Lessons learned from Katrina, 9/11, SARS, and other disasters
You also have – is a part of special operations – and now going over to the reserve side – civil affairs units, which basically more than 95 percent of civil affairs units in the U.S. military, whose primary job is to go with combat units, and under the directives of the Geneva Convention in terms of humanitarian response, are to mitigate the effect of warfare and disaster on civilians. That's a workforce that's there. They've already been federalized; in a way they've been trained, they've been standardized.
I certainly agree with the dictum that the military knows command and control well. There are, though, some euphemistic boots-on-ground services that are used to the command and control environment and that could help.
SHUTE: Dr. Weisfuse, does New York want the military to come in?
WEISFUSE: You know, I think that we – you know, we would coordinate with military if need be through our Office of Emergency Management – Emergency Operations Center where, if the military were in New York City, they would be stationed, as well as we would, in the hospital systems to coordinate. I don't think that we are necessarily looking for the boots-on-the-ground kind of help. We certainly are very appreciative of the help that we've gotten in 9/11 and anthrax from the Department of Defense on a lot of resource issues - notably, that's who bailed us out on our laboratory issues – as an example. So I think on certain issues we really could coordinate with them and work with them and we did during our crises.
SHUTE: And Dr. Low, you've got have a different military but would they have been useful for you?
LOW: All military. They were in Afghanistan so we didn't really have anyone to fall back on, because we talked about it, especially during the ICU crisis as a what-if – that the ICU support staff didn't show up on that Monday morning and could we turn to the military. And it would have been a real problem if that had happened.
SHUTE: How would that have been a problem? What would you see as -
LOW: Well, we had no military that every - most of the forces were in Afghanistan. So if they had of been present – yeah, I think it would have really been critical to have that ability.
WEISFUSE: I just wanted to make one more comment about the military. I think, aside from the, you know, coordination during a crisis, you know, we can learn a lot from the military in the hospital sector in the public health sector, and that really hasn't been taken advantage of in terms of some command and control issues and logistical issues, et cetera. They have a lot of expertise, and trying to figure out a way to share it with the public sector, public health, hospital sector – would be wonderful.
SHUTE: Great. Yeah.
Q: Yes. Nelson Jacobson. My question would be, isn't there a National Incident Command System – the NIMS – and that takes care of command and control? There's a presidential directive, PD5, that says all the first responders need to engage in first response using the NIM system. And has that been brought to your attention and are you guys coordinating with that?
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