safe sites for all        showers and day centers        overnight shelter        coordinated entry locations  

Presentation Minutes

Pierce County Emergency Management - https://www.co.pierce.wa.us/104/Emergency-Management

  • Presentation Materials
  • Serena McWha, Access and Functional Needs Coordinator, Pierce County Emergency Management  - mcwha@piercecountywa.gov
  • My background is in social work, in nursing homes and retirement communities.  Social work and advocacy is near to my heart.  
  • I got my first experience with emergency management on FAST team
  • Functional  Assessment Services Team (FAST)
    • Team of social service professionals who volunteer and are trained in disaster preparedness
    • Developed in California after lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina and some California Wires – developed at the state level by the human services department.  They gathered their social workers and trained them to respond in shelters to reduce the impact of the disaster for people with disabilities and access and functional needs.
    • Lessons are learned from disaster responses, but still people with disabilities and functional needs are disproportionately affected
    • In 2012, sent Sherri Badger to bring this model to Washington State
    • Major duty of the FAST team is to coordinate with emergency shelters
    • Qualifications
      • Two years of professional experience
      • ICS 100/200/7700 (different training courses – info at https://training.fema.gov/nims/ -ed)
      • Pass background check
      • Work under difficult and stressful conditions (are there social workers not working under difficult and stressful conditions?  Just curious. –ed)
      • We draw on your experiences and expertise with Behavioral health, Developmental disabilities, Etc.
    • Have a monthly sustainment meeting where we keep volunteer involved.  The program has been around since 2012, but hasn’t been deployed, so we’ve not opened too many emergency shelters.  We have trainings and exercises to keep folks growing and involved. 
    • If you are interested in participating in our team, we meet monthly, and a 2-day training is coming in November. 
    • We want a representative from every type of discipline (but probably not “lax discipline”, my own specialty, I’m imagining – ed.)
    • We funnel staff to assess needs and want members who already know who to call.  If someone needs oxygen in a couple hours, need folks that can make that happen.
    • TEAM does not self-deploy – it is deployed by the Duty officer.  3 FAST coordinators can also deploy the team.  Duty Officer number 253-798-7470
    • Have trailers with blankets, mother and baby supplies, funded by FEMA.  They are deployable to King, Pierce and Snohomish. 
  • Pierce County Access and Functional Needs Coalition
    • Meets every 4th Thursday at 9am.  Putting a plan together to operationalize this group.  We don’t know where people are that need resources.  People with functional needs are the most impacted in emergencies, and we have resources, but we don’t know where the need is.  We work agencies like the Center for Independence (an amazing group - http://www.cfisouth.org/ -ed), Catholic Community Services ( http://www.ccsww.org/ ), the Health Department ( https://www.tpchd.org/ ) , TACID (another organization I adore - https://www.tacid.org/ -ed.), and people that work directly with individuals and know how to get to those individuals.  We want a way to collect needs and escalate to the right folks to get those needs met. 
    • During Katrina, learned that the disability world and the emergency management folks had no connection.  Neither knew how to coordinate with the other.  We are trying to close that gap still, which means working with agencies and coalitions and the network and membership. 
  • High Risk Disaster Planning Summit
    • June 22nd, - free event, will  hear from county emergency managers and lessons learned from disasters from the last year, including the air quality issues from last summer.  Have a table top exercise as well.  I’d like to invite you all.  It is a free, 1-day event at Blix Elementary on 38th between McKinley and Portland ave.  Registration is required.  Lunch is provided (so, there is such a thing as a free lunch –ed.)
  • Access and Functional Needs Coordinator – the homeless population falls under this category.  FEMA has a broad definition of people impacted in a disaster – someone who has special needs has
    • Communication needs – ASL or another language
    • Maintaining Health – someone who needs dialysis, or has a service animal, or some other need
    • We provide Safety, support, self-determination
    • Transportation is always a challenge
  • Natalie Stice, Emergency Management Guru, Pierce County Emergency Management
    • I am in the operations division of Pierce County Emergency Operations
  • Duty Officer Program
    • For Pierce County 1,800 miles square – over 900,000 people.  23 cities and towns we contract with.  Provide services for whole County, excep  except City of Tacoma, City of Lakewood and City of Puyallup.  If you are inside those three jurisdictions, you have to run requests through emergency management in that municipality. 
    • We have 8 duty officers and 6 duty managers.  They work 24x7 (probably not all at the same time, though…-ed).  One duty office is on-call for a full week – and is available for calls 24x7.  We log all communication.  We get tons of calls, for search and rescue, hazardous material issues, alerts and warning based on zip code or map perimeters.  We have protocols that go through the duty manager.  If a duty officer is overloaded, can ramp up response as needed.  Don’t be afraid to call us. 
    • Have 3 shelter trailers – we have them at a central location in Spanaway at the Radio Shop.  We had them distributed around the County.  We have cots, blankets.  They are different than the FAST trailers, ,which are needed for helping folks with functional  needs. 
    • Scenario – if you call the duty officer, we are trained to answer 24x7 – someone will answer the phone.  You make a request – you’ll need to identify fiscal agent -nothing is free – we may need to know who will assume the cost.  Cost may be billed to City or Agency. 
    • In the snow storm, we have essential personnel transport – “4x4’s” volunteers – can help with Search and Rescue and in snowstorms in urban areas.  Our five 4x4s did 700 transports of emergency personnel.  We transport first responders, hospital staff, fire fighters, and 911 dispatch operators.  After 2 weeks our volunteers needed a break.  For the hospital, it has to go through the house nurse to limit abuse of the system.  Our volunteer spend own time/money and gas – though there is some minimal reimbursement (I hope the doctors tip generously…-ed). 
    • Joy – you keep saying urban areas.  We had folks on the Key Peninsula stuck in their house for 4 or 5 days.  Could you provide services there?  Natalie – If Uber or taxi or Lyft or bus service not work, will activate volunteers.  Joy – we found a volunteer to get food to person in crisis.  Natalie – we can’t go out to 900,000 people to meet those sorts of needs.  People need a level of preparedness.  King County had their whole east side cut off because of the snow.  Clallam County had a similar situation, but not a crisis, since the residents, unlike in East Pierce County, were prepared.  Joy – can you train them to be prepared?  Kayla – since we serve folks who are very low income and work hard to get resources – we serve folks who have no resources.  Natalia - Emergency management can’t solve this problem along.  If a shelter is stood up, we can support that. 
    • Maureen – I appreciate your limits.  But you are a community, governmental agency, and I’m suggesting there are ways to respond to the folks we serve, who don’t have the luxury of personal preparation.  We can help you do that.  Serena – we need people to step up and be part of that.
    • Providing some of this support is the premise behind the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT). We need community members willing to stand up this group to help at the County level.  We have kind of a board struggling to get things up.  Contact Serena to get better involved with this. 
    • Al – You mentioned we need to go through the City’s Emergency Management?  Natalie – yes.  Al – this group we are talking about, has very well-defined procedures for well-defined disasters.  There is a learning curve on both sides.
    • Martha – I thought they don’t run the shelters, they provide what is needed.  The Red Cross runs those shelters.  Do you work with Marvin at the services corp?  Serina – yes.
    • We have 219 identified shelters in Pierce County – we don’t have staff to run them. (Emergency Management shelters are different than homeless shelters.  Emergency Management identifies a huge number of facilities willing to be used in an emergency, then catalogs their characteristics so when a disaster does happen, emergency management can stand up a few of those facility with the right features in the right geographic location to be the shelter. -ed) If you have a homeless shelter running above capacity – even if we were open, if your individual agency or shelter has more than you can handle, it is an emergency for you – so call us (or have Tacoma call us).  The red cross will not open a shelter unless there are at least 25 people, but that is the threshold that needs to be met.  Puyallup staffs their shelter with their public works folks.  We can help get resources and transportation, but someone generally has to pay for it. 
    • Maureen – following Al’s point – we have to work with very structured systems.  Is there a value in looking ahead to summer.  We were told to expect wildfires this summer and people will be subject to smoke and heat.  That seems like an immediate issue.  Serena – at the summit, we can engage on that topic.  Judy Olsen is the air quality expert at the Health Department.  The health department is not responsible for the cooling stations and air quality – we should continue to talk about as a group.  The health department passes on advisories, but doesn’t setup cooling stations.  That is done as a group effort – it was a huge unmet need last year.  Natalie- when we get a request, we push out information about places to go.  There has to be a request- there are no triggers related to temperature or air quality.  In Pierce County, we have many cooling places people can go to.  We’d need enough people not able to use existing locations before we add an inclement weather or cooling station shelter.
    • Theresa – whoever in Tacoma needed to request a shelter for 25 people, then Tacoma would be paying for it?  Natalie - If they initiated the request, they would be paying for it.  There are so many dependencies.  Serena – I couldn’t’ tell you what it would cost.  Natalie – for the Amtrak derailment, we brought in buses that were temperature controlled for temporary shelter.  The duty officer knows where the resources are.
    • Nathan – how would a mall react to us bussing people there.  Is there really no plan for hot weather?  Serena – the red cross is our lead in the sheltering – if we had lots of people that needed a cooling station, one would be established.
    • Question – except for an official state of emergency, someone else is on the dime.  Natalie – we have to be requested.  Question – the community has to establish need and request it.  Serena – we are trying to get a volunteer group to take some more work on.
  • James – there could be a need for a subcommittee to address emergency management.  (you could just feel the buzz of excitement at the suggestion of another subcommittee. –ed).
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