After Action Reports provide a summary of the event, the role of our organization in the emergency response, and detailed lessons learned from that response. After Action Reports provide a detailed examination of successes and problem areas, many of them procedural, and the level of the critique should not be taken as an indication of the success or failure of the response. Even an exceptionally well managed event should result in many lessons that, when addressed, will result in a more effective response on the next disaster. After Action Reports on this site include both exercise and actual disaster events.

1. OVERVIEW: Hurricane Dennis response was initiated on 24 August 1999 based on the assumption of Readiness Condition 4 by the Virginia Emergency Operations Center. State agencies were released from alert at 1430 on Friday, 27 August, based on forecasts for hurricane landfall in South Carolina. However, based on events over the weekend, state agencies were returned to alert on Sunday, 29 August at 1200. The Virginia Office of Emergency Medical Services initiated situation reporting on Monday morning, 30 August, and continued operations through Wednesday, 1 September. Due to lack of specific effects in Virginia from the storm and the absence of requests for assistance from local jurisdictions, state agencies were released from alert on Wednesday morning.

2. VIRTUAL EOC ROLE: Virtual EOC personnel were activated under the provisions of a signed Memorandum of Agreement with the Virginia Office of Emergency Medical Services. The Virtual EOC was tasked to maintain the Office's situation reports on the disaster situation report page to provide information for Disaster Task Forces, Health Districts, and other Virginia ESF-8 agencies. One individual staffed the Office's Emergency Support Center as required to post SITREPs. The initial stages of a virtual Incident Command System Staff (the Logistics Section Chief, Situation Unit Leader, and Time Unit Leader) were activated to provide virtual command and control and reporting for the Brigade. The disaster situation report web site was completed and daily Brigade situation reports were prepared and posted.

3. VIRTUAL EOC MISSION OBJECTIVES:

a. Be prepared to post Virginia ESF-8 Situation Reports in near real time for alerting and information for health and medical response resources state wide - met.

b. Be prepared to provide similar services for the Greater Richmond Chapter of the American Red Cross as requirements for such services evolved during the event - met, but no requirement for support developed due to the nature of the event.

c. Initiate development of concepts for the functioning of the virtual incident command system in an emergency - met.

4. LEVEL OF EFFORT: Total person hours worked on the response - 61 hours. Total personnel on duty during the event - 5 duty officers. Total Virtual EOC Situation Reports released - 5. Total Situation reports posted for the Virginia Office of Emergency Medical Services - 5. Total electronic mail messages passed through the Incident Commander during this event - 97.

5. LESSONS LEARNED: All members of the staff are tasked to review the following lessons learned and provide input on solutions and improvements by the 18 September Virtual EOC staff conference.

a. Our alerting must allow very early response to developing events. To be ready to support initial alerting and notification of the health and medical system, we have to internally alert and establish operations prior to the issue of the first situation report by the Emergency Support Center and well before field resources are formally placed on alert. This requires a rethinking of our alerting concepts and may mean that the standard 12 hour alerting system used by the Office of Emergency Medical Services does not meet our needs.

b. The transition of situation reports from an e-mail format to an Internet page was successful. We know we can now post rapidly from either word processing documents or e-mail.

c. Format suggestions for the SITREP pages made in the lessons learned from Exercise VOPEX 1-99 were incorporated in this event, and the reports may be easier to read as a result.

d. The need for a glossary page, identified in lessons from Exercise VOPEX 1-99, was also apparent in this event. We need to establish such a page as part of the Virtual EOC. Recommendations for terms that should be included are requested from all addressees.

e. Issues of site location identified during Exercise VOPEX 1-99 may have been resolved by the completion of an integrated Virtual Emergency Operations Center page with separate sites for each agency's reports and links to the Brigade main site.

f. Our concept of how we will manage our operations is evolving on a daily basis. Prior to the start of this response we had only a vague concept of some off-site services. During this event we validated that it is possible to flow information from the supported agency site to an off-site individual and have that data used for the Brigade's internal purposes. However, the information flow was not efficient in meeting our final goals and requires additional definition and practice. Specific areas noted:

(1) Individual availability data was not as complete as it needed to be. We need to be specific on times of day as well as day of the week that individuals are available. In several cases, specific time limits that emerged after scheduling was completed limited staff members' usefulness. The Logistics Section Chief developed a matrix that provides the appropriate information and that needs to be standardized by SOP.

(2) Individual off-site staff officer's schedules during the day disrupt information flow, especially in the work commute periods and when individuals transition from being on-line to no longer available. We have to establish clearer guidelines on how to handle these transitions.

(3) Rather than rapidly passing updates, there was a tendency on-site to gather a fairly large amount of information and transmit it. This made the scheduling problem in working with individuals at work even worse.

(4) Even though we are all accustomed to reporting hours for other organizations, we did not regularly update the Time Unit Leader. The Time Unit Leader for this event has developed reporting guidelines that will provide a time stamp system for on and off duty and that will provide accountability. These need to be finalized and disseminated as a SOP.

g. Use of the Incident Command System to manage the internal operations of the Brigade was validated. It provides an efficient means of assigning responsibilities and the duty titles clearly identify primary functions.

h. The Situation Unit Leader was able to complete the Virtual EOC Situation Report off-site and forward it for approval, release, and posting. In future exercises, we need to consider the off-site Situation Leader actually managing the distribution of the completed report, if we retain e-mail distribution as a primary means.

i. We need to identify all of the staff functions that should be contributing to the Situation Report, and establish clear reporting deadlines for their information being forwarded to the Situation Unit Leader. In this event we did not establish a clear schedule for publishing the SITREP, leading to some confusion. In addition, the SITREP did not identify number of personnel available for duty. This has been included in a draft SOP for SITREP preparation.

j. Dissemination of warning orders, mission orders, and situation reports by e-mail needs reassessment due to the heavy load of e-mail generated. Warning Orders clearly need to go by e-mail to alert participants to the event. Mission Orders may fit in the same category, although both should be posted in the Virtual EOC to allow individuals away from their normal e-mail addresses to access the information. It may be that Situation Reports are best posted on a regular schedule and not sent by e-mail.

k. Each ICS function needs at least two people to allow some degree of back-up. In this event we rotated the Situation Unit Leader responsibility to people who would not normally be assigned this duty. As additional subordinate units are activated, these needs may be partly filled by using local counterparts to form a larger staff pool. However, this means these units must also be organized by ICS principles.

l. We need to address the issue of job descriptions as soon as possible so that each individual will understand his or her staff function in an emergency. During the event we developed a preliminary checklist of duties for the Time Unit Leader. Clearly one is needed for each position. With that comes the necessity for training and qualification in those positions. Our Emergency Management Qualification Program is well suited to prepare our people to support other agencies. However, to manage our support we need to train on specific positional duties - this suggests a blue or yellow card equivalent to the US Forest Service red card and the Virginia Department of Forestry green card used to document ICS duty position qualification.

m. Participants in this event were separated geographically and included participation from Tampa, Florida, Cleveland, Ohio, and Atlanta, Georgia. This demonstrated that key individuals can physically be separated by long distances and still perform specific mission assignments on-line effectively.

n. Formats for Warning Orders and Mission Orders need to be adjusted to allow a quick, fill-in-the-blanks approach to provide the specific information needed to operate effectively in the virtual environment. Inputs are solicited from all participants as to what you need to know at what stage to be prepared to do the job.

o. Transmission of information as attachments to e-mails slows down the processing of the information, especially in the Emergency Support Center environment where we do not have access to a printer. If at all possible information should be pasted into the text of the e-mail.

p. We need to develop a more efficient way of handling key data, such as assignment availability and time worked. Please provide a list of what databases you have resident by the 18 September meeting. We need to work to a solution that allows exchange of databases and other mission information and eventually remote access to these.

q. The volume of e-mail traffic through the Incident Commander position suggests the need for all incident e-mail to be copied to a Documentation Unit Leader in the Plans Section who would be responsible for printing and saving the complete message traffic record. This expands to five the minimum number of positions we need to activate for any event: Incident Commander, Logistics Section Chief, Documentation Unit Leader, Situation Unit Leader, and Time Unit Leader.

prepared by: Walter G. Green III, 10 September 1999

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