Chief Mike Miller

I'm going to describe a little editorial cartoon that was in Saturday's Express News paper. And picture this in your mind if you will. It's a couple of HASMET people in their HASMET suits as you saw in one of the earlier slides and they're carrying a 55 gallon drum with them and on the drum it says "Fear." And one of them says to the other one, "this outbreak may be harder to contain." So all of the things we saw earlier are there, but remember that please because what that truly is what we're having to deal with fear. And I also want to talk to you a little about the preparation you just heard about too. And that is I believe that when things go wrong we often hear that people rise to the occasion. Well I'm hear to tell you that they don't. What they do is that they fall back to their level of training and preparedness. So thank you all for taking the time out tonight to learn about this situation to prepare and educate yourselves because I believe that your level of preparedness has risen and when this event does happen and you fall back to your level of training you have a lot shorter distance to fall and you really are prepared to deal with it.

Now let's talk a little about the City of San Antonio and all the hazards we have to deal with. And certainly the new one is what you see now-the biological and hopefully the chemical are staying away from us but we have to prepare for that. But I don't want to forget, and would like no one else to forget that all of the hazards are still there. Just recently we had a tornado hit in our area, in Hondo. We often have floods that hit in San Antonio and in the surrounding areas. Car accidents, fires, you name it, they happen all the time. So the fortunate part is that when those things happen they give us test runs and we build our response and discovery capabilities so that today we're better able to deal with the disasters that are hitting our country as they are. As was mentioned earlier, in 1997 citizens of San Antonio began to prepare specifically for terrorism. We received money's from DOJ and DOHS to develop training to the local community and response capabilities. Some of the people that received this as you heard earlier the train the trainer class which there were over 300 people attended this in 1997 were members of the San Antonio Fire Department, the EMS, San Antonio Police Department, medical professionals, the business community and others. The San Antonio Fire Department has about 1,500 members and they're all trained to the operations level dealing with hazardous materials and weapons of mass destruction training. The HASMAT team, the technical rescue team, EMS Special Operations Unit are trained to the technician levels-the people that are going to go in and take care of the issue in the hot zone as we call it. As well we have more 300 paramedics that are trained to the operation also. You talk about a bad day, 911, which is the day that all this started really made my job a little more difficult. For the City of San Antonio my responsibility is the Emergency Management Coordinator so I run the emergency operation center for the city of San Antonio. Underneath that I also have the HAZMAT material team and the technical rescue team that deals with building collapses and I have the airport. So you can tell my job got very busy there on that day and it's been busy since. But I have a lot of good people that are well-trained and they deal with it and help the community be a little safer.

The hazardous materials teams' been very busy and unfortunately I have to correct Dr. Stewart, I hate to do that, but it's really been 150 events in a week, not a day, My guys would be going crazy and they're having to pull their hair out as it is. So it's 150 in a week. But that's very busy. An average month we may make 15 calls for hazardous materials. So in one week's time we made 150 calls. All the hazardous material people are trained to the technician level in hazardous materials handling, weapons of mass of destruction and they're all at least EMT with many of them being paramedics. There are various type of detection equipment to deal with hazardous materials including the chemical and biological, well not so much biological, that's more the health department, but more chemical and radiological. They have various types of personal protective equipment to deal with hazardous material including some of the things that we see today. And they do have a large amount of decontamination equipment.

The San Antonio Fire Department works under the incident command system, which establishes command and control. It's very important to know who's going to be in charge of that particular incident. We have a very structured system that allows us to identify that relatively quickly. And it also breaks it down into small manageable groups which we call sectors. It's expandable to the local level so we can include all of the fire department personnel that are there, the police department, public work, public health, whatever, but if we need state resources or federal resources expandable to bring those in real quick and clearly define the lines of authority of who's doing what. In the event we did have a federal or state disaster, we would implement the unified command system which allows a group of individuals to get together, make decisions with the expertise of everybody there and quickly implement that decision.

Emergency Management. Back in the late 1970s it used to be called civil defense for some of us older folks. I see some younger folks here that may not know that term very well. But now it's called emergency management. In emergency management we maintain plans-and I'll show you a list of those. We maintain resource lists. We have contact numbers. We operate the emergency operations center for the City of San Antonio. We maintain the emergency alert system. We declare disasters that may happen in San Antonio through the Mayor's Office and request state and federal assistance from the office.

The plans that we maintain. We have a basic emergency management plan that deals again, with all hazards. You name it--it's in there. We have 22 annexes, which one of them includes terrorism, which we just developed last year. And we have a weapons of mass destruction plan and a biological response plan. Here's our slide that shows you the various types of annexes and the numbers that we call them. Again, these plans and annexes are not developed by me. I'm the one that has to coordinate all the efforts, but they are throughout all of the state, local and federal agencies that have to be involved with that, we have a specific plan on how we're going to deal and how we're going to react and how we're going to administer the basic annexes and the basic plan. Bottom line is San Antonio, like many other communities, and most all in the state of Texas have the emergency management office. They have the basic plan. They have the 22 annexes. And some have the biological and WMD, weapons of mass destruction, plan. San Antonio has taken this serious. We've built upon this since 1997. These have all been in place since 1978. But the biological plan has been developed and is currently being reviewed. We always update these plans annually. We look at them. We find out what we need to do to respond in a better way and we update it as necessary. So I'm here to tell, again, keep that fear thing in mind. We can deal with this as a community and as a state and local government. We are prepared to deal with this and rest assured that we will do what it takes to get the job done. Thank you for being here.