Outside Resources

This week I am offering more of a planning session then a training session and it is designed to be a thought provoking exercise that could and should take place at an officer's meeting.

The first thing to do is to identify a list of potential emergencies that would be beyond your capabilities to handle as a department and would require interface with outside resources.

From this point forward I wish to clarify that I mean more than mutual aid fire departments, in fact I mean outside of the "normal" public safety resources.

Brainstorm all of the wild ideas that will be presented during this session. This might be a building collapse, a tornado or hurricane, severe winter storm, a trench or collapse rescue, a terrorist incident, large scale search or whatever comes up.

After all of the ideas are recorded on paper (very important step) list what resources might be needed to mitigate any and all of these incidents.

You will find that you will hear about the need for cranes, specialized equipment, response of the FEMA teams in your region and a host of other activities that might be listed.

Find out how you would go about identifying how to even contact these resources. (This entire processs make take several meetings and can be broken down into logical pieces as you will see)

After identifying these resources, make an attempt to set up a demonstration with each of the agencies that can provide resources so that your members can see a training session about that agencies capabilities. This now provides you with training sesssions that are new and fresh for a short period of time. Some examples might be:

* Contact your local regional FEMA team and see if you can take a field trip or have them show you one of their training sessions.

* Contact a large crane company or supplier and see if you caan watch them doing a large lift and have some one explain capacities, hand signal, safe areas etc., so your personnel have an idea of what safe areas there are.

* On a smaller scale contact the biggest heavy wrecking and towing service to see a demonstration on towing and high volume low pressure air bags if you do not have them.

* Contact your local propane or natural gas company to see what training they have.

* Contact your local power company to see what training they could give you.

* Contact a trucking company that handles chemicals and or flammables and look at the variety of tanker trucks and shut off valves etc.

* Contact your local ham radio operators in your community and ask for a demonstration of radio and video methods of communications.

* Contact your local ground search and rescue organizations.

There are lots of outside agencies and resources that we should know more about. They will be happy to help if you can contact them and reognize their capabilities.