EDMG230

Running head: Eden Prairie Tornado

Eden Prairie Tornado

EDMG230

APUS

At a little after 1500 on 14 June 2014, a tornado briefly touched down in the City of Eden Prairie directly hitting the Eden Prairie Mall. Being a Saturday at 1500 the Mall had an above average amount of people shopping. The tornado destroyed vehicles in the parking lot as well as severely damaged several of the malls buildings. Due to recent construction some of buildings were not able to withstand the wind force and collapsed on some workers. Numerous casualties have been reported from people located in the parking lot as well.

The first rescue unit to respond was the Eden Prairie Police department and Lt. K. Schmidt assumed the position of IC. Immediately after assessing the situation, the partially collapsed building, over turned vehicles and numbers of injured, he started implementing an expansion of the ICS. About 10-20 minutes later EMS responders and the first Eden Prairie fire crews arrive. The fire crews took longer to get on station due to the fact that Eden Prairie uses a volunteer fire department. During this time IC Schmidt set up the ICP on the parking lot to the south of the mall which was least affected by the tornado. He also set up a triage area with the leading paramedic on scene and started having the injured brought to this point. With some of the other police units arriving he set them up in a perimeter to maintain security and facilitate entry of emergency vehicle into the disaster site. Finally he designated a staging area to the north in an adjacent parking as well as a potential spot for a helipad near the triage area if needed. Also during this time Minneapolis Emergency Operations Center came online to support the disaster and sent out an IC to assume command of the situation. At 1730, John Smith, arrives and assumes command from K. Schmidt. They use an ICS form 201 to transfer command and spin up John Smith on the current situation. John Smith realizes that the amount of damage is large enough to warrant a further expansion of the ICS and assigns his command staff and begins creating two divisions to better handle rescue operations (Deal, 2010). Smith assigns his safety officer, information officer, public liaison officer as well as Operations section chief, Planning section chief, and logistics section chief. Smith also begins determining the incident objectives and identifying areas of safety concern. This is the beginning of the planning “P” and soon after each of the leaders do their initial jobs they meet back together for the Command Staff Meeting, followed by the rest of the required meetings to get the Operational Plan into effect.

After being briefed by the IC the assigned staff and officers got to their assigned tasks. The safety officer began by working with the Operations Chief to identify safety hazards (Deal, 2010). His biggest safety concern was the partially collapsed building, which posed a very large danger to rescue workers. He also identified the hazard posed from massive amounts of debris created by the tornado. As the safety officer he continued to monitor the recovery progress and identified any new hazards that arose (Deal, 2010). The safety officer was an interregnal part of all operation planning.

The liaison officer in this event was mostly charged with communication with Minneapolis Emergency Operations Center. She kept the MEOC and other stakeholders abreast of the current situation unfolding at the mall as well as coordinating any other agencies involvement (Deal, 2010).

The Operations Chief after receiving his brief immediately set out to accomplish the objectives laid out by the IC (Deal, 2010). He immediately noticed that to complete these objectives he needed heavy equipment and dump trucks to remove rubble and clear away debris. He conferred with the logistics chief to get those necessary items for his details (Deal, 2010). As the IC had already split the disaster into two zones so the Operations Chief started organizing his two divisions. He first assigned his division leaders and gave them briefs on what the initial objectives were as well as what units are assigned to which division.

The logistics section chief began with his initial brief and then moved on to his priorities of work. He was informed by the Operations Chief that he required heavy equipment and dump trucks on scene to help facilitate access to any trapped or injured personnel in the mall. He also started planning for a long term recovery by allocating areas for responders to be off shift as well as food and other supplies for the response. He is also preparing other units to take over for the working ones in case the operational period goes beyond the planned 12 hours. He will also put together a rotation schedule to ensure proper rest is allocated to workers to prevent fatigue and accidents (Deal, 2010).

The planning section chief is in charge of the providing the status of the situation to the IC, he does this by keeping track of the resources available and knowing their statuses (Deal, 2010). In the initial few hours there were only police, fire and EMS personnel on station. Now that some time has passed more fire, EMS and heavy equipment has shown up and been assigned divisions to report to.

At this point the operational area had been separated into two divisions. Each division is composed of trucks to remove rubble, heavy equipment to get debris and vehicles out of the responder’s way. Search and rescue team was made up of firefighters and EMT’s for litter bearers. The search and rescue crews worked in conjunction with the heavy equipment in order to get to people trapped by the collapsed building. Each division brought all injured back to the triage area where medical unit triaged and assigned the injured to ambulances. The medical unit also determined which of the three nearby hospitals the wounded need to go, being that there is only one Level 1 trauma center in the area there was a need to be mindful not to overwhelm it with minor injuries.

The IC at this point is reviewing the operations plan and is beginning planning for the next operational period. As the response progressed any new issues would have been addressed in the future operational periods. At this time he is reviewed the work progress and identified delinquencies or anything that needed to be fixed for future operations. The Safety officer had been making sure that the safety guidelines put in place at the start of the operational period were being followed (Deal, 2010). He is also kept an eye on weather alerts for the chance of more severe storms that could have potentially put the rescuers in danger. The Operational Section Chief is continuing watching over his divisional supervisors (Deal, 2010). Making sure there is a good span of control and communication between them, also the OSC would have been watching the overall status of each division. The planning chief would have been working on the next operational period and making sure documentation was being kept up on.

At around 3am the last of the casualties were cleared from the collapsed building and the operation now switches from recovery to clean up. The second operational period will involve more work crews to help remove debris, vehicles and rubble from the area. This disaster was successfully concluded due to training and following the ICS protocols to the letter. The injured were moved quickly and efficiently to higher care and those stuck or trapped were rescued in a timely manner without an additional civilian or responder injuries.

Resource:

Deal, T. de Bettencourt, M. Huyck, V. Merrick, G. and Mills, C. (2010). Beyond initial response: Using the national incident management system’s incident command system. AuthorHouse, paperback, Second Edition

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