Worrying Finding - Part 2

Yesterday, we posted the article about how the world class city we call home is as woefully unprepared for a terrorist attack as American Samoa. The primary failure here seems to be based on the lack of interagency communication in the event of a major disaster.

Well, the City is firing back with both barrels. Channel 2, Channel 5, Channel 7, the Tribune and the Sun Times all have coverage of the rebuttal to the Department of Homeland Security report. The City's Chief Emergency Officer, is especially adamant in his defense of local preparations:

• Cortez Trotter said the extraordinary levels of inter-agency cooperation on display at the LaSalle Bank building fire, the South Side power outage and micro-burst and the CTA Blue Line derailment prove that Chicago has the communications network it needs to handle an even larger disaster.
• "You come into the ... the region and stay for a couple of hours at an exercise and, from that, you determine whether or not there's inter-operability issues in Chicago? ... Do you believe the report? Do you believe the two hours or three hours they spent here in the exercise? Do you guys believe what you've seen here or do you believe what you're hearing?" Trotter said.
• "Remember the micro-burst on the South Side of the city? Remember the LaSalle Bank building fire? Remember the Blue Line derailment? Remember the power outage? You don't get through those ... with some degree of success without a collaboration and good communication system. At the LaSalle Bank building fire, the ....agreement that we have with our regional partners was the largest in the history of Chicago. You can't bring people in like that and successfully mitigate without having a good communications network."

When you can't defend a position, the easiest plan is to attack the report pointing out the shortcomings. In every single link above, not a one questions or quotes the guys and gals out in the field who might actually be doing the communicating or the grunts in the trenches at OEMC who are at the other end of the radio. Has a single one of our readers EVER been able to communicate directly with a CFD unit? How about one who's a front line supervisor? And by communicate, we mean other than walking over to the ambulance or apparatus parked on the corner? We don't think so. Is it necessary? Seldom. But in the event of a major event, it's desirable. By the time they roll the "Command Van" out, we're in the middle of some giant headaches.

How about initial Command and Control? We assume someone, somewhere has been trained to set up a temporary command post whereby CFD and CPD can coordinate efforts until such time as a more permanent base of operations can be set up, but thanks to the attitude that it's not feasible to train up the entire Department, we are going to be stuck with a whole boatload of improvisations until those trained people can get into position.

And we hate to rain on Cortez Trotter's parade, but each of the disasters he notes, were for the most part a self contained single agency effort with a minor supporting role for a second agency:

• the microburst was a coordination of city services for the most part,
• the LaSalle Bank fire was a CFD effort with CPD as traffic control,
• the Blue Line derailment was a CTA mishap with CFD doing evac and CPD traffic,
• the power outage was just about all ComEd.

These were recovery efforts. Emergencies, yes, but the potential for loss of life and damage to property was minimal at best. DHS is concerned with a major event along the lines of 9/11 - multiple coordinated attacks against numerous targets resulting in casualties designed to overwhelm a regional ability to cope.

In that case, we are in big trouble.