2. Overview

2.1. Lessons Learned

Los Altos Hills CERT has two main responsibilities:

  • survey the town’s critical infrastructure, streets and houses, and report the status to the Town Emergency Management.

  • respond to emergencies and other requests from authorities, here called ‘ad hoc assignments’.

We’ve practiced this many times over the years, have identified bottlenecks in communication and tracking, and have made incremental improvements over time.

The insight for this “increment” of change is to pre-script our “normal” tasks to lower the communications and tracking burden, freeing more planning bandwidth for emergencies and requests.

We’ve developed some key tools to help with this:

2.2. Critical Infrastructure Survey

We have on the order of 60 locations of key interest to the town (water tanks, bridges, overpasses, electrical substations, pumping stations, schools, etc). These locations are called “Critical Infrastructure”. We’ve grouped these locations into five survey routes divided by geographic location.

The intent is to assign teams to survey routes as teams become available.

2.3. Zone Survey

The town and unincorporated areas in the LAH County Fire District have been divided into roughly 55 “zones”. It takes 15-30 minutes for an experienced team to survey a zone. We found the overhead of communicating new assignments took so much time that we didn’t have time to deal with other issues.

We grouped the zones together into 16 “zone groups” for assignment. This greatly lowers the amount of communications overhead, while still being a small enough area survey in a reasonable amount of time.

2.4. Recon Assignment Sheet

To facilitate organizing and tracking communication, we developed a “Recon Assignment Tracking” spreadsheet. This document has two sheets in it: One sheet for all the pre-planned activities, and one sheet for ad hoc assignments.

Conceptually, these pre-printed tracking sheets become a script for the response that is shared among the Ark teams (Operations, Recon, etc.) and that it will ease communication among the teams because:

  • they have a shared idea of the order of operations

  • each team can communicate progress by copying and distributing their tracking sheet to other teams on a regular basis.

The combination of the Pre-planned and Ad Hoc status sheets should give a complete picture of the status of the response.

The current Recon Assignment Sheet is available on the Procedures and Documentation page of the LAHCERT web site.