Starting with, on the Kansas City, Missouri official website we have the Office of Emergency Management which has no link to the actual plan.
They do list a number of projects that they are undertaking to create or upgrade certain systems. They also have a link to a number of sites including the Mid-America Regional Council, Metropolitan Emergency Management Committee.
The Metropolitan Emergency Managers Committee serves as a forum for local emergency managers to discuss and resolve regional issues, problems, projects and activities related to all-hazards emergency management. The MEMC's mission is to foster coordination, communication and cooperation among local emergency management and allied organizations through the development of policies, procedures, educational programs and resource materials related to all-hazards emergency management.
Stick with me the next few days while I look for the emergency management plan (or whatever they are calling it) and review it with my fellow Kansas Citians and all other interested parties.
Update: sent an email to D A Christiansen, Director of the Office of Emergency Management to ask where the plan could be found and it bounced back to me without a note why except: failure
Looks like they might be farming it out to MARC:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.marc.org/emergency/hazardplan.htm
The small bit of it that I read looks not so much like a plan as a risk assessment to me.
Jim...
ReplyDeleteSo far, I cannot locate a comprehensive disaster plan. You're right; everything looks like assessments.
The only three plans I actually saw were the MCI (Mass Casualty Incident) plan and the Hazardous Material Plan and the High Water Plan.
I can't find any other plans.
But, I'm going to keep looking and keep asking for it.
The only natural disaster I can think of that could cause the type and scale of humanitarian disaster in KC that we're seeing in NOLA would be an earthquake. Kansas City is absolutely huge in terms of geographical area compared to its population, which tends to work in our favor in disaster situations. I've been involved in the past in disaster recovery planning, so here's a bit of what I know about the threats faced in KC.
ReplyDeleteTornados: Yep, we got tornados. They can be remarkably powerful, but they tend to cause damage in narrow swaths and also for some reason I don't fully understand are relatively rare in downtown areas. Not completely uneard of, but rare.
Floods: Yep, we got those too. Not downtown, though, unless the whole world actually is ending. The bluff's too high. Most of the city's population is safely out of even the 100 year floodplain as far as I know.
Heatwaves: Check, we got those, too. But since we're not French (meaning that we have A/C and actually care about our elders), very few people die in these.
Earthquake: In this one, all bets are off if it's big enough. Since the last quake that would have been felt in this area was almost 200 years ago, buildings are not built to survive a quake. In addition to large numbers of structural failures, you'd see widespread infrastructure problems: water, sewer, gas, even electric would likely be severely affected.
Man-made disasters, be they accidents or terrorism, are another story entirely.