2009-06-04 Regular Meeting RE
LOCAL EMERGENCY PLANNING COMMITTEE
QUARTERLY MEETING JUNE 4, 2009
MINUTEST""m 4 l 1'r
CALL TO ORDER BCROIJG wp �u_° a '�
Duane Dvorak called to order the June 4,2009 LEPC Quarterly Meeting at 1:30 p.m.in .....m
Kodiak Island Borough Assembly Chambers.
ROLL CALL
Present:
Lt.Jason Boyle(USCG-MSD Kodiak,LEPC) Bud Cassidy(KIB)
Marjorie DeGreef(PKIMC,LEPC/Hospital) Elsa DeHart(Public Health Nursing)
Anne Ellingson (Kodiak Public Health) Carolyn Floyd(City of Kodiak,ESC)
Bob Himes(Bayside FD,LEPC/First Aird) Rick Gifford(KIB,ESC)
Rome Kamai(KFD,LEPC/Firefighting) TC Kamai(KPD,LEPC/Law Enforcement)
Ruth-Anne O'Gorman (Kodiak Public Health) Gayle Solesbee (KCHC. LEPC/Health)
Terry Stone(KANA) Jocene Warnecke (PKICC)
Scott Williams (KIB School District) Lorraine Stewart(Kodiak College UAA)
Janet Buckingham(KIC&VB) Aimde Kniaziowski(City of Kodiak)
Jeff Williams (KLC Operations/Safety Spclst) Trish Baker(Crisis Solution,Contractor BP)
Doug VanWingerden(BP Community Liaison) Stacy Studebaker(LEPC,Local Environm.)
A quorum was established.
MINUTES OF PREVIOUS MEETINGS
There was a correction to the minutes on page 4 Chief Calkins stated the Northern Edge is
scheduled for April 27- May th this year.
Bob Himes MOVED to approve the March 5,2009 minutes as amended.
Voice vote on motion CARRIED unanimously.
INTRODUCTIONS
Trish Baker introduced herself stating she is the Crisis Solution Contractor to BP.
Lorraine Stewart introduced herself stating she works for Kodiak College UAA.
Jeff Williams introduced himself stating he is with the Kodiak Launch Complex.
NEW BUSINESS
a) Election of LEPC Chair
Dvorak reported that due to Linda Freed retiring we don't have an LEPC chair now and she was
also the Emergency Services Council Chair. Rome Kamai is acting chair right now.He stated the
chair has to be an active LEPC member,and everyone should think about filling this vacancy.
We will re-visit this in September and hold elections,but in the meantime Rome Kamai will
continue to be acting chair.Dvorak will email an information packet regarding the chair and
LEPC requirements to folks.
INFORMATIONAL ITEMS
b) SERC Meetings Report January 2009 (Duane Dvorak)
Dvorak stated the SERC met in May by teleconference and the Department of Homeland Security
&Emergency Management is expecting to experience some budget cuts for next year.As a result
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they have taken immediate action to cut down on the number of statewide meetings they have.
As a function of our grant,usually we were required to attend 4 quarterly meetings at the SERC
level and usually the chair or LEPC coordinator would attend those meetings. It's now been cut
down to 2 meetings a year.Their next meeting will be in September.They will not be cutting our
grant amounts and we've been approved for our baseline grant allocation for FY 2010 which is
$20,180.These grant monies are used for emergency preparedness advertising,printing of the
emergency preparedness brochures,and we use money for planning,equipment,projectors and
such.
c) Alaska Shield Exercise 2010 (Bud Cassidy)
Cassidy stated he put together a packet with some notes from the Anchorage training. He stated
he's a part of the planning committee for a statewide joint earthquake oriented exercise called the
Arctic Edge from April 26 through May 7, 2010 that will involve the Federal, State, and local
government. The National Guard will be doing an exercise at the same time called the Vigilant
Guard, and the State of Alaska with their boroughs and cities will be doing the Alaska Shield.
They are done jointly in a sense but they are separate. Resources are going to be committed at all
levels and we need to decide how we want to be involved and what it is we want to exercise.The
alternative is to work on things that we don't have in place yet.We decide on how we want to be
involved. With all the turnover we're looking at what it would take to get the City involved in
participating in this statewide exercise.There are a lot of resources available and they will pay for
training and supplies. There is ICS training for incident command system for the people who
haven't been trained or trained at lower levels and Emergency Operation Management would be
important since we are building a new Emergency Operations Center, Structural Damage
Assessment, and Communications. Cassidy is looking for people from all sectors who want to
participate in a planning committee. The State will develop the exercise and they are looking for
input from the localities, and they will send out all the advertising and media. Anyone interested
should contact Cassidy at 486-9363.
d) Emergency Preparedness Training(Rome Kamai)
Kamai stated this update ties in with the Incident Management Team list and talked about the
required training depending on the position: the cored training is the incident command system
level 100, 200 and anymore to get grant money you also have to have level 700 and 800 training.
For the 300 and 400 level training we will go outside for. Everyone who has had this training may
want to refresh and Kamai provided website addresses that provide this training online. On the
last website there are links to other locations.The FEMA Emergency Training Center is probably
the best link to get the basic level training and typically training goes from 3 to 5 hours. If you
could get this done by the next quarter we can start planning for levels 300 and 400 training. In
the meantime,we still need to update the IMT list and get that out through the process.
Dvorak stated you need this training in order to understand the Emergency Operations Plan,and
anyone new should be reviewing both of these training courses and then start looking at the
Emergency Operations Plan in the community to see where it applies to your area of expertise.
e) COOP Planning
Dvorak stated last fall TC, Rome and he along with some City folks had some COOP training.
We don't have a COOP Plan and it's one of the things the State will be looking at us to develop in
the near future. It's something that affects every organization in the example of a Pandemic
Influenza where you have the prospect of large numbers of people being absent from work or
essential functions, how will your organization continue to function without those people and
resources. Continuity of Operations is looking at the whole range of potential disasters that
could befall a community and determining what are the essential functions that absolutely need
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to continue even in the midst of a disaster, and how are we going to do those things and how are
we going to continue.
f) LEPC/ESO Bylaws
Dvorak stated he looked for the Bylaws and could not find them and it appears we don't have
any. Ten or fifteen years ago there was an attempt to develop joint Bylaws that would cover both
organizations. The ESO had Bylaws but the LEPC being new didn't so we tried to create joint
Bylaws but apparently they were never adopted. We do need to complete this function so by the
next quarterly meeting we will have some draft Bylaws for your consideration.
g) Kodiak Area EOP Amendment—Incident Management Team Designated Personnel
Dvorak stated this is the page that we use to determine who's going to run the various sections in
our Incident Command System when we activate our Incident Management Team. This is the
new,updated list with new phone numbers,cell phone numbers and this ties in with what Rome
talked about when he mentioned the other list. We left people's personal numbers off this sheet
because we don't want to advertise them.The plan was last updated in 2005 and we're supposed
to do an annual review and update. We have reviewed it but haven't really made any updates
until now. This is our first and highest priority that we need to rectify. At the quarterly meeting
we will ask to put this to a vote and make a recommendation to the Emergency Services Council
for adopting and amending our Emergency Operations Plan. There are a lot of other functions
that need to be filled, this is mostly management level folks but it does talk about the positions
and that relates to the kind of training Kamai was just talking about. Your management people
will be the ones to set the tone who lead the charge and basically direct other people to fulfill
their functions under our plan.
TC Kamai asked if the people on the revised list meet the minimum training requirements that
are specified for the different positions,have they had the recommended ICS training.
Dvorak stated there may be a need to get some folks training or refreshment. Identifying the
people and providing the training scenario will help us make that connection. If people haven't
been trained it's probably because they haven't been designated for that.
Ruth-Anne O'Gorman asked if public health should be on this at all. She has been involved in the
Pandemic Flu mini emergency thing we've had going as a medical branch office. The State does
provide the training for us so she doesn't know if our names should be on this or not.
Dvorak stated this list doesn't go very deep and if we have another medical emergency like the
H1NI virus you would fall under operations and you'd probably fill a medical branch function for
us. The thing about the emergency operations plan is it's a very flexible document. We don't
necessarily need a medical branch in every disaster but in this H1N1 pandemic influenza that's
where we have our pandemic influenza annex as well as the flexibility of the EOP in itself. The
pandemic influenza annex hasn't been fully reflected in the original 2005 plan so there's some
additional planning work that needs to be done to outline that. Normally, we would expect
public health will mobilize and that we would probably have a liaison relationship and that you
wouldn't necessarily be in our building but we would be in close communication and you would
keep us informed of everything we need to know from the medical branch perspective. You
would really be in charge of your own operations at a slightly lower level than this. We have an
organizational chart that shows that without naming any names and the names that would go in
there are available at the time of the disaster. That's how we maintain flexibility. Dvorak said if
there are deficiencies in the contact information see me after the meeting.
h) Pandemic Flu Update
Dvorak said the H1NI virus kicked off in April. We've been working on this since about a week
after it kicked off and had a big community wide meeting on April 30`h which people from the
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State came to give an update on what was going on. The State stood up its emergency operations
center and at that time DHSS was leading the charge. Later on they formed a unified command
because they were also dealing with some flooding disasters in the interior but we did work this
and a lot of credit goes to the local health community members. We just adopted our pandemic
influenza plan back in January. April 301h was Linda Freed's last day and she wasn't at that
meeting due to her briefing the new city manager, Aimee Kniaziowski. Kniaziowski has stepped
up since that meeting and taken charge and stood up a limited incident management team
including myself, Rome Kamai, Ruth-Anne O'Gorman and several others. We also stood up a
joint information committee and did a couple of PSA's that involved representatives from the
city, borough, school district, and coast guard base so we had a good cross section of folks
involved in this even though the H1N1 virus hasn't turned out to be all that virulent but it's still a
pandemic just by virtue of the fact that it's transmitting from human to human going global and
it will be with us for a good long while yet. It does seem that because the virulents aren't as
strong as it could have been things are standing down a little bit so perhaps now is a good time to
get a recap on where we're at.
Ruth-Anne O'Gorman said the incident command and the joint information committee (]IC)put
out another public service announcement. We had one running for a week or two saying that
there were no confirmed cases in Alaska but that did change about a week ago when there is one
confirmed case in Fairbanks of the novel H1N1 flu. The person is recovered and not in Alaska
anymore.There have been no other cases but we're just going to have to wait and see,possibly in
the fall we'll have a new flu vaccine that we'll be providing. All the planning we've done in the
past few years for these exercises will hopefully pan out. We have to wait and see if it's going to
return with a vengeance next fall when the real, true flu season comes. People are getting it and
recovering from it and the death rate is real low comparable to the regular seasonal flu but we
need to be ready for it come October, November, and December when flu season comes back we
might have a nasty bug on our hands.The State lab is up and running and able to diagnose now if
there is a case.
Anne Ellingson said (inaudible) participate in the after action teleconference to be held
tomorrow from 1:00 — 3:00 p.m. and she did send an email out with the number. We will do a
wrap up of how things went, what we did well, what we had challenges with, and then some
possible offerings of solutions of what we might do better next time.
Dvorak said a lot of lessons were learned here. We did mobilize as though this was a serious
health concern so we did exercise our plan.
Gayle Solesbee said the last couple of months we've been working with this H1N1 and wanted to
report the Kodiak Community Health Center in conjunction with some staff from Providence
Hospital had worked together to join all the area clinics and we had representatives from all our
clinics in our community that showed up to take training on appropriate gathering of lab
specimens and responses so we're all working together.
PRESENTATION
a) Regional Planning Committee Process in the event of an oil spill affecting Kodiak (Doug
VanWingerden and Trish Baker,BP)
Trish Baker, contractor for BP, other Prince William Sound shippers, and specifically Regional
Stakeholders Committee, said when she worked for Arco Marine, according to the State Federal
unified plan it called for a MAC (multi-agency coordinating committee) and have since changed
the name due to MAC meaning something different in the fire world than it does in the oil spill
world and it was causing much confusion. In 1999 we roll out what the oil spill version of a MAC
was which meant bringing along the different communities that are affected or might be affected
by an oil spill and bringing representatives of those communities into the Valdez Emergency
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Operations Center. We sit down with them and ask what kinds of problems do you see in your
community that you are either experiencing now or that you foresee happening either as a result
of the oil spill itself or as the result of our response which can be very intrusive in communities,
particularly small ones. Having gone through that by the book MAC in 1999 we determined
while the idea is a good one that particular construct was not ideal but we're glad we tried it. It
had never been exercised before because it's not part of the tanker plan, it's part of the unified
plan. The tanker plan is a voluminous volume which is the shipper's permit to operate. It has
always said you will ramp up a MAC but because it's not part of the tanker plan the State never
required them to do it. At the time Arco and she volunteered to do that and it didn't work out
well. The next shipper up was BP and the State said they wanted to try it again but not to worry
about what the unified plan says and if it doesn't work out we will try something else. BP was
then free to do something that's not in a plan. By that point she owned her own company so BP
hired her to work exclusively on that project. Basically, if someone wore a badge they weren't
invited to the table and we wanted more stakeholders. People from the community level and
below didn't already have a seat at the table where the State of Alaska and the Federal
Government had several seats so it was pushing those communities into the background and
their issues weren't being heard. It was turning into another unified command and that wasn't
what we wanted so we just said people from the city, borough, and below are the ones the
regional stakeholder's committee is made of. In the last 7 years we found that the communities
predictably have different issues with what comes up either as a result of the oil spill itself or the
response. For example, in Whittier they came up with something very practical which is with a
huge influx of people bringing out of region equipment into Whittier and a lot of extra people are
camping out which means their dumpsters are filling up a lot faster than they use to and who is
paying for that. There's an influx of people, the population has doubled and there are a lot of
other expenses. We said that was a good point and never foreseen that event. In Valdez, having
experienced the influx of potential workers into their city their need for security was for extra
police officer's was huge. Even before a spill happens we want to be able to know that we've got
access and someone is going to pay for all those police officers so that is something that we know
ahead of time that that is something that well have to be looking at. There is very specific stuff
that's not particularly newsworthy from a New York Times standpoint but certainly something
that's going to affect the community. BP is committed to sending, in this case Doug
VanWingerden, a volunteer to be in Kodiak in the event of an emergency. There are other BP
employees that have volunteered to go to other communities and basically be the conduit
between the response center and the community. The communities are also invited to send
someone of their choice to the command post in Valdez and we realize when there has been an
emergency, particularly a big enough one, it will require an exchange of people. You may not be
able to spare someone for very long, and someone from Kodiak wouldn't be expected to stay for
the duration of the event. It would be Kodiak's choice how long, when, and whom you sent.
Another person could be sent the following week. It's however the community wishes to
participate. We focus on the 5 Prince William Sound communities plus the western Alaska
communities all the way to Kodiak basically looking at what was oiled in 1989 and saying we
understand where the water goes so we understand the communities that are potentially
impacted. These are the ones we focus on for Prince William Sound for the tankers but because
this is in the unified plan the handout you received is worded as if this could happen anywhere in
the state and in fact, the State does expect responsible parties to reach out to the communities
and give them information and answer their questions. The joint information center has been
formed to answer questions focusing on the media and government folks so they have press kits
and very general information. We have found the residents of affected communities have very
different and very specific questions which we don't want them to have to just depend on the
news to get their questions answered because they aren't usually interesting enough for the
newspapers to pick up but they are of critical value to the people it's happening to. We see the
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potentially affected residents as being another level of the public that gets a little more attention.
At the time of incident an investigation begins but it doesn't stop a response from going on,
Alyeska is still going to respond and then BP takes over that response in a period of days. Very
early on in that process the decision is made do we want to deploy our community liaisons like
Doug VanWingerden who have volunteered to be sent to communities., The first thing they
would do is call the communities they volunteered to be with and say we've had an incident do
you want me to come. Typically a community would say yes but we don't force ourselves onto
people.A place like Kodiak,it would probably be safe to say that VanWingerden could just be on
his way because if they decided they don't want him here he could be in a hotel where in a place
like Chenega Bay or Tititlik you don't just show up uninvited,you wait until you get invited and
then they can accommodate you which is the other part of that. The smaller villages are a bit
trickier. in these periodic visits we would establish a place to set up, in this case at Kodiak's
decision, of where VanWingerden should set up an information center and it's good to have an
alternate site in case the first site isn't available so the community liaison can set up and then
start sharing what he knows. VanWingerden's role is to relay those questions to the response
center in Valdez where people like me work with another group who go down to those sections
that are working; the environment unit, the planning section, the operations section,and we will
get the answers to those questions and then get them back to VanWingerden. We know it's
going to be crazy so there are different things that the industry is doing to try to facilitate
communications. At an absolute minimum we'll provide answers in batches. Whoever the
shipper is has been asked to ramp up a regional stakeholder's committee. Of the 4 shippers 2 of
them have hundreds of employees in Alaska and 2 have dozens.It may be that Sea River or Tesoro
wouldn't have someone from their own company to send to you and my recommendation to
those companies is it is a non starter to send someone from Houston to Kodiak and let them tell
you what is going on. They aren't going to pronounce the words right and get all the geography
wrong and then their credibility will suffer at a time when we're having a crisis which we can't
really afford that. For the companies that don't have large bodies of employees here in Alaska
available to be sent that another mechanism will be used for that conduit. We would want to
talk to each community to find out how they want to achieve that. Local knowledge may be
shared which we appreciate because people who fish these areas know the waters better than
anyone else. We also may not be aware of certain communities having planted oysters in a new
oyster bed and we would want to be apprised of that because we know there is an area with a
higher value than perhaps our maps indicate. Alyeska keeps pretty close tabs on what's
happening in various communities but if I were you I wouldn't want to rely on that. People may
want to let us know they have a bulldozer or other equipment for hire so we give that
information to our logistics people and if we need equipment we know who to contact. One of
the first things we would do is publish the claims number and give it to VanWingerden and all
the other community liaisons to post so if there are people who felt they did have a claim they
could start that process right away.We try to come here every year so anyone new with the city
or the borough can understand how the process has so far has been designed. It gets tweeked all
the time and if you see something that would work better we want to hear about it because the
purpose is to get people informed and make a 2 way communication loop. Each of the 4 shippers
takes I turn every 4 years. Alyeska has to do this every year. It is a negative thing for everyone to
have a spill or potential spill and this process is a response to our recognized need of residents to
have information and have their questions answered. Without this construct you end up with
people who are already upset and anger doesn't breed solutions so the unified command ended
up instead of having a resource they ended up with challenges. We see the people in affected
communities as a resource which is why we hope that Kodiak and the other communities send
someone to Valdez. Without having those community members there we don't have that
resource.
COMMUNICATIONS
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a) Next LEPCA/SE C Meetings-September 2009 in Fairbanks,TBD
Dvorak stated the dates haven't been pinned down yet.
ADJOURNMENT
Terry Stone MOVED to adjourn.
The next ESO/LEPC meeting is scheduled for September 3, 2009
By: z �
>ReKamai,Acting Chair
Approved:September 3,2009