printable versionDisaster drill puts university crisis-response team on red alert
Administrators practice three-day-old earthquake recovery drill focused on business resumption, housing needs, power supply
BY MICHAEL PEÑA
The university held its annual disaster-response drill on April 6 this year to test how participants would respond in the aftermath of a major earthquake. The scenario was a magnitude 7.0 earthquake centered in Los Altos Hills that had occurred three days prior and obliterated half of the housing and classrooms on campus.
The Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and its 20-plus satellite operations centers (SOCs) were not asked to react to a day-of disaster as in years past—hence, the somewhat less chaotic mood in the Faculty Club. The facility was once again transformed into command central for the exercise, with 75 people on five teams that handled top-level policy issues, operations and planning, logistics and finance, intelligence, and public information.
Laura Wilson, chief of the Stanford Department of Public Safety, is the university's designated incident commander and oversaw the exercise. The facilitators included Keith Perry, manager of training and communications for emergency management at Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S), and consultant Regina Phelps, whose firm, EMS Solutions, has helped coordinate several Stanford emergency exercises.
Absent this year were the banks of laptops that covered tabletops in the EOC two years ago; participants relied instead on paper forms to record data. A steady stream of calls came in from SOCs in need of assistance and updates, while members of a "simulation team" in another location blitzed the EOC as they pretended to be everything from panicked parents to the Pacific Gas & Electric Co.
The EOC-SOC model gathers key administrators to provide leadership during a crisis while activating other teams that would perform vital tasks. As always, the drill took place within the framework of a detailed scenario—but one that nonetheless also imposed a few assumptions that facilitators called "exercise magic."
For instance, in the event of a major earthquake, the Faculty Club likely would have sustained severe damage and not been available, according to Phelps. And damaged freeways or emergencies at home may have prevented many EOC and SOC team members from getting to campus. But for the purposes of last week's program, all hands were on deck. According to the scenario, 6,000 undergraduates, 4,000 graduate students and 3,900 staff and faculty were on campus.
Even though the exercise focused more on business resumption and recovery, everyone still needed to think on their feet and react to major issues such as maintaining power on campus, reconfiguring the academic year, verifying the dead and injured, notifying next of kin and communicating information to the public.
About an hour into the exercise, President John Hennessy was on the phone with someone pretending to work for PG&E after the policy group—which also included Provost John Etchemendy and other top university administrators—was informed that all natural gas was about to be cut off because of ruptured pipes.
But if the university's gas supply were to be completely cut off, the co-generation plant on campus that normally sends half its output to university facilities would shut down. The scenario also imposed a major power outage on campus. "OK, I told them just to shut down the ones that are leaking," Hennessy said to the rest of the policy group as he hung up the phone.
And just as in a real catastrophe, updates and conflicting information flowed in, turning problems into moving targets. Material provided to participants before the exercise stated that 10 students had died on campus, which grew to 13 deaths by the time a press release was issued by the public information team. During a mock press conference held to update a group of "reporters" from off campus, the number of injuries had increased as well.
Other major issues that the university had to address were the canceling of all classes and events through the end of Spring Quarter, as well as the more immediate need to accommodate 14,000 students, staff and faculty on campus for an indefinite length of time. In addition to having only three days' worth of food and water, the university had to severely curtail energy use because much of the campus was running on generators. The university had only 2,000 gallons of diesel fuel on campus, and that would last only 12 hours.
During a discussion afterward evaluating the drill, some suggested having a list of standing priorities before a crisis strikes, such as identifying which departments get dry ice first and which must not have power turned off. Call takers in the EOC said they struggled at times to keep up with the phones, and that they needed a better way to keep track of paperwork.
Online, an announcer from KZSU gave updates via streaming audio on the radio station's website. New information also was posted in real time to the university's emergency website, http://emergency.stanford.edu/, which is now permanently hosted off campus.
The site will be used to keep the public informed about the status of the university and provide information about recovery and relief efforts. The site also lists emergency phone numbers for parents, students and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
"The experience of Tulane and other schools after Hurricane Katrina taught us some important lessons about communication in the wake of a disaster. The web proved to be an invaluable tool for getting information to students, staff and parents," said Scott Stocker, Stanford's director of web communications. "By establishing this cooperative agreement with Duke to host our emergency website, we now have the means to post information quickly, even if our campus infrastructure is destroyed by an earthquake or other emergency."
The emergency website project was initiated by University Communications, with the assistance of EH&S and Information Technology Services. Stanford will host a similar service for Duke.