Mayor: Palo Alto Disaster Preparedness Lacking

Although way ahead of other cities, Palo Alto's emergency preparedness still has gaping holes, but remains on the fast-track toward becoming a "10 out of 10," Mayor Pat Burt said.

Patch caught up with Mayor Burt at "Quakeville," a mock emergency response event held overnight at Juana Briones park. In the wake of the tragic disaster in San Bruno, the mayor said the event was critically important, signifying just one of a number of past and future steps being taken by the city to prepare for a catastrophe.

Here is a transcript of our interview with the mayor:

Just real briefly, talk a little bit about why you're here today, in Juana Briones Park, and what "Quakeville" is all about.

Quakeville is an idea that was hatched by one of our grassroots coordinators on emergency prep, Lydia Kou and she's part of what is called our Black Preparedness Coordinators, which is a program that our neighborhoods and even our Chamber of Commerce are participating in to try to identify one person on every block in the city who is trained and responsible for their block in the event of an emergency.

Then it moves upward into neighborhood captains, and up into the city itself. On top of that, this event got coordinated with--Palo Also has its own version of the CERT program—and we call it PANDAs, and they're the people who have advanced training in CPR, in emergency response, and they are the volunteer force that coordinates with the fire department in the event of an emergency.

We're now starting to merge the activities of those two organizations, and they're now part of what we call our Citizen Core Council, which takes all of the major stakeholder groups in the city—government groups, NGOs, private organizations, the Red Cross, the hospitals, the school districts, the Chamber of Commerce, the neighborhoods, and theyr'e sitting on one council, developing a master plan of coordination that goes tiered down from the city mangaer's office into captains, into sergeants of neighborhoods, and down to every resident of the city, is the goal.

Talk about some of the recent events that have played out on the Peninsula that you think might lend a certain newsworthiness or critical importance to our own preparedness here in Palo Alto.

Certainly the last few days--the tragedy in San Bruno drove home the necessity of this kind of effort. We had already planned this starting back months ago as a simulation drill, and it was scheduled to be on 9/11 for deliberate reasons—to build that consciousness in the community.

But we had a total power outage for an entire day in Palo Alto in February, and that was another recent event that gave us a small sampling of what we'd face in the event of a major quake or other major disaster.

But it allowed us to focus our efforts and do gap analysis of what we need to do next and it's been a building process in our community for the last several years to the point where the council had made it one of its top five priorities this year.

And this month is designated as emergency preparedness month in Palo Alto, and we're rolling out a bunch of work that's been building over the last several years, and bringing it together into one comprehensive program.

Describe how prepared you think Palo Alto is for a major disaster?

Compared to other cities,  we're probably an eight or a nine on a ten point scale. Compared to where we really need to be in the event of a major disaster, we're probably up to a three, which is better than almost anybody else, and clearly not as good or anywhere near as good as we have to be if we're going to really be effective in the event of a major disaster.

Can you elaborate on that? What does a 'three' look like?

'Three' means that we have a lot of basic elements in place. We have the Citizen Core Council. We've probably move from a three—we've been a three, and we're maybe moving up to a four or five. We just here at this event had a rollout of our Mobile Emergency Operations Center, MEOC, that the prior council had allocated $400,000 for a number of years ago. It's now online because we've had grants that we've received—because it's not only a Palo Alto center, but it's going to be a regional resource, and it's the best one in all of Northern California now, apparently.

It has the ability to have communications in the event of a complete power outage with broadband communications so we can do Google mash-ups and look at all the integration that now exists there. It also has the ability to take all these different forms of communication—where the Coast Guard speaks in one communication form, and one county emergency element in another, and another county in another, and the city in another.

We've had a Tower or Babel, and that was very clear on 9/11 in New York, where lack of communication was one of the key elements, and this has a system that allows all those communication forms to communicate to us, and we can be the master communications center. So they can now all communicate to each other throughout the region, through this center. We went from a Tower of Babel, to a Rosetta Stone in our communications.   

And so you have this fantastic new piece of equipment, which based on your description sounds like it would truly be an extremely valuable resource in the event of a natural disaster, but yet still Palo Alto is a  "three." What is a—I don't want to use the term "worst-case scenario," but walk us through the difference between a three and a ten in terms of our preparedness. What is it that we're lacking?

 Well, some of the things that are in the works: for instance, we had a bond measure that allocated resources toward rebuilding our emergency water system, and that's under construction right now. That alone may be moving us from a three or a four or a five; that kind of effort.

So, elaborate on that. If what we have now isn't where we need to be, if we don't have an emergency water system in place in the event of a natural disaster, what are we lacking? What is the consequence of that?

Water is a lifeblood. Without the water, we don't have sanitary systems, we literally don't have good drinking water, we don't have the ability to sanitize. Water is essential and it's one of the resources that is most often lost in an emergency. So we're investing millions of dollars in rebuilding our pump stations, which have just been complete, and then we're going to have an emergency underground reservoir, and that's going to be constructed this coming year.

But then the next dimension is: well what about power? If we lose our power, we're unable to do many of the functions we need to, so now because Palo Alto owns its own utility, we're looking at local power generation, including for its function in emergencies. So that's going to be another dimension that's going to move us from a five up to a six on that scale.

And these are not only multi-million dollar infrastructure investments, but then we have the human dimension. And what happened here today, as a result of what's been building for two years in broadening our participation by all of our nonprofits, our governments, and at the grassroots level—which this was all about—so we're moving that grassroots participation so it can move us from a six to a seven.

So we're on that path to move up that scale, but it doesn't happen overnight.

Last question: you mentioned owning a utility here, and that being an advantage in the event of a natural disaster because you control the power; talk about Bixby Park and the proposed anaerobic digestion facility there.

So Bixby is one possible element of local power generation. It would not be the scale that we would need to allow people in the city to have a minimum power usage. It could power certain emergency functions, like our wastewater treatment plant, or things like that. Or, if we have that combined with a local generation plant and distributed power, meaning things like an even more broadly-based solar power, on rooftops and things, then those combined can give us enough power to not only operate some of our emergency functions, but also hobble along as a community until we get full power restoration. And so it's once again an integrated program—no one single solution moves us up that scale. It's twenty different efforts, and ten of them we're working on right now. And the next ten, we'll be putting on our schedule to build us up toward that nine or ten level.

Talk about how critical you think Bixby Park is as an element of that equation.

Well, I think that it's a part. It is not "the solution." So, it was originally driven most of all because of environmental initiatives. It will allow us to reduce our waste and all of our organic and green waste if we go forward on a waste-to-energy program. It will also provide a local power generation, but the local power generation was one of the things that we realized after the environmental initiatives were driving this, and we said, well, it has a second benefit. Now that helps justify it even more, because it has a secondary benefit. But it won't be a total solution to our emergency power; it's a component of the solution.