“If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready…”
A conversation about Emergency Management with Kip Harkness, Deputy City Manager
We’ve talked before on our blog about our ongoing efforts to make our city safer by investing in different ways to help our city and our community prepare for the unexpected, to stay ready in the face of natural disasters. Recently, we sat down with Kip Harkness, Deputy City Manager who leads Emergency Operations and Disaster Preparedness for the city about what he sees as the current and future states of disaster preparedness for the City of San José.
MOTI: Kip, thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us a little bit about how you have stepped into this role of emergency management since rejoining the city around 2 years ago?
Kip: Yes, of course, thanks. So, I first started two years ago, during the Coyote Creek floods. Since then, two good things have come out of that trying time for our community. One is that we were able to recover effectively and support all the families that were affected. The second is that based on those experiences, we have been able to significantly improve our emergency management preparation and capabilities. We now have increased ability to warn and notice, we have a much better planning system, we have a bigger more effective team what is collaborating with the internal city team better, and with the external partners better.
MOTI: How has that happened? How have you built up that capability in the City Manager’s Office?
Kip: I always am trained to think of transformations in terms of three things: people, process and technology. What we have done over these past two years is made simultaneously overlapping investments in people process and technology. We’ve added 7 new positions into the emergency operations and management team, we have built out the full two shifts, blue shift and gold shift, with people in the city who are ready to go into the emergency operations center, who for the first time have been trained in the essentials of emergency management. We have have built plans in collaboration with the water district, which actually anticipate what’s going to happen, so rather than having to improvise a response in the case of any disaster, we will have thought through much of it in advance and can just act when something does happen.
MOTI: Emergency Operations Center? Could you tell us a little about what that is and what that entails for emergency response for the city?
Kip: Part of what happens in disaster is you activate the Emergency Operations Center, which is modeled after a general staff in the military. You bring together, under the management section, logistics, planning and information, operations, you have communications, finance, all the sections that support the operation. And what happens at that point is that it becomes a mini city of sorts. All the functions that are necessary for an effective response are brought into a single command and control system. And for this command center, you need to be able to run your it 24 hours a day, potentially several days or more. So having the correct staffing capacity and having people trained on this will help prepare us for any challenge related to emergency response.
MOTI: Oh yes, like something like a large earthquake perhaps?
Kip: Yes exactly. When the San Andreas fault goes off, and the earth shakes for the next two minutes and the aftershocks begin, Silicon Valley will be changed, in two minutes and forever. As will San Jose. How we react to that, how prepared we are, that is our greatest challenge as a city for Emergency Preparedness.
MOTI: And we thank you for working to help get us prepared for that day. It’s great to hear that something like the Emergency Operations Center has grown to be at more consistent and larger capacity. Since the floods two years ago, has there been an opportunity to test the engagement of the Emergency Operations Center?
K: Yes, there’s been a few. But perhaps the most interesting one was this past Valentine’s Day, February 13th and 14th, overnight and along the Guadalupe River. That night, we had very near flood conditions. We made the call to do a small evacuation of an area, out of an abundance of caution. Literally we came within inches of that area flooding. The good news through all that was by the time that happened we had already notified the entire neighborhood and had the opportunity to get everybody out that would have been affected.
MOTI: Yes, I remember that, that was an amazing moment that showed our communities’ resiliency and showed how far we have come in terms of Emergency Management. I’m curious though, how do you make that call? When do you know to start planning evacuations?
Kip: So that day, the National Weather Service had, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon dramatically revised their forecast for the worst. We also had the water district on that call and as we walked through the chain of events, the weather service said, “there’s about a 70% chance of you getting rain at this level”. So I asked the water district well what happens if we get rain at that level? They’re answer was essentially: not good; if we get rain at that level, then this reservoir overtops, and if that reservoir overtops, then the area downstream floods.
The thing is: you need essentially a 5 hour window between the time you make the decision to evacuate and people are actually leaving their homes. and so you can’t wait until the water is over the bridge. You have to make that predictive analysis before and that’s not easy. So we made the call.
MOTI: Yes, that totally makes sense. Thank you so much for explaining that process to us, especially how you coordinate from the data side. Beyond that though, what do you think the average citizen of San José could do to better prepare and manage disasters?
Kip: I think I like to think of this question as a design question to better communicate to people the responsibilities they might have in the event of a disaster. For example, when that quake hits, calling 911 is not necessarily going to get you help. We are going to be directing help to where we have the biggest impacts, we’re not going to be able to help everyone with a broken ankle and there’ll be lots of people with broken ankles because they ran outside when it started shaking and they fell over. We’re going to be going to the collapsed apartment buildings where people need the most help. So people’s ability to be self reliant, to take care of themselves and take care of others is so important. The ultimate question we are asking ourselves is how might we engage residents so that they know their second job is to go check on their elderly neighbors or differently-abled members of their community and how to assist them. At the end of the day, that people-to-people contact is what can really make the difference when faced with really stressful situations like a natural disaster.
We are really inspired by Kip’s work to help get us up to speed on emergency management protocols and systems. Though we never hope to use these systems, we will continue to stay ready and vigilant to deploy these when they are necessary.
