Vice Chair, ELGL Board of Directors
The start of a new year marks the celebration of my January birthday. I take the week off — because nothing good ever happens when you work on your birthday — and by the time my birthday rolled around, I was out of town but glued to news coverage of the Palisades and Eaton fires back home that were becoming progressively worse, spurred on by hurricane-force winds.
While the fires raged on, a call for mutual aid went out like the Bat-Signal from several agencies in Los Angeles County. They needed staff and equipment. A coalition of California city managers stepped up to help, pledging resources in support. As I flew back from vacation over the devastation in Malibu and Palisades into LAX five days after the fire started, little did I know I was about to be deployed to assist.
Exiting the airport, I turned off airplane mode to find missed calls and texts from my city manager asking if I would answer the call for mutual aid and assist with fire response. My heart raced, a million thoughts swirled in my head, then clarity hit… When your friends ask for help, you help them. I returned my city manager’s call and got up to speed on the situation — the small City of Malibu was in need of staff support and guidance, and I was in a unique position to assist having previously worked with their acting city manager. I said yes, as I often do to important asks from my organization, but this was different.
I packed my go bag, grabbed a blanket and pillow, picked up a city vehicle, and the next morning found myself driving the dark, lonely LA freeways that only exist early in the morning before the sun comes up. The location of the fire and the mountainous topography meant I had to travel 70+ miles around the fire area and come through a precarious windy mountain pass amid 50+ mile-an-hour winds and no lights due to the shutoff of electric circuits. I could smell the smoke in the air and a haze remained after sunrise, lingering like the heavy amount of loss that many had just experienced. Arriving at the emergency operations center (EOC), I genuinely struggled to exit my vehicle and walk to the building because the winds were so severe.
I walked into a hum of activity as the morning shift had begun their first debrief of the day. Situation statistics were being rattled off… 14% containment, number of known lives and structures lost, the directionality and strength of the wind, what roads and schools were closed, what electrical circuits were down, where food would be sourced from due to a lack of power at the few local grocery stores that existed in this rural yet exclusive community. I introduced myself to the EOC director, received my emergency vest, and found my seat where I read the job description I would be fulfilling for the week — EOC coordinator — and I reviewed the daily objectives. I got a quick summary from the EOC director, who shared that the EOC, located at Pepperdine University, was a result of being evacuated from Malibu City Hall and was one of several EOC locations over the past week due to fire evacuations. They were set up and running, but it wasn’t their normal operations, they didn’t have access to much of their regular space and equipment. As I looked up from our conversation, the overwhelming sense of gravity of the situation snuck up on me, so I did the only thing I knew that could immediately help — I organized. I updated the white board where statistics were constantly being updated to clump together categories of information. I set up their shared files on Teams, creating organized folders. I helped standardize electronic submittals of FEMA forms. I kept track of self care requests to HR so we had a running schedule of mental health support for those working in the EOC.
Over that week, I coordinated anything that I could to assist the EOC teams including helping to move the team back to the City Hall EOC once the danger of fire had dissipated. I hoped coming “back home” offered some normalcy, alleviating the stress of operating without familiar resources. I checked in daily with the assigned CalFire rep and called for other county and state agency resources and additional mutual aid staffing. I drafted agreements for emergency staffing contractors and I wrote City Council staff reports to communicate emergency procurement decisions that were made under the council-adopted emergency. I also offered a listening ear and my outsider’s perspective to help inform and guide their acting city manager and deputy city manager — after all, this was the third fire emergency in three months and they (and the team!) were exhausted and suffering from decision-making overload. But what this amounted to for me was that I got to tangibly contribute, squashing my feelings of helplessness while I watched our region burn.
That week of EOC coordination had been one of the best things I’ve ever said yes to. I met some great local govies who also answered the call for mutual aid, I got to briefly know a new community, and I provided bandwidth for a small city facing terrible tragedy. I tried my best to offer moral support, perspective, and levity so we could get through difficult things. And there were brief little moments, between responding to the emergency, that felt like I got to be a part of their special and forever-trauma-bonded team.
Their parks staff shared their very own Ron Swanson with me.
Yes, I did make the acting city manager and deputy city manager take a self-care break for a #CityHallSelfie.
For one of our mental health breaks, we played a cover of “Stand By Me” by Stephen Wilson Jr. and folks, sometimes, there is a song — played at the right moment, with the right message, with the right sound — that you feel in your core. This was the perfect sentiment for the moment, with a group of mutual aid staff members from agencies all over the region and state working together with local staff to respond to a community in a time of need. Each day, I drove into the sunrise, which was a great backdrop of hope for a very emotionally draining yet fulfilling job.
All in all, I spent two weeks working in the City of Malibu EOC and after reflecting on that experience, here are few takeaways for those local govies who have never experienced an emergency:
- Local government workers are mandatory disaster service workers, and during emergencies, we have a heightened responsibility to support those in need.
- Take or refresh yourself on ICS training. The Incident Command Structure is unique and helpful in emergencies, meaning anyone can plug in and perform emergency duties. You never know when you will need to know this, and being trained will help you be effective in an emergency.
- If you have an opportunity to support a mutual aid request, stand up, raise your hand, and say yes. It feels positively staggering to be able to contribute meaningfully to something terrible happening to others. It alleviates that pit in your stomach and that lump in your throat as you watch the never-ending news coverage of tragedy.
- And while likely not on the forefront of your mind in the midst of an emergency, this is an unparalleled resume-building experience, particularly in an area that you probably don’t have the opportunity to experience unless you work in emergency response. You become more valuable to your agency, helping them learn from what you and that organization went through, and you can put it on your resume for future positions.
For local government agencies, if you can spare staff to support mutual aid requests, here is where you benefit:
- The mutual aid experience builds staff knowledge and capacity to support emergencies. There are so many parallels, regardless of the differences between your organizations or in the type of emergency. People who know what to do, what forms to fill out for tracking emergency expenses, the nomenclature of state and federal agencies, and other knowledge that can be difficult to learn on the fly while in the midst of making decisions to deal with the ever-evolving emergency in real time are invaluable.
- Sending your staff to answer a mutual aid request builds a network you can call upon when you need help. And while I hope you won’t ever need help, you likely inevitably will. Have friends in place that will stand by you.
For local government agencies who have sent staff to support mutual aid requests, here is what you need to know:
- Remember mutual aid workers have just seen a lot, especially those in the field or those interacting with community members who have lost everything. Find ways to support mutual aid workers’ mental health when they return. With 12-hour shifts for two weeks, I felt like I had experienced a whole month in a day and was constantly working on little sleep because I was staying in an area with fire evacuation warnings. So my brain had a hard time refocusing on my work after making minute-by-minute decisions for that period of time. Upon returning, I couldn’t finish simple tasks, I had difficulty remembering where I left off on things, and I even finished a few conversations with my coworkers with information from the emergency because my brain was consumed with being in emergency mode.
- Intentionally give your returning staff a purpose — a basic assignment to reintegrate them into the team. When I returned, my team had capably held our work together and it felt like I wasn’t needed, didn’t have a place, and I didn’t know where I fit in. It was an odd feeling of disconnectedness while at the same time knowing I needed to be around my people. A specific assignment would have meant that I had a purpose and needed the help of others to finish it, making me feel like myself at work again.
- Schedule a debrief to share lessons learned with mutual aid workers and your emergency team. I wanted to talk about it and process what I had experienced and seen. I needed a timely outlet for all the thoughts I subliminally had about the applicability to my city operations/community before they were lost in the Rolodex of my brain.
- Celebrate mutual aid staff. Thank them for stepping up and acknowledging their contribution. Your mutual aid staff likely have no idea how much their sheer presence meant to the other agency, helping them breath a little easier during a time of extreme stress, or how much filling out that 213 form for material requests actually mattered to ensure critical items like safety equipment, sandbags, or N95 masks arrived to protect people. Your gratitude upon their return goes a long way to show how proud you are of their contribution.
As the last embers of the Palisades fire burnt out, the devastation was vast. I’ve never seen a fire this close up before — I felt sincerely shook that Mother Nature can be so powerful. This fire killed 12 people, and destroyed 6,837 structures across large areas of Pacific Palisades, Topanga, and Malibu before it was fully contained after 24 days, making it the tenth-deadliest and third-most destructive California wildfire on record and the most destructive to occur in the history of the City of Los Angeles. This, coupled with the Eaton fire, which burned another large area in the region, pulled thin many local, county and state resources. I want to say thank you to a number of my Long Beach colleagues who also answered the call to support the City of Malibu and LA County with the Palisades and Eaton fires. You can see some of their experiences through the eyes of amazing photographer and storyteller, who also happens to be my colleague, Laath Martin. I am also thankful for colleagues from other locations across the state, who sadly have experienced devastating fires, who showed up to lend their expertise based on lessons learned.
When your friends ask for help, you help them. Always be someone’s help.