throughout the entire service territory. we have 3 major services, supply service chains, that are open and available to us 24/7 if we need them. we also have contractor arrangements, maybe it's pipeline welding or electrical service work, line man work, and we also have mutual service agreements and pg&e participates in those. we have sent folks to hawaii and we have sent folks back east and we have certainly sent folks to oregon and washington and idaho on a regular basis as we all in the west suffered through storms. so we have those activities in place and then of course we do just our normal emergency response activations on an on-going basis just to make sure everyone is trained and veilable and ready to go. in terms of the big 1 that we always talk about, we have an earthquake play book. the gas

side and electric side has very specific actions to take, we have very trat strategic actions to take, we have a hard copy and hopefully we'll never need it but if a big earthquake comes, it can happen anywhere in the stais, there's earthquake faults all over this place, we're ready to go. >> mr. boland. >> we take a little different role on this seeing as we represent a multiple discipline of utilities, we are engaged in california national guard in their exercises. we handle the utility operations center which is wholly operated within the state's operation center. we do the exercises with calima to golden guarden all the way down to the specific exercises. we interface with each and every one of our utilities and their

exercise programs. we carry the best practices from one utility to the next to share that knowledge across discipline. we then execute decisions on the catastrophic plan for california, the one coming up here in the bay area so all utilities understand their role that needs to be played and we can plug and play and the class ral utilities that are going to be called upon to support it from the private and municipal side and this is an on-going living process. working with the local jurisdictions, the county jurisdictions always, the states north and south and the state operations center and then supporting whatever the fema initiatives are moving out from that in cross-discipline lines. >> thank you. mr. brig. >> as an operator of a distribution system, the stories are probably very

similar. we have small emergencies every day, small, medium and even large, so the back-up systems, the screening, the ics structure, the spare parts, the communication, those muscles are flexed quite often. the big one is the one we design for and spend a lot of our time and energy preparing for. the big one for us is the design earthquake, it's the max credible earthquake, san an drais a is basically a 8.0, a repeat of the 1906 earthquake. some of the components can be tested, we can simulate an earthquake on some of these facilities as they are in design to make sure they can withdraw that level of earthquake. we're designing for an 8.0 and that's not what happened in japan in 2011. the earthquake that hit japan in 2011 was not what they were designing for and all the

assumptions went out the window so that's food for thought. >> thank you. mr. angelus. >> at verizon wireless we try to do it day in and day out to avoid interruption in services. we try to put all this in place but in the event they do happen, we have those redundant systems i discussed earlier. weak route traffic from one side to another or from one switch to another and we test regularly to make sure they occur. and this is transparent to our customers. calls are being routed to another switch during these cross over tests. we have actually fleet of portable cell sites, these are cells that are on trucks or in trailers that are deployed, that actually are available

within a market so we can deploy them in the cases of emergency so if the cet site actually goes out of service, we can deploy a september temporary cell site. we have these systems available for our emergency departments so if they need coverage in certain areas that are not covered very well, they can actually use those systems as well. so i did talk about the failure overcasts. i think this is the key portion of our industry, for our company. we want to make sure that we can take into account when these big situations occur and major interruptions happen in particular areas. >> thank you. okay, our last question, have you established standards for

resilience in cooperation with other lifeline providers and how systems should perform in an earthquake? >> i'll go ahead and talk about pg&e. i would say first off we've designed our own standards for what should happen in an earthquake or any other major emergency. our electric system is designed to worry about trees and wind and rain, which is what we see the most of, and tends to be the most damaging, but we have our own standards and our own expectations in terms of what our system should be able to withstand. add david pointed out, the risk is that an event will occur that is greater than what you have prepared for. that's always a possibility. in terms of working with others i think the important part is to make sure you understand what everyone is relying on you for. so it really comes back it an issue

of priorities. what's going to come back first, what's going to come back second. for pg&e we always worry about bringing electrical generation back, those are done in conjunction with our gas and electric together. most of the power plants in california are fed natural gas, you need to get the gas back up before you get the power plant back up if you have damage to both. we do have standards for all that activity in terms of our engineering design. the trick is for us to sit out there and talk with all the different regional areas including san francisco and make sure we understand how we're going to work together in the event we have an event that takes our services out or is greater than what we're actually expecting and that's the challenge for all of us, all the service providers, is working together to figure out how to make that happen. >> mr. boland. >> this is where we fit into that link. we represent the utilities that protect and

build the resill yepbs into the infrastructure. we fill a gap in attitude which is the relationships, distant and local relationships, cross boundaries between the multi disciplines in the utilities. we are able to cross those lines in the counties and step up to state operations so everybody is operating in a common operating picture so everybody understands what's available not only in their jurisdiction, but what kind of resources we can bring to bear, short and long-term, how distant those are, what the qualifications are. we have master resource catalogs designed just like fire scope and cal fire in which we have built strike teams from our utilities, strike teams from water companies. they simply make a call and tell us we need 10, 12, 15, it's our obligation to put that together and get it to them. they are worried about the incident in their jurisdiction which they have to

correct. it's our responsibility to reach bond those borders as their extension to bring in the reserves that they need to maintain that kaupblt newt of operation and then where we function through the state utility operations center and the state operations center to make sure that we have that kind of access and that kind of assistance. we need caltrans, we're going to need chp, we're going to need cal fire, we need dwr, they are invested in restoring their critical infrastructure and it's our responsibility to reach across those lines to get that kind of access to keep that kind of restoration underway. >> thank you. mr. brig. >> in terms of establishing standards for resill yepbs, absolutely, we have done that. again as i mentioned earlier, to get our customers to fund all these capital projects we did up a contract with them. this is what you're getting and this is what you're going to pay for. that had to be well

defined as engineers need to know what to do and what to design for. establishing those standards, what we call levels of service, there's levels of service for threats of terrorism and also the seismic one, which is essentially an 8.0 event on the san andreas fault. we're working with other city departments so they know what to expect from us. it's been an education process. as we started down the road i think there was an expectation all water and sewer was going to be in operation in san francisco after an ert quake. that probably is not going to happen. it's a little bit different having several blocks in your population out of water versus out of electricity or gas or cell phone service. it's a little bit different level of emergency. after an earthquake what we're designing for is to have the high level fire system more or

less immediately. there may be homes, individual service connections, which could be out of water for quite some time and that's where my utility has to interface with other departments to make sure we're getting water to people through humanitarian stations, red cross, mutual aid is a huge part of this with our federal and state partners. but those hand off points after a major event and educating ourselves what we're doing and not doing is a big part of the life line process that naomi is running and it's been very, very helpful. >> thank you. and mr. angelus. >> in terms of standards, similar to pg&e we have established our own internal standards on how resilient our network is. it's two hour quality of service how to design our capacity and also in how we perform, we do these

failure tests to make sure the network can withstand the additional traffic being transferred from one portion to another. we have an earthquake strategy binder which is available aupb lane for our employees that can be accessed. it's available in all of our switches. these are step by step directions what happens when this big one occurs. we also practice this on drills, we have very little drills within the company or within the region to make sure everybody is on the same page when this situation does occur. now, as far as our support with other agencies, you know, our first priority of course when this thing happens is to make sure our network is running. but we also have a number of hotline numbers available for the police department rtion for the local agencies to contact us if they need some adistance from us in case some of their own systems do go down and we have our own

infrastructure to support them as well. >> all right, thank you. i think this is an opportunity for us to open it up for questions and answers. i think we have some folks with microphones right over there, there's a gentleman. >> you talked a lot about network and grid resiliency. how do you guys approach your op center in context of resiliency of operations in terms of something like this ?oo ?a would you mind remeeting that one more time. >> you talked a lot about your grid and the resiliency. it's something we look at all the

time if the ship sinks, who is the back up guy in charge. how do you guys approach that stuff. >> i'll go ahead and cover at least for pg&e. in terms of our emergency centers and understanding what's happening there, we have our primary emergency center here in san francisco. we have on call personnel for both gas and electric and our generation facilities who have responsibilities upwards of about 80 people each and every day, have to be available, available to come in on any notice. we have back-up facilities that can operate out of walnut creek in many cases, we also have a major back-up facility in san ramon where we can duplicate everything that we have in san francisco. in terms of back-up facilities, in terms of our ability to operate if something goes wrong we can bring up our emergency centers and that's for our corporate emergency center. pg&e actually operates over

70,000 square miles. we have 19 division and 55 districts and every one of those districts has an emergency room or what's often referred to as a storm room and any one of those can open up and handle any other location's facility so we in essence have at least 55 sites we can go to and try to operate from, but certainly with respect to the command structure and how we operate, we want to be in the emergency center for a major event such as an earthquake or major storm, we have 3 facilities that can handle that fairly easily and several that can do duty with a couple days notice. >> mr. boland. >> we are very fortunate, we are fully embedded with the state operations center. should the state decide to close the operations center and relocate, we will follow very closely. we also have 10 virtual centers to operate out

of to support the state operation and support the utility industries if in fact that's called upon. >> mr. brig. >> similar response to the pg&e in terms of back-up centers. the only thing i would add again is the human element. we make sure all the knowledge does not reside in one person. we have a lot of bridges in the area, not all our employees live in san francisco. so it may not be possible to get some of our senior managers here or key employees here quickly within a day, within two days, and it's a constant challenge to make sure we have documentation and broad training for whoever does arrive at the eoc, they are in charge until someone else gets there and that could be a long time. >> thank you. mr. angelus. >> for verizon wireless in northern california we have two separate offices, we have in walnut creek and also folsom

near sacramento. we have another redundancy center in texas. we have it all across our infrastructure and also with our teams. >> thank you. we have one question in the back. >> yes, my question is regarding your ability to bring in repair equipment or crews to make repairs or back-up equipment in case your infrastructure is broken. i know they have that capability but in this area, you know, many roads, bridges would be damaged. do you have your own internal aviation capability or lift capability to bring in those repair equipment and crews or is that something that you would be looking to other organizations to provide that airlift capability? >> start with mr. johnson. >> yeah, we have some limited capability in terms of aircraft

and on site helicopters in our outskirting area, but in terms of a major event in the san francisco bay area, we would be heavily focused on those folks who provide that service to us under contract. we do not have our own helicopters in oakland or san francisco itself, as was already mentioned to, san francisco is very difficult to get to in the case of a major event. it's either going to be getting people in or obviously getting across the bridges and getting material in. while we have the transport ability on the ground we don't have a lot of aircraft capability. most of our facilities wouldn't come in via aircraft anyway. the services we need, it's not typically getting the people, it's getting to the location you need to do the work. while we can drop folks via helicopter, we do that on a pretty regular basis during fires and storms

up in the mountains, it's going to be able to get the roads clear and get the bridges open or get access into the location for which we need to get to. in fact, we suffered tlie that in a lot of the big cities just even during commute times if there's a minor emergency getting tlau and we have a relationship with the city here in san francisco where the fire department and the first responders have reached out to us and will help us get there. i can't say we have that everywhere in our state. certainly in a major event, that would be our concern, our ability to get our work force into the bay area given the type of infrastructure we have here. >> thank you. mr. brig. >> i would add, we don't have aircraft that can lift heavy bull dozers so we would be looking to the state for that. that would be a mutual aid call pretty quick.

>> verizon wireless would be the same. the most important thing is for us to get our resources where they need to work where they can repair or reroute traffic where it needs to be. one of our main offices is located in the south bay. that way we don't have to worry about bridge access to get into the peninsula or san francisco if the situation occurs, but if the situation does occur, we're going it need some help from other agencies to make it happen for us. >> all right, thank you. and we have another question. >> roger that you guys deal with unexpected circumstances all the time, weather circumstances, things that are completely unexpected. i would be really interested in, as a result of your latest hot watches on an vent, whatever that event might have been, what was the big aha thing that you learned from that event?

>> well, i don't know if it was an aha, unfortunately as i mentioned we get the opportunity to practice on a pretty regular basis. i would say the issues that typically come up in a major event really are two-fold. one is communication, communications with everybody, in a major event we will have a thousand to two thousand people out working and understanding where every crew is at and every product on every job is a huge challenge to us. we're concentrating on bringing every customer back on and at the same time not sending a crew to a location we may already have somebody there. it ties directly to the comment i made earlier. getting folks to the location is a real challenge. this happens certainly in storms up in the mountainous areas, facilities are closed, trees are down, bridges are blocked, areas flood. so

getting folks to those locations can be very difficult, we end up doing a lot of hand walk ins, a lot of helicopters in with crews of 30 or 40 folks and communicating with them where there isn't cell coverage even if it did work is a big challenge. the things we focus on the majority of time is how do we improve our communications, what did rerun into this time that we didn't have in the past, how do we get through that and how can we improve getting folks to the facility and making sure we know where everybody is at at all times. >> thank you. mr. boland. >> one of the major challenges that we have incurred all the way from 2003 till now, is credentialing or badging of utility emergency responder personnel trying to gain access into a secure zone that needs

their services. as a prepop drapbs of the heavy equipment sometimes falls under a contractor's jurisdiction and a local officer at a local roadblock does not always know or understand the necessity to get that kind of equipment in there to restore the grid, the water system, for the telecom it is something we are still struggling with and we are working with on a daily basis. >> thank you, mr. brig. >> every exercise i've been involved with, managing information and communication is easily no. 1 or 2 on the list. in the heat of an event, information is flowing in, there's usually no shortage of information rtion it's translating that to something credible that is the challenge. usually 50 percent of that information is wrong and untimely. before a unified command is established and you have various city departments or

regional groups that are working together before the unified command has been established, coordinating field work in 4 counties is usually awkward. until that central message gets pushed down and all the groups are rowing together, the field, when you are dealing with the geegraphy we are dealing with in the bay area, that field coordination is always difficult in the first few hours. >> thank you. mr. angelus. >> verizon wireless, every time we get involved with emergency situations we did a post meeting to analyze what we did and how we can make things better. it also pushes down to the processes and the preparedness and how we can make things better from checking our equipment to our staffing levels and it depends, really, on the situation but we always get something good out of these situations that makes our processes better. >> thank you. i'd like to

thank the panel members for taking time out to discuss about lifelines. i want to point out that all of these organizations are members of the san francisco lifelines council along with many members in the audience, and rest assured we have been working with the fire chief and the police chief with pg&e and the san francisco public utilities commission to make sure we can get them to their emergencies in a timely fashion during rush hour traffic and would like to thank both chiefs who are here today. so thank you. (applause).

>> thank you. and general spiese, if you could talk a little about the relationship and what it means to the marines? >> sure. let me reference mayor lee from this morning. he said what we are starting to do is get beyond conversation and we're getting a feel for the impact of our training and our particular interaction. just this past year alone from the communications, command and control exercise that we did in august, yesterday bringing an air cushioned vehicle ashore on the beach, landing helicopters at lake merced and working between us and the national

guard, exercising the evacuation of casualties under the control and observation of the department of emergency management, and these are things that we can only really understand through exercise, through training and then figure out where the gaps are and what we need to do to smooth those out. i'll also reference lan wilder if i can. she said something that was pretty revealing. prior to yesterday and getting out on the beach and seeing us, her thinking was just to ride out the disaster. now she feels like she's in a position where she can do some strategic thinking and strategic planning, which is really an obligation for all of us in charge. as captain jones said earlier this morning, we do not know what this is going to look like and it's certainly not going to look like what we anticipate. but having us understand how to react and how to interact with each other will give us a basis upon which we can go forward and move hopefully very quickly

to salvage what we can in the event of a complex catastrophe. thank you. >> and admiral zukunft, we heard a little about from captain stow about the different authorities that the coast guard can bring to bear in different situations. but could you talk a little bit about the partnerships and relationship and how that plays across the coast guard mission set? >> well, first i'll talk about my capacity challenges and my area of responsibility covers the rocky mountains to madagascar. the same area of responsibility as admiral lochlear except they have the arctic and antarctic as well. so, obviously with 13,000 people covering that aor, a little over 200 ships, i'm very dependent on partnerships. i work with 71 countries with whom i have 65 bilateral agreements with those entities. but everything really starts at

the most local level first. so, it's appropriate to hear from captain stow and the network of partnerships that she's dealt here in the bay area, but we have this lattice work that goes across my entire pacific region. and then i need to focus on what do i do in the event of a threat right now in dealing with the arctic. what if i have a deep water horizon spill there? because now it affects the nate and i have indigenous tribes of that part of the world. and how do i flow resources there, recognizing the navy doesn't have ice breakers and our nation has one. so, we do a lot of work with canada when we're starting to work on those contingencies. but we look at the national response framework. it was rewritten post katrina. and another key part of partnerships, when i was the federal on scene coordinator during deep water horizon, it's not in the national response framework, but every parish president, every mayor, every governor had a coast guard

liaison officer at the oak pride and above level. so, if they didn't like how the response was going, go to my liaison officer. don't go to anderson cooper and then cause the white house to react to what they're seeing on cnn. so, how do you get in front of that news cycle? and the only way you can do that as tip o'neill said, all things in politics are local and i think we heard from vice admiral nathan that i think all responses are local as well. and, so, we really need to start most importantly at the local level, at those planning levels, because the first shot of any campaign, the plan will change, but the partnerships need to remain constant. >> and, general baldwin, we heard from colonel span owe about now your three hats of authority, your state hat, your federal hat, and now your dual status hat. but if you could talk about the partnerships and relationships and how that plays into your ability to respond under -- wearing each one of those hats? >> sure.