🚀 go-pugleaf

Dale Harris (rodmur@ecst.csuchico.edu) wrote:

: I guess since ca.emergency hasn't been formed yet we can use ca.news. 

Works for me...

: So what I wondering is how does the mutual aid system though OES work, I
: understand that any emergency agency can ask for mutual aid through OES, 
: but is there direct mutual aid aggreements as well, like automatic aid
: (anybody out there that can give a good definition of each?)

Unfortunately I'm at work and my copy of the plan is at home.
Several years ago I was a meeting at OES when this topic came up. We were 
told that "MUTUAL AID" was a function of OES. Before the establishment 
of OES, counties had 'friendship' agreements for joint responses. 

The politically correct answer is that if you, as an officer of county "A" 
have an incident beyond your ability and need help from county "B" then 
you are supposed to place a request thru the OES Warning Center. In 
reality the process is usually circumvented. Fire depts. have developed 
Auto Aid responses, and counties frequently send resources based upon a 
call from a requesting neighbor county. OES is not real happy about that 
when it occurs. Since their job is to maintain an inventory of all the 
available resources for the state they get a bit nervous when those resources 
start rolling around by themselves. 

Our team has a policy that if a request for services is received by the 
dispatcher he/she takes the info and begins to locate response personnel. 
The requesting agency is told to make the call to OES and place the request 
for _______ assets. Once the call comes from OES, team members are 
already on alert and ready to roll. But NO ONE rolls without the OES mission 
number in the hands of the dispatcher. A response with the authorization would 
mean that the responders would *not* be covered by workers comp. Of course
team members can respond to in-county missions. We request that they 
contact the dispatcher to advise that they will be unavailable for mutual 
aid callouts by OES.

The textbook answer is that OES should initiate all mutual aid responses. 
As usual, reality differs from the text. It sounds like the problems you 
described are the result of a major lack of communications which needs to 
be addressed. It certainly is not a good situtation when some teams are 
working in the field and other teams respond and setup an IC that does not 
acknowledge the prior arrival and operations. 

You folks need to get together and review the state mutual aid plan and 
develop a simple operations procedure. A call to OES (or CARDA for that 
matter) can get you connected to an appropriate Managing the Search 
Function instructor who might be able to provide some guidance.



-- 
Ken Navarre
kjn@netcom.com