State rescue services step up preparedness
| • | Sept. 11 anniversary events |
| • | Special Report: 9/11... One Year, One Nation |
By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer
The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., jolted most Americans from a state of blissful indifference, if not ignorance, about the way war is waged.
Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser
But those responsible for rescuing people from such a disaster — including fire, police, paramedics, the Hawai'i National Guard — had received their wake-up call a long time ago. The Oklahoma City bombing, the use of sarin nerve gas in Tokyo, the expectations of trouble at last year's Asian Development Bank conference here, all changed the way emergency workers, once trained to rush in quickly, do their jobs.
Honolulu Fire Department Battalion Chief Peter Gaskell, wearing vest, briefs members of the Hawai'i Army National Guard during Kai Po'ino 2002, an exercise involving the Coast Guard, city emergency services and others.
"Now they're more trained in risk," said Attilio Leonardi, chief of the Honolulu Fire Department. "Now they have to kind of hold back and get the binoculars and see what is going on."
The response certainly has quickened since Sept. 11, when the sight of the Twin Towers crumbling to dust demonstrated the danger terrorists pose to civilians.
Fast-forward a year later and Hawai'i has emergency crews far better prepared to deal with the danger.
• State Civil Defense has run a total of 19 joint exercises throughout the Islands, more than double the number in all of 2001, involving various local and state teams. The exercises, which included training at Barking Sands last month in Kaua'i, simulate various scenarios of terror, from explosions to contamination of water supplies.
• Emergency Medical Service paramedics have formed "metropolitan strike teams" with specialized equipment to deal with nuclear, chemical and biological situations, said Robin McCulloch, Honolulu's EMS chief. The last of the equipment, including personal protective suits for 48 paramedics, arrived within the past six months.
• Last year, $1 million in extra federal money was allotted to the state, distributed by Civil Defense among the islands, for purchasing detection devices, radiological equipment, communications and decontamination equipment. And individual agencies have found money to meet their own needs — such as the high-tech mobile command-post trucks, loaded with computer and satellite communications gear, being built for the Honolulu Police and Fire departments.
• The National Guard this year finished equipping a team of 22 specialists — the 93rd Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team — to help rescuers cope more quickly with a range of terroristic attacks. The team uses sensors needed to size up chemical, biological and radiological hazards and call in the right rescue workers and equipment.
Despite the advances local authorities have made, work is far from over. Authorities are generally unwilling to discuss shortcomings in detail and declined to release performance evaluations of training exercises.
But some challenges are clear. One of the biggest is the need to connect the assorted, incompatible radio systems emergency crews use so that they can communicate effectively during a disaster.
George Burnett, state Civil Defense telecommunications officer, said a kind of switchboard device called the TRP 1000 represents the best hope for bridging the communications gap. Eight of the units — two for each county — are available and can allow, for example, a police officer using the Honolulu Police Department's digital radios to be patched through to the commander who is coordinating the response by state and local agencies.
The units first were tried during the ADB conference in May 2001, Burnett said, and that test showed that individual agency communications could be swamped by shared messages. He said Civil Defense had hoped to test a solution — a separate frequency accessible by the different radio systems through the TRP — during May's joint exercise with the Honolulu Fire Department at Kalaeloa, but there wasn't enough time to set it up.
Communications is one area where the military, which sees itself in a supportive role during a disaster, also is offering support. The Army in Hawai'i runs what is called the Joint Rear Area Command, set up to secure the home base in a war zone. Here it's working with civilians to guard against terrorism.
Among its contributions is the Pacific Mobile Emergency Radio System, a secure multi-band communications network designed for use in natural disasters in Hawai'i and Alaska, the two states likely to be cut off from assistance the longest.
Although Burnett believes the switchboard approach may be better than a system designed for use by the military, about 100 handheld radios are available for distribution among county, state and federal teams, said Maj. Gen. Craig B. Whelden, deputy commander of U.S. Army Pacific. The system is due to get a field test here in a few months.
Either system is only a temporary solution, Burnett said. The state needs a unified radio network, he said, to replace the patchwork collection of obsolete single-channel systems used by several agencies — including state Civil Defense and state conservation enforcement officers.
"We're finding that our existing public safety radio systems to a large extent don't provide sufficient coverage for the users and their needs," he said.
And it would make sense to pool resources because the well of available cash is running dry. In the past two years $1 million in extra federal money has been allotted to state Civil Defense for equipment purchases, but experts have estimated that $19 million would be needed to buy all the gear the state needs.
Much of the success in the past year has come in the form of planning, officials said. A statewide survey now lists more than 200 financial, political and civil institutions that need protecting, identifying who is responsible to plug security leaks. Individual sectors, such as hospitals, have performed their own surveys to assess readiness for disaster.
All counties also have a Terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction Preparedness Draft Plan, which is continually updated. The state also has a draft plan.
Advertiser library photo • March 6, 2002
Much of this work was done by a consortium of agencies known as the Hawai'i Emergency Preparedness Executive Committee. Formed in 1999, the panel began meeting monthly immediately after the attack and, a year later, still convenes about every six weeks.
The Coast Guard cutter Kittewake patrols Honolulu Harbor, with Aloha Tower in the background. Rescue services in the state have conducted exercises, which included training last month at Barking Sands, Kaua'i, to simulate various scenarios of terrorism, from explosions to contamination of water supplies.
"Prior to Sept. 11, we put a lot of our emphasis on disaster response plans for events like hurricanes and tsunamis, and that laid the foundation for the response plans we have today," said Col. Stan Keolanui of the Hawai'i National Guard, one of the agencies on that committee. "Since Sept. 11, we've put our planning process in high gear."
Planning leads to practice, such as the Fire Department's Kalaeloa exercise held in May. One typical scenario involved a car loaded with an unknown chemical driven into a water tank. Firefighters, guided by the chemical-hazards experts on the National Guard team, tended to the role-playing victims.
A federal grant enabled the fire department to buy hazardous-materials suits to use in disasters, said fire chief Leonardi, and simply having the opportunity to cope with their job while wearing the heavy hazmat suits is a valuable skill. The purchase of a second rescue helicopter was another byproduct of 9/11 diligence, he said.
Rescuers will begin to sharpen other skills later this year once State Civil Defense forms an urban search-and-rescue team, which will be trained to enter collapsed buildings and face other perils such as those encountered by squads in Washington and New York a year ago.
Biological threats represent a great unknown that, slowly, is becoming knowable. The Emergency Medical Services paramedics now have a mobile DNA laboratory to help identify the nature of a biological threat.
EMS also has used a combination of city and federal money to stockpile antibiotics for victims of bioterrorism. Now there are 112,000 doses available, said EMS chief Robin McCulloch.
The Healthcare Association of Hawaii, an organization of the state's acute- and long-term-care facilities, compiled an assessment of medical resources throughout the Islands.
One weakness the association identified will take time to overcome: Doctors are unaccustomed to detecting the rare diseases produced in a bioterrorism attack, said Toby Clairmont, who heads the association's emergency management committee.
The recent outbreaks of dengue and murine typhus have provided some unanticipated practice in identifying symptoms and disseminating information so the disease can be contained, Clairmont said, and training and alerts distributed to emergency rooms are in the works.
Communication gaps have been cited as a healthcare problem, too, and Clairmont said hospitals are planning to install a computer intranet this fall. Through this system, communications by voice or e-mail could be sent securely, using password protection and encryption to ward off hackers.
Law-enforcement authorities see intelligence-gathering and heading off terrorists as a crucial part of their game plan. Security clearances are under way for the formation of an FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force in Honolulu, one of a number being organized nationwide to sharpen surveillance skills on the home front.
The days when police can be satisfied simply with reacting to crimes is over, said Honolulu Assistant Police Chief Boisse Correa, whose troops have been receiving supplemental training through FBI and military partnerships.
"If people told us when I started out that we were going to be involved in this kind of training, we would say, 'No, you guys are way out of line,'" he said with a laugh.
The constant training is necessary, Correa said, to combat what he described as "alert fatigue." With the passage of time, the terrorism threat seems less ominous.
"People are saying, 'Where's the threat?'" he said. "The field officer might say, 'Why do I need to notice a boat going into a zone at night that it shouldn't be in?' Before, it might have been no big deal, but now, we want to know who you are and where you are going."
Correa, Leonardi and others in the battle zone agree that Hawai'i has had a head start in gearing up for the coordinated response that a terroristic incident would demand. Civil Defense vice director Ed Teixeira said his agency is accustomed to a good working relationship among the various levels of government, having watched the Islands climb out of the wreckage of Hurricane 'Iniki and earlier natural emergencies.
Some call it a homegrown network forged through years of working together, even growing up together. Some call it an invention born of necessity on an island where no immediate help is available. Some call it the aloha spirit.
Whatever it is, Teixeira said, it's something to be treasured.
"We treat it as a very delicate thing," he said, "something that can perish, well, tonight."
Reach Vicki Viotti at vviotti@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8053
