program of public education and information, responder training, communication equipment, and response coordination. It was a $1.5 million five-year plan, implemented through LEPC and funded by eight industrial sponsors-CITGO Refining, KOCH Industries, Coastal Refining, Equistar Chemical, Celanese Corporation, Valero Refining, the Port of Corpus Christi Authority, and the Corpus Christi Water Department. The concept of the project is housed in a 20-part, 176-page workbook, which was presented to industry and governmental officials. The Corpus Christi City Council and the Nueces County Commissioners Court reviewed and approved the document. The project’s five-year plan is based on this document. Blue Print funding was reviewed annually, and specific goals and objectives were incorporated into each year’s budget. The project is in its last year.
CRISIS MANAGEMENT DISPATCH
Crisis management dispatch (CMD), a very important part of the Blue Print project, was implemented in 1997. The CMD section is a room within the city 9-1-1 dispatch center. RTFC dispatchers staff CMD on a full-time basis. The RTFC personnel in CMD are trained to the Firefighter II level; they have firefighting and medical training. They are also trained as hazardous materials technicians and must complete Corpus Christi police dispatch training. They are certified police dispatchers in the state of Texas. The RTFC and the city of Corpus Christi have signed a Memorandum of Understanding that allows RTFC staff to operate within the city’s 9-1-1 center.
We have not experienced any significant interdepartmental problems. Those that did surface were worked out over the long haul. We worked out issues such as varying pay scales, scheduling, staffing levels, and legal requirements. City and county officials wanted the problems resolved. The needed compromises were worked out.
When the funding came along, everyone saw that they had to get along to move ahead. This is one of those rare jurisdictions where the organizations get along quite well, from the top down. The very few personality conflicts (and there are some) that occur do not spill over into emergency response or dispatch. This cooperative spirit started back in the early 1990s, when the police chief and fire chief (EMS works for fire) got along well. They were part of the initial “push” on the LEPC and Blue Print projects. That cooperation has carried over with our new police chief. (It helps that the former police chief serves on the city council.)
On a day-to-day basis, CMD is the RTFC dispatch center. During an emergency, however, appropriate city and county personnel enter the section and join the RTFC staff. The room then goes from being RTFC Dispatch to Crisis Management Dispatch; all emergency communications during the incident are coordinated from CMD. Once this section is opened, all CMD resources are available to the incident commander.
CMD resolved some basic emergency response problems within operations and communications. After the CMD concept was implemented, city 9-1-1 personnel had trained RTFC personnel available within the center to help with hazardous materials incidents. These RTFC dispatchers also operate the many Alert/Information “tools” the LEPC Blue Print has purchased for public alerting. Over the five years of the Blue Print project, several state-of-the-art Information/Alerting tools were placed within CMD. Presently, CMD has the ability to access the Emergency Alert System (text messages across the commercial TV screen), the telephone information line (emergency information available to callers during an incident), the computerized telephone system (computerized calling telephone system that sends prerecorded messages to selected telephone numbers), the transmission of emergency audio messages over a local FM radio station, and the Tone Alert Radio System (tone opens a radio receiver and audio message can be transmitted to hospitals, schools, and nursing homes). CMD dispatchers operate all five of these systems.
The Blue Print has implemented these tools over the past five years. Although private industry funded these systems through the LEPC Blue Print, ownership was passed to the city, which has promised to maintain the system. All five systems are operational at present. No tools were placed in service without first conducting a comprehensive public education program that explained the system to the community. Public education also included emergency tabletop drills that necessitated extensive “neighbor” involvement.
The centerpiece of the Blue Print-METROCOM-is a combined dispatch center that encompasses most of the county’s response agencies’ communications-the RTFC, Corpus Christi fire and EMS, Corpus Christie police, Nueces sheriff’s department, and Nueces county constables. It became a reality this year. At the present time, CMD services and tools are also being made available to some of the surrounding Coastal Bend counties. Giving surrounding counties the opportunity to monitor the METROCOM 800 MHz system enables responders within the Coastal Bend area to unify emergency communications and response.
CMD, METROCOM, and all of the advanced tools are nothing more than the outcome of the involvement of government, industry, and the community. It is too soon to know how well the new METROCOM system will work in the next major incident, even though several of the system’s components were used in actual incidents. Knowing the nature of emergency response, it probably won’t be long before the entire system will be tested. After the next major incident, the users will probably still be talking about communication, coordination, and span of control. The conversations hopefully will come from a different perspective.
DAVID W. PARROTT is division chief of the Main Station, the In-Plant Program at CITGO Refinery, and the Crisis Management Dispatch Center at the Refinery Terminal Fire Company (RTFC), where he has been employed since 1998. He previously served as staff division chief in charge of the Crisis Management Dispatch Center and training division chief of the RTFC Training Academy. Before joining RTFC, Parrott was administrator of the City of Corpus Christi/Nueces County Local Emergency Planning Committee; a firefighter/police officer in the Olathe, Kansas, Fire and Police Prevention Bureau; and the director of emergency management for Johnson County, Kansas. He has a B.A. degree in social science from Emporia State University, Kansas. He served in the U.S. Army Infantry in Vietnam and as a member of the U.S. Naval Reserve.
