Guest Blog from Kevin Lauer - Disaster Response

Kevin wrote this report to Mike Garland. I thought it should be shared with the entire IPS staff:

Per our discussion the other day, here is a quick summary of our assistance that we have provided this past week during the Greater Nashville area Disaster Response.

I received a phone call from TEMA at 1:45 Sunday morning requesting that the TN Fire Chiefs Mutual Aid plan be activated and that 3 Swift Water Rescue Teams from East TN be deployed to Nashville. I contacted the District Coordinators with the request and they filled it with Knoxville Rescue Squad, Bradley County Fire Rescue and Hamilton County Rescue responding to Nashville. In this initial deployment, 25 personnel with 6 rescue boats were deployed. These crews worked in Nashville, Williamson County, and Cheatham County rescuing 100’s of people in just the first 12 hours. They were joined by the Rutherford County EMS Special Operations Response Team once the situation was stabilized in Rutherford County. All of these crews would work several deployments over the next several days.

Clay County requested assistance of the Mutual Aid plan due to the fact that the fire stations were flooded and could not respond. Fire crews from Putnam Co., Livingston, and White Co. responded and provided coverage to Clay for about 24 hours.

Cheatham County was hit exceptionally hard and requested a higher level of assistance in addition to the rescue crews previously mentioned. An Incident Management Team was requested to assist with the massive undertaking of managing this very complex incident. This was the first deployment of this team in Middle TN after the initial training was provided in Nashville back in January. (A previous deployment occurred last year in Sevier Co during a large wildland interface fire.) An advance team of senior officers from Knox, Roane, and Rutherford County was deployed and were joined by 2 members of the Cookeville Fire Dept later on Monday. Over the course of 6 days, 17 members of our regional IMT’s worked in Cheatham County providing assistance in all areas of incident management. IMT members responded from Knox, Roane, Rutherford, Cookeville, Oak Ridge, Knoxville, Pigeon Forge, Williamson, Chattanooga, Memphis, and Germantown. All of these are senior fire, EMA, and special ops officers/ chiefs that have experience in large scale incidents and have received the necessary training. I also spent the day there on Wed. meeting with our team and with Mayor Orange. He was VERY pleased with the assistance that we provided to them during this crisis. In addition to the IMT members, we also sent fire tankers to Ashland City from Fairview and Lasscasses (Rutherford Co.) to provide water for fire fighting, since there water system was practically wiped out.

I also received a request from Metro Nashville Water for fire tanker support to assist with the decontamination/ clean-up of the Wastewater Treatment Facility and other public infrastructure that has been shut down. Crews from Bedford Co. and Lasscasses have been hauling non-potable water for Metro Water for several days and will be possibly through this week. This relieves a tremendous burden on the water system as they attempt to get it up to full-capacity.

Throughout this event Gary West and I have been in constant communication with TEMA as part of the State’s Emergency Operations Plan providing support for the ESF-4 (firefighting) operations, in addition to rescue and haz-mat, as well as with countless cities and counties providing assistance, advice and support. This is what we have been working so hard for the past 3 years developing the Mutual Aid system and infrastructure including the Incident Management Teams, databases, District and County Coordinators and 100’s of fire department and rescue contacts. There is no doubt that this plan works and that lives were saved and that cities and counties will be able to recover faster out of this project that we developed with the TN Fire Chiefs Association and TEMA.

It has been a long week and I am sure that I am leaving out some information but that is a snapshot of the some of the highlights.

Thank you for your support as we have and continue to work on this project.

Kevin

Kevin J Lauer
Fire Management Consultant

Congratulations to all our staff who responded so well to the disaster last week.