[Sooner or later]

Originally Posted by VINMAN

My take on this...

Iv'e spent the past 34yrs as a firefighter, 18 of which in a chief's position, which I still hold as dept Chief.

Iv'e spent the past 14 yrs on a state/FEMA USAR team. Many as a high rank officer, second in command of the deployment. Iv'e been on every hurricane deployment since. People than haven't worked in these disaster areas have no idea what it takes to deal with it.
Even though we deploy as a FEMA asset, you still have to answer to the AHJ ( Authority Having Jurisdiction..). They are the ones that set the Rules Of Engagement 75% of the time. Plenty of times its a guy like that chief in the video that you are dealing with. Some are extremely cooperative, some are egotistical morons. You have people that change the ROE 5 times in a day which is extremely frustrating and counter productive.

One example, during Hurricane Florence, we were sent to one town by the county OEM, to set up evacuation plans. The town sat along the Cape Fear river. I did a pre-recon meeting with the county and locals, along with my rescue manager and engineer. While at the meeting a state wildlife officer told us he had found a levee breach along the river. My engineer wanted to look at it. We hopped in a helo to look at it. When we got back to town, we reviewed the flood zone maps. My engineer did all these calculations, and predicted the levee breach would increase and fail.
We told the local authorites, who thought we were crazy, and would take our advice to start evacuating the town. the fire chief told us they didnt want our help and basically go back up North. Yankee go home. We tried pleading with them but no go. So we left.
Following morning we get a call, the firehouse we had the meeting at was under 6 feet of water and they were pleading for our help. At that point roads were inaccessible to get back there.

One of the biggest issues with these things is accountability, controlling who goes in the areas, tracking missing, etc.. You get a lot of well meaning people that want to help out, that have zero business being there. Which puts a possible additional burden on responders. Ground Zero on 9/11 was prime example of that.

I completely sympathize with that chiefs frustration. But i would have handled it totally different. Let the guy quickly finish that mission. Then direct him the proper way to provide help.

This is the first deployment that I haven't been on. But talking to my guys that are there deep in the sheeot, other than getting our teams in place before hand and putting us to work, there is a huge sense of failure otherwise by the feds to provide what is needed.

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Excellent.

Thank you.