i didn't know what the e.o.c. was so that's when i knew we were on our own and since then watsonville has elected over five latino mayors and council members. the response recovery and recovery relationship needs start now not after disasters as i learned when i tried get re'em bursement. i was denied three times. paul worked on that until the state did. because i did not have a -- with the city to provide those services. so i made it a point that all of our community-based organizations have contracts with us vand m.o.u.'s with us to provide. and they are all disaster workers. managing disaster response donations and items and goods should be planned before to take advantage of the goodwill of individuals and communities and businesses to help with the response and recovery process, our company learned well that we were going to do dwop our own program. we were able to use this for grants for home repairs. if any of you have seen the pictures, all the houses looked like they leaned in to each other. we lost thousands of foundations. we repaired 1,000 water heerts and -- heaters and o

i say bunker mentality is the number one enemy of the e.o.c.'s so the way you can avoid that and open it up -- so the third thing we did is we established a network of communication using the business community and the leadership structure, the chamber of commerce, the downtown association to purble the information back out and also to get feedback in. so we understood what were the big things that people needed. then, we had to build an ad hoc organization and another thing about disasters is they're bigger by definition something you can manage. it's not manageable. that's why it's a disaster, right? if it was manageable, it wouldn't be a disaster, it would be an incident, right? so we had about 15 or 20 people that i brought out of city hall, just picked people i kind of thought would be good at thinking on their feet and didn't need to read a book to now what the rules were. so we brought them and then we used hundreds of volunteers to support that. and the big project was trying to find a way to get policies and process in place to allow th