Articles
9 February 2012

Homeland Security Roundtable

by UB Admin

09 February 2012—

HERBERT: We live in an interesting time. We do have a heightened awareness of homeland security, the challenges that we face since September 11 and the additional challenges that we have faced since Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita.
Here in Utah, two days after Governor Huntsman and I were inaugurated, we were alerted to the floods in St. George. We actually had people losing their homes and homes falling into the river in a 200-year type of a flood scenario that we had never anticipated. It was kind of a wake-up call to us saying, "You are on the job now." Former Commissioner Flowers was involved in that in a significant way saying, "What do we do and how do we do it and are we ready?"
We have had, just in this past year, significant fires. The Milford flat fire was the largest probably in our state's history. There was the Crandall Canyon mine disaster. And the question always is if we are ready and what our response is going to be to those kind of situations. We live along the Wasatch fault and that's always a big concern: When is the big one going to hit, and what devastation would it do if, in fact, it did hit here on the Wasatch Front? It could mean maybe hundreds of thousands of deaths if we had a 7.0 earthquake. The devastation would be significant and it would be a real challenge for us.
We have had the birth of the Be Ready Utah program. As I talked to [Lt. Gov. of New Orleans] Mitch Landrieu, I asked, "What have we learned? What can we take away from this to help us in Utah with our responsibilities?" One of the things I took away is [officials in New Orleans] were too much in a top-down mode as opposed to a bottom-up mode. The people on the ground were not prepared individually or as families. The city governments and county governments were not prepared to take on the bulk of the responsibility. The people were looking to the state and to the federal government for the majority of the relief. And as we observed, that didn't happen.
From a bottom-up approach, it makes [the preparedness process] a lot more effective and a lot more efficient. We have done some really good things and are really getting the attention of others outside of our state with our Be Ready Utah program. And I think we have a good format here but we need your help in smoothing it out. The Be Ready Utah program is in four parts: family emergency preparedness, community emergency preparedness, school emergency preparedness, and business emergency preparedness. All of them give steps and processes to go through to be prepared and ready. For what? Fill in the blank: Fire, flood, natural disaster, terrorist attacks, economic downturn. It fills the gamut of potential problems we face as a state.      
I'm pleased that Utah is one of three states that have been first in line to provide training and resources at no cost to the business community. Now, we have got a lot of input from the business community and we appreciate what we have received as we are working together on this. We are working with our chambers of commerce and others to help us make sure that we are listening to the needs of the business community and responding so that as we put together our programs and planning we will, in fact, get the results that we want.
            This June we have a new Website now called BeReadyUtah.gov that gives a lot of step-by-step instructions for families and individuals and communities and businesses on how to be ready. But we are going to have videos on that, and an on-line calendar for preparedness fairs and other events happening across the state. We will have the ability to give updates on different crises or emergencies that we are involved with at the time. And it will give information, of course, on our Be Ready Utah programs
I don't believe any one individual or any small group of individuals can make this happen. I do believe that you can have impact and every one of us here have a responsibility and a role to play to make this a successful effort. But you are going to have some key component players, of which you are all part. I hope that we never have need of a lot of the stuff we are going to learn about and train about. We hope for the best, but we better be prepared for the worst. I have said before that our community will not look kindly towards us if we fail in this assignment. When that earthquake does happen, if we are not ready and don't have things in place to show that we have done all that we can do to mitigate potential problems, then we will be looked at as people who have not been responsible, maybe derelict in our responsibilities. We appreciate the support we have had in the past and what you have been doing and are doing. And maybe more importantly we appreciate what you are going to do in the future.
 
Part of what Be Ready Utah is all about is continuity of operations. As you plan for your organization, how do you communicate to your people what your plans are pre-disaster, during the disaster and post-disaster?       
 
SHAUB: We are an educational institution. We do a fair amount of communicating in our student newspaper, The Daily Utah Chronicle. Today there's an editorial that is asking for more updates on just this topic, and we are working on Websites, we are working on e-mail notification systems and we are working on text messaging systems for notification. We are offering workshops at the department level. We have instructors who provide workshops or portions of their academic curriculum on this topic these days. So everything at our means is what we use.
 
PEARSON: As a corporation, we have different levels of communication where we communicate strictly through our market managers and our club managers to our store managers and associates. In the pre-incident stage, we hold a lot of communication meetings. We have emergency flip charts throughout our stores which address a lot of disaster situations specifically. But then we also have taken different threats and specifically developed a plan in stores, from a shooting situation to a bomb situation to stores that are always affected by threats of tornados, and we teach continually through operation.  
Then during the incident we have different ways of communication. We have call lines where our associates will call in through a 1-800 number to say, "I am here," and give family status and home status to say, "I am/am not able to report to work or to another facility." And then after the fact, our management team with Wal-Mart and with Sam's Club follows up. We assess where we can use them to either rebuild our facility, restructure our facility, send them to another facility or use them in our community. So we have been able to layer the education and the planning process through our organization.
 
Using the bottom-up approach, is it the employee’s responsibility to call in and make those initial notifications of what their status is?      
 
PEARSON: Absolutely. We teach associates with Wal-Mart and Sam's Club personal preparedness. The first key to business continuity is your people who work for you. They are the ones that are going to show up or not show up to an event. We teach them, "Have your kits and your family ready, then here is the number when something happens. Call us. Because if you don't, we’ll come out and look for you." Post-Katrina, we had market team managers, district managers and people out of the home office going out and looking for associates who were not able to call in, because we have to run our business and to run our business we need our people. So bottom to top is more important than top to bottom. ‏
 
Does anybody do it differently?
 
GUINNEY: Let me paint a picture for you. First, Dr. David Sundwall put together the governor's task force for Pandemic Influenza Preparedness. One scenario for Salt Lake County: Bird flu hits. Numbers: Population is 970,000. You've got 280,000 people sick; out-patient Medicare, 145,000; in the hospitals, moderate scenario is 2700, 32,000 if severe. There's 670 deaths. Think about that. And it's going to hit over what, two, three months in waves?     
            It's great to have a food supply. But if you are too sick to make supper, you are sick. So what do we do with these millions of square feet of food supplies from U.S. Foods and Sysco and Wyeth and so forth? Obviously the hospitality industry is out of business. They are not going to be coming to Salt Lake to come to a convention or have early bird dinners at Market Street. But we have these facilities and this food supply. We are going to have a certain amount of healthy labor force. We have a capacity to produce tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of meals a day and get them distributed with the resources that we have. And no, we don't need all of our utilities intact. We actually could do it without water and electricity and so forth. There are other means to produce the product. Has our industry had this conversation? It has not. And it's time to start to engage in how we are going to use this very critical resource. ‏
 
How do we go about the communication process and what do we do about this pandemic flu outbreak? How do we convince our public of what the right steps are to take and what is safe, what is not safe? What is the process for providing that message?
 
SUNDWALL: Well, you are right, those are really the important issues. The governor's pandemic flu preparation was an advisory committee. We met over several months and it surprised us because we convened a community-wide group like this, acknowledging that if it's a pandemic it's not just the Health Department's problem. It's transportation and education and all the businesses. But, you know, the thing that percolated up to the top was communications. And it didn't start that way, but we realized that anything we do to prepare, whether it be to stock Tamiflu or try and mitigate spread through congregations, won't work unless we get the word out. So we have something called the Utah Notification Information System that is pretty sophisticated and it's all over the state. For those people like me who are the front line, we have the megahertz radios that would not be affected, we hope, by cell towers going down in the event of some kind of a national disaster. But for other kinds of communications, say a pandemic or infectious disease, we have capacity to communicate via e-mail or fax or phone or traditional mechanisms all over the state through local health departments, departments of education and a long list of people who are connected with that. So I think we should have some comfort that there's been a fair amount of effort to attend to communication. Whatever we do, that's number one. We have to get the word out and do it across the state.      
 
HERBERT: It seems to me the communication is somewhat reflective of the type of disaster we have. One of the things I was really concerned about in New Orleans was their lack of communication. We had pockets of people that didn't find out about it until they saw it televised on CNN. And with the advent of cell phones, it seems like we ought to have better communication. What are we doing as a business community to make sure we can communicate? ‏
 
HOFMANN: What's equally important is the notion that the communication has to start with the government. You've got to let us know which direction you are leaning. And then as the situation changes, we have got to know in a timely fashion, because we could actually be, as a business, leading people opposite of where [government] wants to go. So [we need] regular communication, but also some way to notify when the wind changes and we need to go another path. ‏
 
KING: Having gone through tornados and fires and flooding, the communication generally is a horrible mess. And the government needs to rely on your private industry. That's where the stuff is. Government doesn't have it. There is a big hole in the government, and that is what your private industry fills. You fire up an emergency operations center and there's nobody there from private industry, from hospitals or from your power companies. One of the things I'm tasked with is working with Renee to get the individuals in these decision-making things. Because government doesn't have it. So that communication piece needs to work. That's why this is important in the infrastructure piece.
There's a huge effort on the federal level to do exactly what you are doing here today in a meaningful way. It does no good for government to sit in a room and make decisions about moving stuff when we don't own it. It is really good to talk about, "We are going to get fuel there.” “How are we going to do that?” “Through the trucking industry.” So we need Dave in the room when we are talking about moving fuel.
One other thing we always miss is who is going to pay? That has to be pretty clear. I went to a trucking industry event and they were talking about that very issue. They said, "I can move trucks. I just don't have a bank full of cash some place. So I need to know who pays." And you find that out by being in the room in a planning process.
 
VOUGHT: I know the hospitals that I work with have redundant systems. We rely on telephones, we rely on the 800 megahertz radios, the 400 megahertz radios. We have satellite phones. We use ham radio operators. The real key aspect is that it's one thing to have them but you have to know how to use them. And you have to know how to talk with the people on the other end. Building those relationships with the government, with the business agencies that are out there is critical and key in the communication aspect of things. It's not just tapping the line there. If I don't know who I'm talking to on the other end, if I don't have that relationship, it's not going to do me any good to call them up because they don't know me from Adam. ‏
 
One of the things that often comes up in these discussions is that we need to create a database of information so that we know who to contact. Who should be in charge of the database?      
 
WALKER: The lieutenant governor is leading out on this. I think the state has too. I think somehow there's got to be coordination. I know that the LDS Church is taking inventory around the state. Our homeowners association in my neighborhood has gotten together to figure out what resources we have in our own little neighborhood and who has the food and who has the water, who has the swimming pool that we can use as a water source. But in the big picture, whether you are talking about electricity, whether you are talking about medical care, somehow I think we do have to take leadership as a state and have an umbrella that is coordinating key needs around the state, particularly along the Wasatch Front where we have the concentration of population. Under the lieutenant governor's leadership and Be Ready Utah, we have to take that inventory and have the database so we can mobilize quickly and communicate. I don't know who else would logically do that. I think it needs to be a public/private partnership, but somebody has to be the chief. ‏
 
‏CREER: For industry, it has to be simple. I look at our industry that has over 400 companies and 75,000 employees. When you are talking emergency, we are talking about preparedness. The more complicated you make it, I think the less success you'll have during an emergency. So [we should use] single-point contact, just like in a business. Who do you go to, where do you find the information? If that's not available, what is your plan B? One sheet. Make it simple and I think that will help a lot of industries. ‏
 
HARDCASTLE: I think we need to prioritize and do the most important things first. We have limited resources so put [crucial tasks] all together and plan and do the most important things first.
 
HEADLEE: From the standpoint of the financial services sector and banking sector, we came into this process confidently because the banking industry is highly regulated. For years we have been required to have plans in place. We now started thinking about [preparedness] in terms of being ready industry-wide and putting together an industry-wide communication plan.
But what became clear to me is the interdependency and the interconnectivity issues that we have. The banks may have their act together but what is the information my banks are going to want to know about now that I know how to communicate? They want to know when they are going to have power and gas and what to do as far as hospitals or food. I'm not going to have the information that they want. I have total capability of communicating with them, but I'm not going to have the answers. I fear that if we centralize things too much, that becomes a bottle-neck. I'm going to be taking more of a peer-to-peer approach, and that's the way we have done it among the sectors. If I have to wait for a central database or for someone to answer my phone call, I can't serve the people that I'm here to serve. ‏
 
PEARSON: We have resources but before any private sector business is willing to say, "I have whatever the list is," we need to know who is paying for it, whether we are donating it, who is accountable for it, who will be contacting us or whether it's the government.
We need to cover mutual aid agreements so if something happens and the state calls me and says, "Rachel, I need water and ice. You have the resources," then it's not me dumping 25 trucks at a designated point and saying, "I'm going to hope a week down the road when all the dust settles there will be an accounting for it."     
 For private sector to be willing to put things on a list, we have to have accountability. There still has to be an accounting piece of financial responsibilities.      
 
GARRETT: Through the Chamber, we have created a homeland security advisory committee looking at the issue of database and the notification piece. Some of us found, as we worked through the Olympics, we got into the issue of cataloging equipment. And you can get so deep into the weeds that you kill yourself with that. So this committee is looking at how we can make it quick, easy and user friendly and to have that database be available to not only government but to business. And it would be a joint partnership between government and the private sector. The follow-up piece to that is being able to take that database and move it into something that is a dynamic information sharing resource.
We had a fire in Sun Valley. And I have a deep Rolodex of people to call to ask what we need to be aware of [in Utah], but in Idaho I was at a loss. I felt helpless until we found a Website that Blaine County put up that they updated at 10:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m., and 6:00 p.m. every day that posted what government was telling the public they needed to do. It was simple things like, "Stay off the road between Hailey and Ketchum because of fire apparatus." Or, "Stop using your cell phones. It is overwhelming the network because the responders want to keep the network free." We in Salt Lake made better business decisions because we had that information. And we could direct our folks to follow what government wanted. So we started this group and it's going to have to be a public/private partnership because we have to figure out how to fund it.
 
LEY: I think we hit the nail on the head with a voluntary private/public partnership program that gets the information from the private sector and puts it into one place. If they join the private partnership, it expects them to learn the ESF system, learn what the state is doing so that when you hear the acronyms they know what they mean. [For example,] you know what is expected at your county, local and state levels. What it means when a JFO is going to roll into town; what FEMA is going to expect.
I came from the private sector before I was a Fed. If you were going to come to me in my business, my thought was, "What's in it for me?" So to give back those incentives for the private sector to come to the table and work with the government, that's what we are going to have to key in on. Do you have your continuity of operations plans? Do you have a pan flu plan for your business? Have you gone through the checklists of your 72 hour kits? Those are the things that you key in on.
In Utah you have some sort of label, a moniker you develop, and you could start branding that and saying, "These companies that joined this group are responsible. They are there to secure their business; not just to be prepared to respond, but also to prepare day in and day out." That is somebody I'd want to do business with.
 
SUNDWALL: I would just like to make a pitch for the importance of keeping it simple, to a degree. As I listen around the room and as I know, there are not a dearth of activities, there are too many. How do you know who is doing what and how do you work together? I think that there is a risk of overwhelming the public with, "Gosh, there's so much or so many things going on, how do we be selective?" And I think that we need to direct people to what has been done to date and is already really useful.      
When we did the pandemic flu preparation, it was a task force that came up with seven major recommendations. The top one was communication. But we also recommended the governor establish a standing advisory committee on public health preparedness, and at the time it was pandemic flu. That has now been appointed and convened on May 22 for the first time.     
 ‏
PROPER: I come at it from information technology. How do we share data and communicate? And I do think in the end, by leveraging tools it can be simple if we prioritize and break it into different categories.  
What can we do short-term and how do we break those into different areas, whether it's health related or flu, whether it's terrorist related/disaster; or economic related or local or national? Then how can we actually add value technology-wise? Look at what has happened with Wikepedia. There's not a huge business behind that, but we all use it in one form or another. Maybe we don't know about it. But if you literally had a body that regulated what content is out there and how individuals can help themselves, it would be beneficial.
I believe we need to take the momentum that we currently have and focus it with specific information-based tools. These collaboration tools are huge for business, which then can tie to recipes that we can build for long term. The long-term plan ties to legislative type realities. How do you create intelligent decisions that set the guidelines for businesses to use technology? There's processes that a governing body can look at to make recommendations out there into business sectors that can literally alleviate some of the realities.
We talk about terrorists or disasters for businesses. It breaks into a couple categories there. You have data, whether it's stored locally or remotely or up in the cloud, which everything is moving to that, or you have security realities. I met with Senator Bennett about two years ago and he said the biggest threat of terrorism in this country and the world is not planes running into buildings, it is intelligent people knowing and understanding how to penetrate the technology that we are currently using. Information. He made one comment. If we went down for one day, if we couldn't process credit cards and do banking, this country would be in the biggest recession we have ever seen, by far. In most of these environments, legislature has not mandated certain things around intrusion detection and prevention which would separate that terrorist act. It's simple and doesn't cost a lot. But with long term measures, it can be mitigated. If we eat the elephant in bites, we can make more progress. And then we use communication tools like the Internet.
 
Let’s move to the topic of payment for products and services during an emergency. Representative Oda, you put together a Disaster Relief Fund for the state of Utah. What is the expectation of payment?
 
ODA: We have three bills that tie everything together. We have the Disaster Recovery Fund. We have the Statewide Mutual Aid Compact, and the one we just passed this year, which was the Emergency Management Coordinating Council. The Disaster Recovery Fund was basically to have something set aside for the state to be able to pay for infrastructure repair, deployment and emergency services and things of that sort. We started that out with $11.4 million that came back from the St. George floods and we get a little chunk of every surplus we have. In less than one year's period, we are up to a little over $34 million. So hopefully we can keep building this up.
The Coordinating Council and the Statewide Mutual Aid Compact help to see who is going to be responsible for what. The Mutual Aid Compact says all the local governments agree to help each other out and will work out the details later. If that 7.0 earthquake hits, it's estimated the first 96 hours will cost somewhere between $1 to $1.5 billion for the state. If we do nothing, the total economic impact will be between $38 and $42 billion. ‏
 
HEADLEE: I think it's critical that we look at this issue before these things happen. We already have the statistics on, for example, a business that doesn't have a plan after it happens, the likelihood of being in business after an event like this is very, very low. The government is not going to be in a position to fund much of anything after these things happen and there will be such a huge drain on our funds, the general funds and so forth. And so who is going to pay the taxes? We have children we still have to educate. We have enormous demands in terms of the short-term, as Representative Oda talked about. It's critical to put the money aside now while we have it, and prepare. I have been a long-time advocate that we have some kind of an incentive for businesses and individuals to prepare, because every dollar that is spent in preparation beforehand is going to save us so much money on the back end as our businesses and our citizens are prepared for this.
 
For every dollar that you spend in preparedness, it's worth $5 in a disaster. What can we do to coordinate with business and government?
 
T. HUNTER: Renee was asking me about the effects on a small business. As a resource company, we have the tools that you are going to need in an event like this. But back to the payment part. We want to know that Rich and his company are going to be paying us, because that's our livelihood. And we only have 150 people. So one of the questions that they asked is how the recovery and all the networks that we use will be used in a disaster. As a small business, it is harder for us to frankly invest the dollars to be prepared. When I go back to our CEO and our board and say we would like to spend some more money to teach everybody that we need to be prepared, they are not as willing to go forward.
            But preparedness is a revenue generating activity if you consider that afterwards you are not going to have anything to generate if you don't have a plan in place. We started this with no plan. I think the more we get this out and the more that know about this, it's going to help us greatly. ‏
 
HERBERT: I feel like the government is doing the right thing. I think we are trying to get organized and be prepared. We will have information, and I expect that the government needs to be kind of the central clearinghouse. We need to gather information from the private sector when a disaster happens, collate that information, and put it out there to be accessible by T.
But I wonder if we thinking we are doing good things but you in the business community are saying, "That's not what we need. We need something different." I know that in a lot of businesses, [preparedness] is probably not a priority. They are trying to scramble to find dollars to pay for health care benefits. So I worry if we are doing the right thing in conjunction with the private sector.
There are a lot of businesses out there where it's not a priority, and are they procrastinating. What can we do to help? And, how do we find out if there are holes in the system? I know we have done some tabletop exercises, particularly with military folks and the National Guard, and we have done a mock disaster training. But I wonder if tomorrow morning we had a call that said, "There is a disaster,” what would the communication system be? Would we be able to get ahold of everybody? Would we actually be able to do something in response to the disaster? I don't know if we should be doing more drills. Anybody that's been in the military can tell you it's one thing to do it at boot camp and another to do it under fire. So I don't know what we are doing to see if there are holes in the system and see if our plans really work under fire.
 
GRAVIET: In the private sector coordinating council we are actually doing some command training and we are preparing that group to go through that very type of exercise in September. So it will be interesting to see what holes we do have and what things we've got a good handle on. ‏
 
HOFMANN: One comment, first. I think a resource you should think about taking advantage of is the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of the employees are probably employed by 20 percent of the companies. And most of those large companies like us have a plan to get information out there if the state could contact those 20 percent of the companies. That information would flow rapidly into the small business community that perhaps isn't as prepared.      
 
T. HUNTER: What became abundantly clear when we went through this exercise is that we needed to get the information to our people. So we distributed some of the Be Ready Utah pamphlets because we are definitely going to have to rely on the individuals to be responsible in our case.
 
GUINNEY: Let me address the small business sector, a good portion of us. [In a disaster] we are not going to be in business. We are going to close. Restaurants are not going to be open, Fast food, maybe, but the hospitality industry won't exist. So consequently, "let's be prepared" doesn't always apply. I'm not going to talk to 1,000 employees about what we are going to do when we are not going to be able to even function. So that kind of dialogue does need to take place.
There needs to be more dialogue up at the legislature about legislative relief. If you did get overwhelmed in the health care system with people dying of the flu, at some point in time you have to say, "You need to go home. We can't do anything for you." People are going to have babies, heart attacks, so forth, and the system needs to be able to function. At some point there does need to be a conversation about what the federal role is and only what the federal government can do. Getting back to pandemic flu, it will be global. Only the U.S. government can inform the states or this country of when it is most likely going to strike the U.S. population.
 
GRAVIET: One of the most overwhelming things that occurred to me in our pandemic exercise, the simulation cell made a telephone call and I was in a conversation with political leadership and the question became: We are now looking at quarantine, and we want it to be voluntary quarantine. Are we going to pay our people to stay home? Otherwise, they are not going to stay home. And we need a decision from the governor's office as to whether or not we are going to pay people. I suppose that question could go on to any given business owner in this state. Are you going to continue to pay people? We came up with the answer, yes. But I'm not sure that that was the right answer. And I was pretty uncomfortable with that because at some point in time it runs out. Doesn't it?      
 
SUNDWALL: When we had the pandemic flu task force, education was represented. And it drove me crazy because the [teachers] are not willing to stay home. We know from CDC the best way to limit the spread of an influenza epidemic is to close schools. As soon as we decided to pay them for three months they were happy to stay home. Economics drives these decisions and concerns, even when their life is at risk.
 
BEATTIE: I really do believe we need to go back to where this whole conversation started with some great comments about simplicity. In all probability, outside of a flu pandemic, we are not talking about a natural disaster that would probably last for long periods of time. The concern that I have is that when those happen, we need to make sure that Wal-Mart and other service providers know that if their equipment is walking out the front door or the bottled water is gone, they will be reimbursed. I think that needs to be done on the upper level.      
The reality is that when there is a disaster, people go home and want to know what they have to do. They don't know that it's on the Website. They are struggling, the phones don't work, those are the kinds of areas that also create hysteria where they are running to find grandchildren or children.
Most of the big corporations are prepared but a lot of the smaller corporations [are not.] What can we do to make sure that the information from Utah Business is something that every home has - not just every business, but every home - and that it is relevant to what is going to happen so we can immediately respond?
 
WALJE: The bad news is we practice on you all the time because we have storms, and part of our job is 7 by 24 restoration. So most of the lesser events, other than pandemic, but other physical type incidents, we are pretty practiced at. We have mutual aid agreements with other utilities. We have materials stockpiled. And so it's the biggest events that we are more worried about; the category 7.0 earthquake.
I think there are holes in how we are approaching things, and I will give you an example. We helped sponsor a tabletop exercise with Coalition for Utah's Future. One of the things people don't think about is that the majority of our hospital beds are on the side of town where the Wasatch Fault is. All of our restoration equipment is on the other side of the freeway. So if we have a category 7.0 earthquake, people think we are just going to send people to the hospital. When we think about modern society, people now use cell phones and portable phones. They don't have Western Electric hard-wired, self-contained, self-operating communications equipment. Last time I checked, the Internet runs on electricity. So this notion that we are going to be looking at electricity or, as Howard pointed out, if it happens to affect the data centers that are key that don't have full backup -- I sometimes think we don't think this through. There are pieces of this that we are just beginning to get comfortable with. But this will be evolutionary, and I think our company has the perspective and obligation to get the lights back on as fast as we can, irrespective of the type of incident.
But I do think this cash flow issue is a pretty significant issue because we bill Utahans about $100 million a month. If there's vast damage to houses and people are staying home, the first thing on their minds is not paying their utility bill. So even though we are pretty big, we will also have cash flow problems. And if we have to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in restoration, even for us in the ultimate disaster it will be a very trying time.
One other thing to think about on the pandemic Avian flu, there are only about 20 people in the state of Utah who know how to run our electric system out at our dispatch center. So are we going to say, "You are now quarantined in the dispatch center and you don't get to leave because without you we can't run the system"?      
 
SUNDWALL: We will get them Tamiflu right away. ‏
 
WALJE: And then are we going to take care of your families so you are okay with staying here because someone is looking over them? In [Hurricane] Katrina the critical providers, EMT and police department and others were torn between, "Do I do my civic duty or family duty?"
And I still don't think we have sorted that out internally in our company.
 
HEADLEE: What I was trying to raise in my last comment had to do with kind of the systemic economic issues that are terribly hard to recover from because you have a government that has difficulties. If we are talking about a very localized, maybe an earthquake or pandemic, the systemic economic impacts are huge. And it behooves any corporation and any government to put money on the front end. We should be paying our employees bonuses for having plans for their family. We should be looking at tax incentives for businesses to put a plan in place. Because the systemic economic benefits in the long run far outweigh those up-front costs that we would have today.‏
 
DeAVILA: I have been in several disasters and have been called into a few. Several years back we put a team together to address the same issue, and it comes down to economics. You have two types of economics you have to deal with. The first one is how do you get to a point where you are prepared. The second one is post incident response economics. It's very difficult for a business to look at investing in their own safety and their own processes. I see the Presidio Group over there. I just learned the other day that for several months, maybe years now, they have been discussing with several business owners how they could work with them on their safety plans, and create a discount to their insurance companies. We have been doing the same thing and we are actually talking to them and with different insurance companies. A team that we put together was solely focused on how we pre-deploy an emergency system. What we came up with was a system that was solely made possible through the incentives of the insurance companies, for step one.
If you have people that work in downtown Salt Lake City and they have to go home during an incident, they are not going to be able to do it. Their children are going to be in schools, the bridges are going to be down. It is going to be several hours before they can get to their families. They are going to abandon their posts for sure. It has happened. Red Cross has deals with a lot of the schools that in any incident, they are going to take them over. Your kids could be kicked out. That's something to look at.
I also don't see anyone here from Chevron. We have some refineries here in town. If an earthquake happens, your biggest worry is going to be inhalants. And you have to create a process for pre-deployment of equipment. Our team went to the insurance companies. Building owners and tenants have to co-insure the inside of their buildings. You have a $2 million exposure for any incident. They have to reduce that. If you pre-deploy equipment within your building, they are going to give you the discounts.
Then we looked at how do you protect public areas. We have convention centers in town. We have train stations. We have many other venues, airports. We came up with a system that, through advertising dollars, they would pay to have these public areas protected.
 We remember a world prior to 9-11. And now we have to deal with these kinds of meetings. Where we don't go far enough is in looking at the commitments. Where can we look for the dollars to pay for it? And that's been the focus of the team that we put together and trains the FBI and the first responders. And what we have been looking at is how to go after a day-to-day business solution that will help pay for equipment in your facilities. That's your insurance carrier. How can you look at putting the equipment in your public facilities? Advertising dollars. That's how they make the money. Letting you know how you can buy their product. And we are using those funds to place equipment in different facilities.      
 
SULLIVAN: I believe it was the former director of the National Hurricane Center, Max Mayfield, who was quoted as saying that preparation through education is less costly than learning through tragedy. For 20 years we have been working with those employees on the bottom level. We have been working with households. The consensus is the same: Too many people have the mistake of thinking the disasters are for the other folks, we are all vulnerable to something. Change, challenges within business or economically, it will happen at one time or another to everybody. We talk with people every day after disasters, I can't tell you how many people call us and say, "I knew that I should do something but I didn't know where to go. I didn't know where the resources were." And it just boils down to education. It's as simple as that.
 
LEISHMAN: I have the opportunity to work on an international basis responding to some type of emergency almost every day somewhere around the world. And one of the things that we have learned is simplicity. Plans in a thick notebook do not make an efficient or effective response. One of the things we have learned over the past few years is that very few of our members had what you would call an adequate food storage. You hear about the one-year supply of food and that's just a daunting task for a family to take on. So we have simplified that over the past year, encouraging our members to have a three-month supply of food that they would eat on a normal regular basis and then have longer term storage.
One of the things that we are very, very concerned about is the debt load of not just members of our church but people in general. Too many people have so much debt that preparedness is on the back burner. It's not something that we are thinking about. So hopefully as businesses here, we could do something a little bit more to educate our people and maybe provide them with some planning tools and training tools to help them get out of debt. Because as we look at this, it goes back down to the individual and the families. And we believe that's where preparedness needs to start and that's where people focus.
As a business owner, you are going to focus on your business. But as an employee, you are probably going to go back to your family. And you, as business owners, can do a lot to help your people get that preparedness mentality.      
The LDS Church maintains a large supply of food and other essential items in the time of emergencies. And we sometimes hear the comment, "I'm not going to prepare because I know that the Church has a lot of wheat and they will take care of me.” That is not the case. First of all, the food is not for us. That's to take care of the poor and the needy.
One of the things we encourage our leaders around the world and also here in Utah is to get together with community leaders, with police, fire, Red Cross, and make sure that our plans mesh with their plans. In planning response, we don't need to reinvent the wheel. And also preparedness, we don't need to reinvent the wheel in a lot of areas. There's so many great resources out there provided by FEMA, Homeland Security and the Red Cross, and if we create a Website, a lot of this information could be put on that.
 
N. HUNTER: You mentioned the Website and the correct new address and the brochure. All of these people are going to be submitting to the brochure, and you are talking about having something that goes into people's homes that they have all this information. They can build their plans and such with this. We are going to have all of those recommendations both on our Website and on paper brochures that we hand out to people at our events, as well as a downloadable format on that in pdf form on our Website to download and use when you need it. If any news entity has a story that has an emergency preparedness background, we invited them to post it on the site and we will put a link to your site. It's about cross promotion, and we want Be Ready Utah to be the gateway for everyone to get all of the information that they need. It's easier to remember BeReadyUtah.gov than twenty Web addresses. We want to be a gateway, and we invite all of you any time you have something that is helpful to submit it to us and we will get it out there for you.
 
GRAVIET: To summarize today's event, I’d like to come back to Lieutenant Colonel Bart D. Barry, who said the most important thing you can do in an event is take care of your people. And it results in talking about all those things that we need to do to make sure that they are okay, so our businesses are okay, so our economy can recover, and that whole chain reaction can go into effect and help us get back up and running. I think education is crucial. I think collaboration is the key.
 
 


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