Meetings/20190801

2019 08 01 Casey attended the Coastside Emergency Action Program monthly meeting. These meetings are held the first Friday of each month. https://www.visithalfmoonbay.org/biz/coastside-emergency-action-program

"The Coastside Emergency Action Program is a disaster preparedness committee bringing all key Half Moon Bay area coastside organizations to the table in order to sufficiently prepare for a disaster. In the event of a disaster, the coastside community would have to be self sufficient for the first 48 hours, at least."

Some of the attending organizations were: CalFire, Sherrif's office, various police depearements, Ham Radio/ARES folks, RedCross, Puente, San Mateo County OES, Large Animal Rescue, the DART ( volunteer pilots ), Coastside Emergency Corps, the City of Half Moon Bay, the Humane Society and a collection of CERT folks from up and down the coast.

Lisa M represents Puente at this meeting as well, and probably has more insights.

Their motto is "Shake hands before the disaster, so you don't hvae to point fingers after the disaster" which is sensible. This organization is a *VOAD* - a Volunteer Organization Active in Disaster, only the second in the state - East Palo Alto has the other.

Apparently the format is that each meeting has a guest speaker, and then there is a roundtable of announcements from various groups.

Brian Molyer presented an overview of the Incident Command System ( which many of you will remember from your CERT training ) A key item of his presentation is the need for written records of all the decisions and actions taken during the emergency. Why? The central issue is FEMA's rules for re-embursement / grants: given the post-Katrina post-Bush revamping of FEMA they are trying to watch where the money goes very carefully.

Then each group gave a brief statement of their current activities.

Things I remember ( I didn't take good notes, sorry )

• DART drill at HMB airport. In a bad disaster this program expects to offer flights
  • to medical facilities over the hill
  • to re-unite families
    • side note: it appears the HMB airport only has backup power for about a day - this will make radio comms for incoming and outgoing air traffic rather tricky, esp given the fog.
• HTTPS://smcdisasterprep.org is having a disaster readyness event Saturday September 21st. at the county fair grounds. They are also offering classes: https://smcdisasterprep.org/classes-2/

I reported on our radio relay day, chipper days, and the work on showing the folks south of us how we've organized ourselves.