What Happens When an Emergency Operations Center Is Damaged by an Earthquake?
A 6.0 magnitude earthquake hit Napa County, California, on Aug. 24. AP Photo / Eric Risberg
Napa County officials recount how they had to turn to Plan B.
As Napa County officials were shaken from their beds during the early morning 6.0 magnitude earthquake on Aug. 24, the Northern California county’s key disaster-response personnel began to quickly assess the situation before daybreak.
But there was a problem. Among the buildings that sustained seismic damage was the Napa County administration building, the designated site for the county’s emergency operations center. That made it necessary to set up a new EOC at the county sheriff’s office, located in a newer, stronger building.
In a recently posted video, the Media Survival Group’s Kerry Shearer interviewed some of Napa County’s public information officers to show how the county’s designated disaster-response personnel had to turn to an alternative plan for their emergency operations.
The biggest initial challenge?
Molly Rattigan, principal management analyst for the county, explained that having to relocate meant that she and her colleagues lost access to most of their emergency response resources, including computer systems.
But the impact was somewhat mitigated. “Many of us have computers that we take home, so we were able to bring them with us to start from scratch,” she said.
Still, relocating emergency response operations wasn’t a simple task, either, as Danis Kreimeier, director of library services and community outreach for Napa County explained in the video:
There was a lot of scurrying to get plugs for the computers and enough outlets in the room just to power up and getting copy machines in and setting up the tables and figuring out where everyone was going to be as people were coming in. So we were setting up as they were reporting so it got a little crazy figuring out where everyone was going to be and what permissions people needed for the computers so [information technology services] was very active getting that set up so people could get into all the different systems that they needed to get into.
Would your local government know how to set up a new emergency operations center in a similar situation? Learn from Napa County’s real-life lessons:
WATCH: Kerry Shearer’s full video interviews with Napa County officials