Community Disaster Response
Frank Lucier, Retired San Francisco Fire Department

Community disaster response is certainly not a new concept. The history of our Country’s pioneers is filled with stories of neighbors helping neighbors and communities banding together in the face of adverse conditions. More recently the Civil Defense system was created during World War II to respond to the effects

Following a major earthquake in the Los Angeles area in the mid 1980s, a group of Los Angeles city officials visited Japan to observe first hand an exercise of a neighborhood based response program that was taking place in Tokyo. They were so impressed by what they saw, that following their return, a program was created by the Los Angeles City Fire Department to train citizens in basic disaster skills. This program was developed under the direction of Chief Frank Borden.

In 1989, the city of San Francisco and the surrounding communities suffered a devastating 7.2 Richter event, the Loma Prieta earthquake. It became very clear to the Fire Department that night that the help of civilians would be needed, if we were to successfully respond to all the emergencies that arose. While the citizens were to help, we quickly discovered they had few disaster skills. We realized that the people on the scene when a disaster happened, whether an earthquake, storm or terrorist activity, were the first responders and in a major event the only responders for possible long periods of time. We felt it our duty to follow Los Angeles Fire Departments lead and develop a community disaster training program.

We researched the Los Angeles program and in 1990 developed our own program and began training the citizens of San Francisco in the Neighborhood Emergency Response Team training program. I developed and directed this program for the first seven years in which time we trained over 7,000 people from neighborhoods and local businesses. The San Francisco program has become a model from which many other cities are drawing ideas and structure.

The concept of community disaster preparedness has spread since Los Angeles first developed their program back in 1985. Today, FEMA’s Emergency Management Institute offers train-the-trainer classes in Community Emergency Response Team training or CERT at a national level. There are community programs being conducted all across the country, each geographic area modifying the curriculum to meet the natural disasters that they face. No longer does the program deal strictly with earthquakes but with flooding and storms also.

The target audiences for the training are community groups and businesses. The skills taught in the classes does not differ from group to group but the response responsibility does.

The training is a combination of classroom type instruction as well as, hands-on skills training and exercises. The training presumes no prior knowledge of disaster preparedness or response skills and is easily manageable by all the participants. The courses

Organizational structure

In the event of a major disaster, the disaster management for City of San Francisco decentralizes into what are called Emergency Response Districts or ERDs. There are ten ERDs in the City, each having the geographic boundaries of the ten Fire Battalion district. In this decentralized mode the fire Battalion Chief is responsible for all tactical disaster response and management issues within that ERD. These battalion chiefs or ERD leaders report to the Office of Emergency Services where the city department heads and their operational people gather to make overhead decisions and to support the tactical response of the ERDs.

Within each ERD there may be several NERT neighborhood and business team. Each of these teams has its own staging area or place where team members gather to make decisions on actions to take and assist teams in mitigating disaster events. Each team can work independently of each other and independently from Fire Department directions. The first actions the team take is to form a command structure for operations, or Neighborhood Command. This is a basic form of the Incident Command System (ICS) with sections for command, logistics, operations, intelligence and administration. Being a modular system it can grow or contract as needed. The Neighborhood Command exist to support activities in the neighborhood and make decisions that will do "the most good for the most people". The incidents that are beyond the scope of training,  collapsed buildings, major fires, hazardous materials spills are immediately reported to the ERD.

There are redundancies built into the NERT communication system. The first choice for communications is the telephone. This may not always be possible because of the amount of phone traffic following a major disaster or the possibility of the system being overloaded by telephone receivers being knocked off the hook by the quake. As a back-up form of communications every NERT team has at least one HAM radio operator equipped with a portable HAM radio. The NERT organization also installed HAM radios in each of the ERD fire stations with a base station installed at the Office of Emergency Services. Thus the NERT teams are able to communicate with each other, with the ERD and when necessary with the Office of Emergency Services. If all other systems fail, the NERT teams will default to using written messages and runners to communicate.

To test this system of response and communications, two drills are conducted each year. The spring drill focuses on skills, team building and internal communications. Trained NERTs are brought to a central location, usually a school or other large building with multiple rooms. There is some skills refreshing such as disaster medicine, search and rescue and lifting heavy objects. Then the group is divided into neighborhood teams and these teams are put through several disaster scenarios. The intent of this drill is to have the people practice their skills and inter-team communications in a simulated disaster setting.

The fall drill is a decentralized exercise where each neighborhood team designs there own drill scenario and practices skills at their neighborhood staging area. We also practice the disaster HAM radio net by scripting messages that are sent from the staging area to the Battalion command to the OES.

In the event of a real disaster such as a major earthquake, this system of community disaster response operates at different levels. The first level of operation is at the area where the damage is most sever and people are injured and trapped. The individual NERT’s will be the true first responders since they will already be on the scene (this is where they live or work) when the event happens. In individual or group effort, they will organize convergent volunteers into teams and direct them in assisting the injured, searching for missing or trapped people, or what ever needs to be done.

A second level of operations happens at the staging area. There, other NERTs are arriving from less damaged areas of the neighborhood and are forming an Neighborhood Command unit, using ICS, to assist activities in the neighborhood, and to communicate with the ERD. The teams in the field are communicating with the Neighborhood Command by use of HAM radios, or if none are available, by written message and runner.

At the staging area the Neighborhood Command unit is gathering supplies that may be needed by the teams and by themselves, are organizing convergent volunteers to assist the teams in the neighborhood as needed, and communicating major incidents, as well as neighborhood status, to the ERD. All of this can work without direction or control of the Fire Department and it is designed to work this way. The response to a major disaster event will be spontaneous and it is really the first critical hour that community teams can be most effective. 

History has shown us that first responders to sudden on set disasters such as earthquakes are always the people on the scene immediately before the event occurs. They are by definition the first responders. This system of training and response attempts to give these first responders skills to make them more effective and a support system to assist them.

Frank Lucier is a retired Lieutenant from the San Francisco Fire Department. He was the Program Coordinator for the NERT Program from its inception in 1990 until 1997. He is currently on the Executive Board for NI/USR, president of North American Emergency Management and editor of The Connection.

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