April 22, 2004
Earthquake drill to hit campus
While most of us are going about our business today, about 40 University employees from about 15 units across campus will be responding to a major “earthquake.”
A 7.0 earthquake on the Seattle fault is the scenario for a disaster drill to be held from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. that day, led by the UW’s first director of emergency management, Steven Charvat.
“This is the University’s first emergency drill in more than six years,” Charvat said. “We thought it was about time that the University do a simulated disaster exercise to find out what our weaknesses are, where we’ve got issues that we need to work on and to do this in a non-lethal and educational way.”
April 22 was chosen for the exercise both because the state is running its annual “Drop, Cover and Hold” drill for earthquake preparedness that day and because it’s Earth Day.
The drill will be a tabletop exercise, meaning there will be no actual going to buildings and pretending to treat “casualties.” Rather, those involved will go to the designated emergency operations center, where they will receive phone calls, faxes and messages brought by runners giving them information such as that bridges are out or that buildings have been damaged.
“The people in the room will have to determine how they would respond to these — where they would put priorities,” Charvat said. “You’ll never have enough money, personnel or resources to deal with everything, so you have to figure out priorities. Then you have to collect information and send it up the chain to the president, because this would be a media event in real life.”
Those involved in the exercise include the usual suspects — the UW Police, Environmental Health and Safety, Facilities Services, and so on. But the group also includes some units not normally thought of as part of emergency response — units like Purchasing and Stores, Computing and Communications and Human Resources, for example.
The group will operate on what Charvat calls the incident command system, which involves creating four sections — operations, logistics, planning and finance/administration — each with a designated leader. Representatives from various units across campus are assigned to the sections according to their unit’s function.
The incident command system grew out of response to the wildfires in California back in the 1970s. “There were problems because agencies had trouble talking to each other,” Charvat said. “So they developed this system which has now become a national standard for emergency response and recovery. It’s almost a military model in that it allows for quick decision making.”
For some participants the drill will be more than a practice session. Students from Disaster Hazard Mitigation and Planning, a master’s level class in the Urban Design and Planning Department, were involved in developing the script for the exercise and will serve as runners during it. They’ll also help with the evaluation afterward and use the whole event as a case study for their class.
Everyone involved in the exercise will do their own evaluation afterward, Charvat said. And there will be two outside observers — one representing the city and the other the county — to provide independent feedback as well.
“Within a month we’ll have a full debriefing,” Charvat said. “We’ll collect the information and synthesize it and come out with some recommendations. We’ll ask what we can do to improve. That’s the whole purpose for doing an exercise.”
And there are more such exercises in the University’s future. Charvat said one a year is the minimum needed to maintain preparedness, and that the drills will get more complex with different scenarios each time. Eventually he’d like to hold one without warning the participants in advance.
Charvat was hired a year ago after serving as the deputy director of the District of Columbia’s Emergency Management Agency in Washington, D.C. Although the UW’s Emergency Management Office is new and Charvat is its first director, the University has been thinking about disaster response for some time. Four and a half years ago it was one of six universities chosen to participate in a pilot project called Disaster Resistant Universities, which was funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
“Thanks to that, our emergency preparedness is much better than at other colleges and universities,” Charvat said. He said the University is waiting to hear whether it will receive an additional $633,000 from FEMA, a grant that would pay for plans, training and exercises, as well as projects such as earthquake retrofitting for buildings.
Last year the campus was also given a share ($239,000) of funds received by the city of Seattle from the Department of Homeland Security. The University is using that money for detection equipment to try to protect against possible terrorism in the campus’ open environment. The city may give the UW additional monies from the same grant this year.
In addition to his work within the University, Charvat has been working to improve connections with those outside as well.
“Our office has been working very closely with city officials, regional officials, state officials as well as FEMA to build linkages — financial and practical,” he said. “Before this office was established the UW didn’t have a seat on the state Emergency Management Council, even though we are among the largest of the state agencies. Now we do.”
And at the UW, Charvat has created a similar group, the Emergency Management Planning Committee. “The big issue is coordination,” he said. “We don’t want any duplication of effort; we want to make sure everyone is at a certain level of preparedness and try to elevate the organization so we’re always ready for any type of disaster.”
It all started with a fire drill
Steven Charvat’s career in emergency management started with a simple fire drill. He was working in the budget office in Phoenix when the opportunity came up to be the fire warden for city hall,
“Nobody else volunteered, so I did because I thought it would be interesting,” he explained. “I soon discovered that doing fire drills twice a year for a 20-story building was sort of fun, so I started taking some classes from FEMA, the Red Cross and so forth and discovered this was something I really enjoyed.”
After coordinating the city’s financial accountability during major flooding, Charvat found himself named the city’s first emergency management director, a position he held for more than 10 years. Then, feeling bored, he took the job in DC, a city that he describes as “always at the center of a bullseye.”
That was exciting, but Charvat said he had wanted to live in Seattle a long time and had applied for at least two other jobs here before being hired at the UW last May.
“It’s been quiet here since I arrived, but beware,” he said. “When I went to DC it was quiet for a year, then came the anthrax attacks, 9-11, and snipers. Well, I’ve been here about a year now.”
