>> good afternoon, everyone. welcome to the disaster council. my name is ann and it is a pleasure to have you here today, in our emergency operation's center. and i will just jump right into the agenda today, we are going to start off with mayor lee is going to give us a few remarks for us. >> good afternoon, everybody.

again, i just wanted to thank all of the agencies for coming together and doing both a celebration and another prepatory work at the 108th anniversary of our 1906 earthquake and see so many people at 5:00 a.m. and that is pretty nice. i also want to say, again, thank you. we did take the opportunity as you saw and read last week to thank all of you who were part of the response, the great response to the mission bay fire, so it was a multitude of agents that responded and worked well together, and these are things that we have practiced doing, over and over again, and give me the opportunity to continue thanking everyone for working altogether and we, i think that we made an emphasis that both firefighters and officers, but also everybody that works behind these things to make them happen and all of the different agencies that we are

able to recognize from the parking control officers to the 911 dispatch to the people working here and others that coordination is extremely important. i also want to say that we do take advantage of learning lessons and that became, i think a very good connection for the public to understand why infrastructure is so important and that is, i think that link is leading our efforts to the easter bond this june and i expect that the public will understand that but we will not rest on those. we will continue pushing it, because we have a lot at stake if we don't get that passed. but it will also lead to the continuing, i think, positive dialogue that public safety for all of us and emergency response, all of that needs infrastructure investment and support and we practice it every time, and so all of you here in this room, again, thank you for being a part of that

constant message and i want to just, again, congratulate dem too, because they are always, this is their priority and so they get us altogether and they are constantly advancing on the times and whether it is 72 sf, did i say that right or is it sf 72. >> it is sf 72, close. >> i got to catch up, with all of the ways that we communicate and with all of the different parts of our community, and we are growing a city in the growing region and so we have to accommodate for that and also for the next generation that doesn't know what has gone on and what we trained for in the last couple of generations. and then, of course, tell everybody to watch the movie noah because tsunami is coming. because i want to say thank you to everybody and we will work on everything from climate change to our sea wall, and the challenges and to all of the

things that we need to continue doing and that we will pay attention to the infortunate disasters to happen around the world. in our region and learn those lessons and incorporate them into what we do and then have good positive discussions with our public about what we need to continue protecting them and build for the future, thank you very much. >> thank you mr. mayor. we are indeed very lucky in san francisco to have a mayor like mayor lee who really understands emergency repairedness and response and is so supportive. thank you. >> and i wanted to talk today, just real briefly about the 800 mega hertz radio replacement project. and i think that all of you know, first responders if particular, rely on the 800 mega hertz radios for day-to-day operations as well as for emergencies.

dem is leading the charge to get the radios replaced. i believe that some of you or maybe all of you know that the radios are now 14 years old, and the average life span of a 800 megahertz radio is about ten years and so we are well over the life span, those of us who use cell phones on a daily basis, generally change them, i don't know where mine is, i was going to hold it up. but every couple of years you get a new plan and you change your cell phone and so it is really an important project and we at dem have hired federal engineering to develop a full system replacement plan and budget and the firm will begin interviewing key staff at public safety agencies about this system in june and july. so be expecting a call we should be complete by that, and that should be complete by the end of 2014 with the new system

in place by 2018. >> this was one of mayor lee's priorities last year during the budget process and we so appreciate your support and it is vital for our first responders. i wanted to mention that in the we got the funding for the urban security initiative and that is the department of homeland security funding and it is about 0.5 percent over last year's bay area regional, allocation, and this money does not come just to san francisco but to the bay area region. and it is a regional, anti-terrorist, and we use that money in san francisco for equipment and for training, and exercising and for personnel, so it is really important to us and we were happy that the grant did not get cut this year.

>> dem completed work with 24 city departments to update the hazard mitigation plan, the hmp describes our city's natural and human made hazards and identified the implementation measure and this year we added critical city owned assets located outside of the city, and sfo, san bruno jail as well as added hazards for pandemic and climate change. >> just a week and a half ago here at dem we announced a partnership with the private on-line social network next door and we are excited about this, it provides a platform that allows the neighbors to share the information and resources during a disaster and you will be seeing later today, dem's new sf 72 we have the connection to next door and i

think that you will find it informative and fascinating as we move forward and we are excited about this i have listed on the report the recent activations and the planned activations that we have coming up as we do every year and we will be activating for the beta breakers and the pride parade and fleet week and new year's eve. that concludes my brief report. i am now going to ask mary ellen carol to give us an update on the rim fire. thank you. >> thanks, ann, and thank you mayor, and thank you. thank you for asking us to come in... (inaudible) i will talk as loud as i can. can i take those? >> yes.

>> okay. we will just... okay, so rim fire. this is a scematic of the hethch water system and hopefully you are familiar with it, the red circle is generally the area of the fire and so you can see while this incident happened 200 miles away from san francisco, it had potential huge impacts on san francisco itself. and those of our three reservoirs lake elnor and cherry lake and much of our hydroelectric power generation and in addition there is a place called camp neither that is in the center of that circle and so we were, really concerned, when the fire started on august 17th, it burned through, it was not 100 percent contained until october

25th and over 5,000 fire service personnel responded to this fire, we just as a puc had over 300 people involved in the response. and it was the third largest wildfire in california, in the largest wildfire that yosimete has experienced. it is a little bit hard to see here, but the fire just expanded and progressed incredibly quickly. this is the first four days of the fire. so, the yellow you can see best is the second day, there is actually a smaller green and by thursday, we were at that red perimeter and so it was just really out of control situation, that we all needed to really respond to quite quickly. and so, what has happened with water during the fire, where we are happy to say that we didn't have any negative effects actually on our ability to deliver quality water to our customers, both in san francisco and in the bay area. we never had any issue with

strabitiy and we were happy about that and however when the fire started we did put the plans in place and that included moving as much water from our source, up country down to the local storage reservoirs and we were able to do that fairly quickly, what that meant is that we had 3 to 4 months of reserve at that moment and we knew, if in the case that we needed to turn off that source from hetchy and we were able to do so. in addition we warmed up our inner ties or at least put our partners santa clara water and east bay mud utility district on notice should we need to use those inner ties. and so the story about why we didn't have an effect on water really can be illustrated here in this picture. so that the blue is the reservoir, and the fire did burn all the way up to the edge of the reservoir, however a lot of that area is granite and

rocky area, the green that you see in the picture is low or no burn and so we really got fortunate in that we didn't have significant portions of the actual water shed. and that really saved us. and this is also, water shed on the other side and that was super helpful that we didn't have that there. and the big impact to us was on the power. and so we did have damages that compromised our electric power generation, and distribution system. we had over 20 miles of line that really got burned and we had powerhouses and some other facilities, however, again, we didn't have any impact on the municipal customers that received power and we were able to do that by buying off of the market and the banking agreements that we have for power. and so, we didn't have any interruption and we were actually able to again meet our

own municipal load by september first which is really amazing if you could see just what has happened up there and how quickly we were able to restore a lot of those lines. >> so, part of of what happened during this time is that we responded so this is like very exciting and this is what happens in operation centers a bunch of people standing around and planning the very long days. and very tiring. and we activated in our headquarters at 5225 golden gate for almost a month. we were tracking the fire, and again one of the challenges of this situation is that we were so far away. but, luckily we had an incredible team and they were running a command post at mokasan where we call it camp the administration building and we have a company town up there and so this is some of the

group there. and we were thrilled to welcome the mayor and i don't know if you see yourself there and margaret the woman in the blue runs the system. and this is margaret, sort of giving an update to the mayor and his group when they came up. >> the real heroes however, we feel in this incident were the folks, or the people out in the field, the folks who went out there and really in the hazardous conditions as soon as they could to clear the way to assess the damage, and to help us get back on-line, and these were just a few of the pictures. and it was really dirty work. and one picture that i don't have, actually is of our partners from the fire department. and specifically chief tom, who really led, our partnership and we asked, chief white if she would help us, if we could deploy as a liaison, some fire chiefs to go up and it was probably one of if not one of the most important decision that we made and, so we were

really appreciative of that. and i think that many of us feel that the camp is still there because that have decision and inpart a lot of the fire did not extend beyond where it did in the water shed. >> and so, what ended up happening on the bottom line is that we have over 50 million dollars worth of damage and we are currently in cost recovery, full mode, and we have different types of recovery funding and we have two different types of insurance that we are pursuing and we also have two different kinds of cost recovery government recovery funds and one through the state and then, of course, fema we did get a federal disaster declaration and so we are in the midst of that we have lessons learned that we thought that we would share quickly. on the response side, in general what we learned is that the traini and exercise works, so that is good news for you. that is good news for us. one of the focuses of our training in the year before the

fire, was water shed fires and so we got lucky, and we partner with cal fire and we talked to them, and we train with them about what to do in this instance and so it really helped us to find of integrate into the unified command and the fire command, so that we could make sure that the city's interests were represented and that decisions were made that protected the facilities and the infrainstruct structure. >> the plans are there and they are helpful, and generally we suggest that you follow them. and we did a lot of training with field crews but what we realized is that the management, the support management of a large incident is critical. and we need to focus a little bit more on that. and so at the department operation's center and the field crews are in incredible

and they do what they need to do and there is never a problem, and it is more making sure that a management level, we have good ics training shs and knowledge. and the other thing is transitions, and we sort of, it is easy to know what to do when everybody is burning down, but when it starts to slow down, there is a little bit of are we in this? are we not? the fact is that today we are in the emergency response situation with this fire in restoration and so one of the advice that i would give to folks is to be sure that you plan for transition from the beginning. involve your business services. the other big learning from this is that we depended so heavily on our business service partners and when i say business services our finance our budgeting, it, hr. and purchasing contacts. and we always think of the field, the field guys, and the people in this field, fighting directly on the emergency, but

you need those support functions, even more so during an event. and then the last few mutual aid and so we have, and we have fire, and law enforcement using mutual aid on a fairly regular basis, utilities do not and so while we do have utility agreements, and we go to meet ands talk about it all of the time, how to trigger the mutual aid and we kind of have to figure out in that moment, so if you have the agreements figure out how to use them before the event and communications just very important to be able to communicate to your stake holders and to or for us the wholesale customers and the public and the media and etc.. finally on recovery the list is not long now because we are up to here in recovery right now. but, what we are learning is that data management and tracking at the most... level is what you need to do and that documentation of what you are doing, is incredibly important

to be able to recover any sort of funding whether it is insurance, or government public assistance. and to that end, we are partners with the controller's office to develop city-wide training on finance and admin and cost recovery that we will be doing, in july or august of this year and so, we are definitely taking the lessons learned and train those around. but, we are going to be in this for some time. we have many projects under way. and the cost recovery will be working on for several years, so thank you very much. >> thank you, mary ellen that was very informative and our next presentation is by rob forester at the asiana airlines crash wrap-up.

welcome rob. >> great, thank you, gooded afternoon, everyone. and thank you for this opportunity mr. mayor and disasater council, to present some information regarding the crash that we had out at the airport and back in july, and share with you some of our lessons learns and recommendations that we are working on as a result. working in the aviation industry, while we spend lots and lots of times putting together some pretty detained emergency planning and information and exercising those plans, and one of our biggest goals is to try to get through our careers without ever having to actually put those plans in to use. unfortunately, on july, 6th, we had to put those plans into use, as a result of the crash of the asian, plane, 214 at the airport, and i am sorry, july,

6th, i am sure that most of you have seen the footage, that was all over television, and we have a boeing 777 aircraft, large aircraft, and which struck the retaining wall on the way to the airport and it hit the ground and spun 250 degrees in the air and fortunately landed back on its belly just of the runway to the left and it was just after a ten-hour flight from korea. and obviously the airport, upon the crash, happening, ceased all operations immediately. and we had a number of first responders, actually our air field safety officers who are typically out driving around were the first ones to actually make it on the scene ahead of the fire department, and who followed shortly behind, but that was something, that we are looking at in our response

plans because we had not factored that in the typical planning scenario you assume that you are going to have a dance move that you are going to know an aircrafting in and having problems and give the firefighter a chance to get out into the staging positions and be the first ones there and so that is a little twist that we are incorporating in to some more. and as a result, obviously our airport emergency operation's center was activated, as a result of the crash, 207 passenger and crew board of the aircraft and you know, as horrible as it is, when i think that everyone saw that video, the fact that 304 of those 307 passengers survived the crash, was really miraculous and i think that it goes a lot to say i think and a little bit of luck in the way that it happened, but also, some great planning, and efforts by particularly the fire department staff that were out there. and responding to the aircraft.

we had 189 individuals that were transported to hospitals, around the bay area. and obviously there were multicasualty plan was put into place and we had mutual leaders and thoughts, from the city here and the county that responded for the plan to the airport to provide additional support. and over all, the big picture, our plan worked. we have an emergency procedure, and we are required to have one by the ffa and everything, for the most part worked. as we head into the division and we will go over some recommendations that were given to us on ways to enhance some of those procedures but over all, we were happy with the way that the response went. >> one thing in the response was over, we quickly began to devise a way to get all of those first responders together

to capture what had happened, and develop some recommendations on how we can improve, we decided to bring in a third party to assist us in that effort and as we brought in a consultant from the outside to help us facilitate, an after action debriefing and because of the size and the complexity of this, we made the decision and in working with the consultant to divide it up into several phases and the first thing that we did, and we felt that it was very important was instead of diving right into the details of it was to have initial meeting, and bring together particularly the first responders and recognize them in the fantastic job that they did and also, allow them to share their stories with each other, and with the folks that were involved in the incident and we felt that was critical, those first responders, it was a traumatic experience for a lot of them and being able to have that opportunity to share that experience, with the others that had gone through that, we felt that really helped them in the process

before we got into the details. after we completed that, we went into the first of the three phase debriefing processes which focused on additional response phase. the next phase that we looked at was the recovery phase, and after that initial response phase, was over, the process to get the aircraft cleared off of the runway and get back to normal operations. and then the final phase that we discussed separately was the medical and family assistance, processes, and because there were some areas in there that we really felt that we could improve upon, and for the future planning and we wanted to make sure that we gave that enough attention in its own debriefing to handle that. and we utilized the homeland security exercise, evaluation program, process and facilitator did and which really helped to make sure that we covered all of those a-core capabilities in the debriefing process. and we had over 120

participants, in the different debriefing phases or the sections that we conducted and again, the goal of that was to focus on continuous improvement, and document lessons learned and moving forward, and get those first hand experiences and we also had because, you know, fortunately in our industry, and aviation, there are not a lot of aircraft accidents, which is a really good thing. it does not give you a lot of opportunity to enveloper learn from the life experience and so what we developed it off of was a hypothetical. and we had airports from all the country that sat with us and went over the lessons learned. and some immediate findings, first of all in the positive side, one of the biggest things that kim out of that, or those debriefings was the fact that

the commitment to the staff and the first responsiblers and also the relationships and almost everyone that spoke, especially in that initial kick off session spoke about the reason they felt things went so well in that initial response was because the folks that were out there knew each other from going through drills, the daily briefings and those responders see each other on a daily basis and there were mechanisms in place, where everyone knew who etch other were and that made it much easier to coordinate the efforts when this accident happened and they had a real crisis that they had to deal with, and they were not, and they were not comfortable with each other and they knew, who these people were and that was a really positive thing. command was put into place in the crash site and obviously we have a lot of folks and from the department taking the lead and working in the command role are working well and obviously we talked about the commitment

and the recovery operation, and once we had the initial response phase completed, the fact that we got the two crossing runways opened within four hours, was really a huge accomplishment. and the full airport operations back within six days, it sounds like a lot of time, but when you look at what we had to deal with working with the ntsb and all of the entities that had to come together to get that last one way, opened, and in a safe manner and operational, and in six days was really something, that was fantastic, and we are really proud of it and it was recognized. >> and our recommendations on the debriefing were put together by the consultant into a final report and they were broken down into several categories similar to the sessions, response, and recovery and medical and family assistance and so we will move through these quickly. some of the recommendations

that we had was the better to find the role of the airport eoc and working with its relationships both with downtown, and san matao and so we have reached out and done some of that and utlyization is something that we did not fully utilize and we have gone through the training with the staff here at dem who is assisting us to come up to speed and utilize that tool to communicate information and also, just better defining in the emergency procedures, what the defined roles of the eocs are to make that process a little smoother in the future. regional efforts when it comes to medical service, integration, the fire department has done enhancements and the medical response in that the airport is in the county, there is some factors in working with those mutual aid responders that was a little different and there has already been great strides made by the fire department in

working through the triage efforts when we bring the county in to make sure that we are working on the same sheet of music when triages and transporting patients. >> looking at our epm, which is our manual and we actually completed that already and we brought in all of the stake holders and went through all of the response and incorporated these lessons learned that we have developed and compiled that in the emergency procedure manual and submitting that to the faa, for improvement and implementation. one of the things that came out is i think that a lot of agencies that came out is the impact of social media and that was a big eye opener for us on how important that is to incorporate social media and work with all of the different public information officers