At 9:57 A.M. the phone rings at The Humane Society for Seattle/King County (HSS/KC). Protection One is calling to report that they’ve received a signal from one of the fire sensors indicating that there’s a problem in the Animal Boarding Area. The Building Warden for that location is contacted and discovers a fire has broken out in the dryer area.

Thus began the first annual exercise of the local Humane Society’s Disaster Plan. For six hours on that Wednesday, twenty-one key people assigned to critical roles in the overall plan had their first chance to work together through the steps documented in their individual plans.

Response and Recovery
The Humane Society (www.SeattleHumane.org) has been creating and documenting the strategies, teams, and tasks necessary to respond to and recover from a major disaster that might strike their Bellevue, WA facilities. The morning session of the exercise focused on response while the afternoon session focused on recovery.

“The response phase of a disaster begins when the disaster strikes and ends when the environment is stabilized,” said Jim Brennan, one of the volunteers that led the exercise. Jim, an employee of The Boeing Company, is an analyst in the company’s Constant Readiness Center in Kent, WA and an expert on disaster planning. “The recovery phase starts as damage assessment information begins to arrive and ends when the organization is fully functional and located in their permanent facilities.”

Norm Bottenberg, another volunteer from Boeing, who has over 45 years of experience with the Red Cross and is an expert on disaster exercises, designed and led the actual event for The Humane Society. Using a scripted series of events that simulated the unfolding of the disaster, Norm provided a realistic experience for all the participants. "It's often useful in a disaster exercise to use a script where new and unrelated problems develop as the exercise unfolds."

Disaster Scenario
The exercise scenario was a fire that started in The Humane Society’s dog kennels and boarding areas. The dryer fire was selected for the first exercise scenario because it was fresh in the minds of many of The Humane Society employees and volunteers. Earlier in the year there actually was a fire that started in one of the clothes dryers. Fortunately, the fire was contained without injury to any animals or significant damage to the facilities. A “learnings” session was conducted after the fire that included changes to the documented response and recovery plans. This exercise leveraged off that event.

Unlike the real fire, the “exercise” fire quickly went out of control with dense smoke spreading to the veterinary area, adoption center and small animal kennels. Water from the fire fighting effort washed into the administration, auditorium, and pet food bank areas, accumulating to a depth of six-inches.

A traffic accident and backup on Interstate 90 next to the campus added to the emergency response efforts. Individuals were warned for failing to adhere to police instructions as they re-entered the burning building to rescue animals. Landline phone service failed and the fire department had all power cut to the campus.

There were mock injuries to both humans and animals and two volunteers couldn’t be found when their families came to pick them up. And to top it off, the forecast was for a severe cold front to enter the area with evening temperatures predicted to be in the teens.

Objectives
The exercise, as with all future exercises, was intended to maximize learning and to validate the plans and functions that have been created thus far. The focus was on the ability of team leaders and team backups to access and follow documented plans and their ability to use resources dedicated to disaster response and recovery.

Perhaps the most important objective for the exercise was to test the responders’ abilities to communicate and coordinate efforts. Using some of the hand-held radios purchased with funds raised during the Fund-a-Need portion of the 2005 Tuxes and Tails Auction, the HSS/KC’s primary annual fundraiser, individuals were taught basic radio use and exercised their ability to communicate with various disaster-related functional areas during the event.

Twenty-one team leaders and team leader backups participated in the exercise held in the library and auditorium at The Humane Society. “I was really happy to see the enthusiastic participation by all those who were at the event” said Rich Finlay, Humane Society Board Member and CEO for the organization who participated in the response phase of the exercise. “People were engaged and I saw everyone making notes in their documented plans.”

Trish Grant, one of the participants and team leader and owner for the Animal Information and Referral plan, pointed out, "I knew that communication with the outside world was a critical part of disaster response and recovery. When a disaster happens, people are going to want to be able to communicate with us. This exercise really helped me to see how external communications fits in the larger response and recovery process." (Trish is the person you see in reception and the voice you hear when you call The Humane Society’s main phone number.)

Policy, Strategies and Planning
In 2004, the HSS/KC’s Board of Directors approved a policy that acknowledged the importance of having disaster response and business recovery capabilities, and in 2005 they approved the key strategies to create and maintain those capabilities.

The strategies included creating the capabilities for The Humane Society to survive a disaster that directly strikes their primary assets, along with creating the capabilities to respond to a disaster that occurs in the Puget Sound region.

The Business Continuity Management Team (BCMT), comprised of the Directors of Facilities (Herb Muchow), Information Systems (Anne Oneha), Operations (Glynis Frederiksen), and Finance & Personnel (Ken Farmer), defined a set of worst-case scenarios that supported the overall strategies approved by the Board of Directors.

"This exercise was part of our first scenario," said Herb Muchow, who leads the Scenario 1 effort. "We wanted to work on our ability to deal with a disaster that directly impacted the organization’s facilities and assets."

Herb, who responds as Incident Commander during Scenario 1 disasters, is accountable for the three response teams activated during a Scenario 1 event. The Evacuation Team performs the tasks necessary to move people and pets to safety along with providing protection to the assets, the Animal Care Team provides for immediate shelter and care for the animals, and the Medical Triage team provides first aid to individuals that might have been injured during the event. The Incident Commander coordinates the teams’ efforts and provides liaison with Emergency Response Units like the Bellevue Fire Department.

Anne Oneha leads the Emergency Operations Center (EOC), a resource and planning function active during the response phase. “The EOC model we’re using at the Humane Society is based on the standard models used by government emergency response functions,” Anne explained. The EOC contains finance, logistics, operations, and planning functions along with liaison, safety, and information officers. “We activated the EOC and walked through the entire event, step-by-step. A major disaster is chaotic and acquiring accurate and current status information to make efficient and effective resource and priority decisions is a challenge.” The EOC functions through the entire response phase, from the beginning of the disaster event until the environment is stabilized.

In preparation, EOC members did a complete walkthrough of the event prior to the exercise and have scheduled follow-on walkthroughs to tune their capabilities.

“One of the unique challenges for animal-related agencies is assuring the welfare of the animals under its care,” according to Glynis Frederiksen. “Most publicly available business continuity and disaster response guidelines deal with safeguarding human life and protecting the assets, but none deal with assuring animal welfare, a key objective for organizations like the Humane Society.”

Second only to safeguarding human life, assuring animal welfare is a top priority for both response and recovery. "Our first challenge is to get the animals out of harms way, which, in an emergency like the fire used in the exercise, means that we use leashes and portable crates set up in safe areas in the parking lot to keep them confined," said Frederiksen. "During the chaos of the event, we have to be mindful of issues like health quarantine, the special care needs of post-operative animals, and a myriad of other issues associated with animal welfare. If we lose the facilities, our next challenge is to find more permanent shelter where we can provide continuing care. Ultimately, during a worst-case scenario, the act of getting the animals evacuated from the buildings is just the start of the tasks necessary to assure their welfare."

The Recovery Operations Center (ROC), similar in structure to the EOC, functions during the recovery phase of the event. Initially driven by the damage assessments provided by the EOC, this function builds the plans necessary to 1) resume time-sensitive business services and functions, 2) recover remaining business services and functions, and 3) relocate all business operations into their permanent facilities. “Since a major disaster, like the one used in the scenario, may wipe out the facilities, the ROC may function for months as new facilities are acquired or built,” explained Ken Farmer, head of the ROC. “Our survival as a business hangs in the balance of our abilities to minimize impacts caused by these disasters and our ability to provide for timely recovery of our core operations and services.”

The ROC portion of the annual exercise allowed recovery plan owners to review their plans in the context of a real scenario. During the exercise they were given a damage assessment which they used to review the effectiveness of their plans to recover their services and functions.

One of the planning principles used by the Humane Society is that the person that authors a plan may not be available to manage the execution of the plan. That means that the plans have to be accurate and easily understood in order to be effective at the time of need. The exercise included reminders for all the participants that the plan they are reviewing may not be executed by someone familiar with the plan’s development.

Learning to dance
“Developing disaster response and recovery capabilities is a little like learning how to dance,” said Tom Carpenter, owner of Carpenter and Associates who have volunteered their time to manage this phase of The Humane Society’s disaster capabilities development. “When you start out learning how to dance you concentrate on where to put your feet, when to shift your weight, and when to turn. Later, when you have the basics you can take the footprints off the floor and turn up the volume of the music. In this first exercise, the focus was on very, very basic capabilities like how to use the radios and which tasks to perform first. It doesn’t allow for learning if you try to dance an elegant tango when you’re still just working on how to move and how to avoid stepping on your partner’s feet.”

The Humane Society has based its entire disaster preparedness program on a learning model, an approach that acknowledges the fact that the organization and its people will be smarter tomorrow than they are today. “It can be extremely hard for an organization to accept a learning model,” explained Carpenter. “We’re so ingrained with the belief that we have to produce the perfect plan before we can take the first step that the idea of allowing for learning can be difficult to accept. But it’s the only effective way to build the kind of capabilities necessary for disaster response and business continuity. Whether you’re learning how to dance, master a sport, ride a bike, learn a martial art, or any of an infinite number of capabilities, a learning model is the only meaningful way to progress.”

Event follow-up
According to the organization’s plan, an exercise similar to the one conducted in December will be run every six months with each being followed by a formal risk assessment of the Humane Society’s abilities to deal with a Scenario 1 disaster. The risk assessment provides the basis for the design of the next exercise and functions as an important measure of the Humane Society’s disaster response and business continuity capabilities.

Keeping plans current, testing regularly and maintaining the organization’s enthusiasm and support are just a few of the regular tasks associated with disaster response and business continuity planning. Another formidable challenge, one that can have a measurable negative impact if taken lightly, is getting a continuity program off to a quick and effective start. “This exercise is an important milestone for The Humane Society. It represents a level of commitment and functions to create a baseline of documented plans for the organization,” said Carpenter.

As Rich Finlay pointed out, “Our focus is on the Puget Sound region and the people we serve in this area. Our ability to respond to disasters is totally dependent on our own performance, the organizations we partner with, and the generosity of local donors that see this effort as part of our mission in the community. We’ve seen that disasters can have a profound impact on the relationships between people and their pets. This program is an important part of our ability to accomplish our mission.”

Methods and Measures
The Humane Society for Seattle/King County uses a formal Program Management methodology based on industry-proven concepts and designs for its disaster planning. “When asked to provide program management for this important effort, we knew from the start that the use of and alignment to industry-proven models and techniques would be an important principle,” pointed out Carpenter. “The good news is that the disciplines necessary to provide effective disaster response have matured and are well understood. Our challenge was to appropriately scale and adapt them for The Humane Society while staying aligned to their key principles.”

"The objective all along has been to document every plan necessary for disaster response and recovery. We’re extremely fortunate to be using one of the tools created by Strohl Systems, the industry leader in business continuity systems and planning," Carpenter explained. "Documenting the plans, including teams, task, assets, suppliers, customers, and a myriad of other details can be a daunting task. To integrate them and ultimately to make the plans cross-functional requires that they be linked and coordinated. Even in a relatively small operation like The Humane Society the effort can be extremely difficult without some sort of tool. The Humane Society’s overall plan contains twenty-five individual response and recovery plans."

Using a method pioneered by Strohl Systems, the program was able to get a quick start with the right focus. HSS/KC had started its efforts to build business continuity capabilities by researching disaster-specific guidelines. The approach was modified by using a worst-case approach to plan design and construction with specific disaster events used for plan and capabilities validation.

The Humane Society for Seattle/King County is an independently operated, non profit organization dedicated to building lifelong relationships between people and their pets. They are funded exclusively by individuals, corporations and foundations, and not by any national organizations with similar names or missions.