Highline is looking to improve emergency response by holding different training drills and safety walkthroughs every quarter, college officials said recently.
These drills are a part of the Highline College Emergency Operations Plan. This plan is overseen by Highline’s Emergency Management Program. Highline also has an Emergency Response Team who go to the drills to be prepared for any foreseeable disasters.
“The college’s Emergency Response Team consists of employees from Public Safety, Facilities, ITS, Institutional Advancement and Academic Affairs,” said Francesca Fender, emergency manager of the Emergency Response Program and associate director of Public Safety and Emergency Management.
“When putting this team together we wanted to utilize employees from departments that naturally respond to incidents and emergencies on campus. These departments are essentially the campus’s first responders and therefore they should be actively and consistently involved when helping write emergency response plans and participating in drills and exercises.”
Many kinds of emergencies could happen at Highline, and each emergency warrants a different response.
“We run four drills every year and they range from tests of the emergency communication system. full exercises for violent intruder response, or power/network outages,” Fender said. “How long they last usually depends on the drill type.”
The plans go up for revision frequently. The Emergency Management Office review results with the Emergency Response Team to improve the emergency operations plan. About 10 people in total are involved in the process of making the plan.
“The emergency manager (myself) is involved in writing the emergency operations plan and then reviewing it with the emergency response team for edits, recommendations and testing it with drills,” Fender said.
“After each drill we conduct an after-action report/meeting where we talk about how the drill went, lessons learned, action items to follow up on and any adjustments we need to make to our emergency response plans,” she said.
Fender said part of any plan is admitting that there are things that can’t be foreseen. The COVID-19 pandemic was one such disaster.
“The obstacle of creating emergency plans is ‘you don’t know what you don’t know.’ We had an epidemic specific response plan prior to COVID and even ran a flu pandemic tabletop drill that tried to encourage participants to think about continuity of operations during a year when the flu was worse than normal and affected the health and safety of the community,” she said.
“As you know, the campus has gone through two years of pandemic response with the loss of normal campus life and everyday business operations,” Fender said. “In February of 2020, when we realized that reacting to the pandemic was going to take much more than placing Purel pumps in various buildings, the campus put together a group of key personnel and formed an Incident Command System (ICS).
“An ICS is a federally recognized way of organizing people and agencies in a way that allows you to manage an incident by assigning certain roles and functions to groups of people within the structure,” she said. “In the early days of the pandemic, this structure helped with decision making and provided the ICS with the big picture and the full extent of the situation on campus.”
But with any challenge comes an opportunity to learn, and two years of having to wear a mask has shown that everyone has a lot to learn from whatever life throws at people, said Fender.
“I look back at that plan now and laugh at how incomplete and puny it is in comparison to what we’ve all gone through over that last two years,” she said.
“The evolving nature of a long-term incident can never be fully prepared for in a written plan. COVID response has taught me to really flesh out our emergency plans more, prepare for the unexpected and to work on creating a response structure that can be flexible to a constantly adapting situation,” she said.
While COVID may have been a wrench thrown into the global machine, plenty of other emergencies need to be planned for. There have even been drills where student volunteers get involved, Fender said.
“We have used student volunteers for exercises in the past. For example, we conducted a violent protest drill in 2016 and used students from the criminal justice program to simulate a protest on campus that eventually begins to get out of control,” she said.
“This added an intense realism to our drill. The students kept us on our toes during the drill and really tested our procedures and made us feel the pressure of having to maintain some sort of order during an incident of this type.”
For anyone looking to learn more, there are several ways to get involved and learn.
Students who want to feel involved in the college’s disaster preparedness work can get involved, Fender said, including participating in campus drills, “such as the annual earthquake and shelter-in-place drill,” and visiting the emergency management website to learn more.
“Work on personal preparedness,” Fender said. “Ready.gov has some great resources including ways to prepare your home and family for an earthquake.”