Back and Forth: Emergency Response Time
September 12th, 2008
During the Sept. 11 attacks, the Office of Emergency Management, located in 7 World Trade Center, was destroyed. On the seventh anniversary of the attacks, much has changed for the office: new technology, a tight coordination with other agencies and extensive planning, all overseen by Commissioner Joseph Bruno, who took over at the office in 2004.
In the office’s stately Brooklyn command center, Bruno spoke about tactical improvements, how he influences the federal government’s disaster response and his general outlook on life as the man charged with keeping the city prepared for the worst.
What follows is an edited transcript.
City Hall: How has the Office of Emergency Management changed since the Sept. 11 attacks?
Joseph Bruno: I came in at 2004. Clearly some of the things that occurred, we did not have a backup site on Sept. 11. We lost our entire office with everything in it. Today, we have a full back-up, hot sights. We are in a much better position. The staff has grown to now well beyond what we had. I don’t know what the staffing was at that time, but I knew when I came in, it was like 80 people. We are close to 200 people. It’s doubled in size. We have a great focus now on planning. We put a lot more people into that area, certainly planning in a more operational way.
CH: How is progress measured?
JB: We look at the number of incidents we responded to. Are we responding to more or less incidents? Are we monitoring more or less incidents? Are we picking up what’s happening in the city? So that’s one way; another might be in the area of, for example, preparedness education. We would look at how many presentations we made, how many people have we touched in preparedness education. Those are two areas that we would monitor out on. And we have, for example, the addition of new CERTs [Community Emergency Response Teams]. We have gone from, when I came in 2004, we had seven teams. We now have 63 teams. So that’s kind of another indicator of how we changed. These are citizen volunteers who have already been doing good things, who have stepped up now to be transit CERT teams, who come out to incidents and assist. For example, in Long Island City, when we had the blackout, they were there feeding people, and we had the crane accident, they were there helping people in their apartments to get out valuables.
CH: OEM has assisted with post-disaster relief in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 South Asian tsunami. What has the office learned in dealing with these natural disasters?
JB: When we see major incidents like the tsunami or like a major coast storm occurs in the United States, it tells us that you cannot just say, “Well, you need a lot of sheltering.” So if we see something coming 10 days out, we’ll start opening up shelters. Well, you’ve got to know where the shelters are. You have to have keys to the shelters. You have to have food in those shelters. You have to have people to manage those shelters. You need security systems in those built to make sure people are safe when they’re in there, whatever they have to bring into the shelters—safe. You need to have all the steps in place long before. You cannot plan on this “concept” of operations. You have to plan operationally. And that’s what we are telling the federal government to do more and more of. We say to them, “We need as much operational planning, as much as possible. You need to help us be operational in local and state government.”
CH: How do other cities get information from New York about emergency preparedness plans?
JB: We’re bringing out to them what we’ve been doing. For example, I have presented to them the coastal storm plan. We have provided them some parts of our own plan so they can be assisted in doing their own work. We have talked a lot about how we have been taking the CERT program from this miniscule program to a huge program now in New York City; what we’re doing in preparedness education; how we measure preparedness. We do our own polling—as well as polls done nationally—to see if people are prepared or not. Try to figure what works, what message makes people take that step.
CH: How much time is invested in offensive measures instead of defensive ones?
JB: On the larger scale, we have a mitigation plan. And the mayor’s doing a lot of this on his sustainable plan program, the PlaNYC program. And that’s to start looking at more long-term sewage treatment along waterways, start taking the power that runs us and raise it up high enough so that if we have some flood it doesn’t knock them out. Back-up generation for hospitals. So that’s mitigation. We are looking more and more through those types of activity.
CH: What is the office’s relationship with the federal government?
JB: We are very, very close and very involved in the federal government’s business. Because we are such a big city, we may need the support of the federal government at some point. So in order for us to get that, we have to engage them in every way possible. I mentioned earlier, one thing we have tried to do is make them more operational in their view. Federal government doesn’t always see itself as being operational, but the fact of the matter is, in Katrina, that’s what they had to do. They had to become operational. And because they didn’t see themselves like that, they had difficulty doing that. Our job is to ensure they see the needs of New York. For example, in the area of post-disaster housing, I want them to understand that the solutions they have to create have to be a menu of solutions: one for rural areas, which they are pretty good at, one for less rural areas that are somewhat dense, which they are not so bad at, and one for dense areas like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Newark, the places that are at risk for certain types of disasters.
CH: How does 311 interact with the OEM?
JB: We are providing information to 311 regularly. Secondly, 311 oftentimes will get info on a problem before anyone else gets it. The public starts calling 311 saying, “I’m seeing no lights on this block. In fact, I’m seeing no lights 20 blocks around.” And when that happens we are getting from them information, “OEM, we’re getting these calls, check it out.”
CH:Are you an optimist or a pessimist?
JB: I’m an optimist, 100 percent. We have solved so many problems here in the four and a half years I’ve been here. And I have such great people here. I’m very optimistic of what we can do in the city in general and what we can do in this office.
In the office’s stately Brooklyn command center, Bruno spoke about tactical improvements, how he influences the federal government’s disaster response and his general outlook on life as the man charged with keeping the city prepared for the worst.
What follows is an edited transcript.
City Hall: How has the Office of Emergency Management changed since the Sept. 11 attacks?
Joseph Bruno: I came in at 2004. Clearly some of the things that occurred, we did not have a backup site on Sept. 11. We lost our entire office with everything in it. Today, we have a full back-up, hot sights. We are in a much better position. The staff has grown to now well beyond what we had. I don’t know what the staffing was at that time, but I knew when I came in, it was like 80 people. We are close to 200 people. It’s doubled in size. We have a great focus now on planning. We put a lot more people into that area, certainly planning in a more operational way.
CH: How is progress measured?
JB: We look at the number of incidents we responded to. Are we responding to more or less incidents? Are we monitoring more or less incidents? Are we picking up what’s happening in the city? So that’s one way; another might be in the area of, for example, preparedness education. We would look at how many presentations we made, how many people have we touched in preparedness education. Those are two areas that we would monitor out on. And we have, for example, the addition of new CERTs [Community Emergency Response Teams]. We have gone from, when I came in 2004, we had seven teams. We now have 63 teams. So that’s kind of another indicator of how we changed. These are citizen volunteers who have already been doing good things, who have stepped up now to be transit CERT teams, who come out to incidents and assist. For example, in Long Island City, when we had the blackout, they were there feeding people, and we had the crane accident, they were there helping people in their apartments to get out valuables.
CH: OEM has assisted with post-disaster relief in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 South Asian tsunami. What has the office learned in dealing with these natural disasters?
JB: When we see major incidents like the tsunami or like a major coast storm occurs in the United States, it tells us that you cannot just say, “Well, you need a lot of sheltering.” So if we see something coming 10 days out, we’ll start opening up shelters. Well, you’ve got to know where the shelters are. You have to have keys to the shelters. You have to have food in those shelters. You have to have people to manage those shelters. You need security systems in those built to make sure people are safe when they’re in there, whatever they have to bring into the shelters—safe. You need to have all the steps in place long before. You cannot plan on this “concept” of operations. You have to plan operationally. And that’s what we are telling the federal government to do more and more of. We say to them, “We need as much operational planning, as much as possible. You need to help us be operational in local and state government.”
CH: How do other cities get information from New York about emergency preparedness plans?
JB: We’re bringing out to them what we’ve been doing. For example, I have presented to them the coastal storm plan. We have provided them some parts of our own plan so they can be assisted in doing their own work. We have talked a lot about how we have been taking the CERT program from this miniscule program to a huge program now in New York City; what we’re doing in preparedness education; how we measure preparedness. We do our own polling—as well as polls done nationally—to see if people are prepared or not. Try to figure what works, what message makes people take that step.
CH: How much time is invested in offensive measures instead of defensive ones?
JB: On the larger scale, we have a mitigation plan. And the mayor’s doing a lot of this on his sustainable plan program, the PlaNYC program. And that’s to start looking at more long-term sewage treatment along waterways, start taking the power that runs us and raise it up high enough so that if we have some flood it doesn’t knock them out. Back-up generation for hospitals. So that’s mitigation. We are looking more and more through those types of activity.
CH: What is the office’s relationship with the federal government?
JB: We are very, very close and very involved in the federal government’s business. Because we are such a big city, we may need the support of the federal government at some point. So in order for us to get that, we have to engage them in every way possible. I mentioned earlier, one thing we have tried to do is make them more operational in their view. Federal government doesn’t always see itself as being operational, but the fact of the matter is, in Katrina, that’s what they had to do. They had to become operational. And because they didn’t see themselves like that, they had difficulty doing that. Our job is to ensure they see the needs of New York. For example, in the area of post-disaster housing, I want them to understand that the solutions they have to create have to be a menu of solutions: one for rural areas, which they are pretty good at, one for less rural areas that are somewhat dense, which they are not so bad at, and one for dense areas like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Newark, the places that are at risk for certain types of disasters.
CH: How does 311 interact with the OEM?
JB: We are providing information to 311 regularly. Secondly, 311 oftentimes will get info on a problem before anyone else gets it. The public starts calling 311 saying, “I’m seeing no lights on this block. In fact, I’m seeing no lights 20 blocks around.” And when that happens we are getting from them information, “OEM, we’re getting these calls, check it out.”
CH:Are you an optimist or a pessimist?
JB: I’m an optimist, 100 percent. We have solved so many problems here in the four and a half years I’ve been here. And I have such great people here. I’m very optimistic of what we can do in the city in general and what we can do in this office.
