4. Incident Commander

4.1. Responsibilities

The Incident Commander has overall responsibilty for the operation. This person has responsibility for forming the initial leadership team and setting priorities until the EOC and ARK are up and operating.

The IC’s responsibilities are:

  • to select the rest of initial team (County Liaison, SMS Monitor).
  • to contact town officials to notify them of our intent to activate, and get approval for your plan.
  • make sure the county resource net is notified of town status
  • to organize a Recon team(s) to survey critical infrastructure.
  • to assign folks to the ARK and EOC to start the opening process.
  • hand off responsibilities once EOC and ARK are running.

4.2. Recruiting Staff

Your first task is to recruit some extra folks to help accomplish your key goals. This document forsees three additional roles:

  • the NCO (although an NCO already exists: you may want to get someone more experienced)
  • the County Liason to relay messages to and from the county resource net
  • the SMS Monitor to send and receive messages to those without ham radios

Right after you become IC, and while you are gathering your thoughts (and no doubt reading this document…) the NCO should be gather a list of CERTs and ECC members who are available to help with the response. You should pick your staff from this list.

After you pick the County Liaison you should ask them to report in to the county resource net. The SMS Monitor should start collecting and acknowledging SMS messages.

4.3. Contact Town Staff

Your next step should be to contact town staff. The town has pre-authorized us to take a small set of tasks to start the response, but we need to get their approval for further actions. In the end: we are here to serve the town’s needs, and the town staff set the priorities and have ultimate control of our actions. They have granted us a large amount of autonomy in the event of an earthquake. We need to respect the boundaries of our authorization.

You need to communicate your initial plan to the town staff. This will typically be to survey the critical infrastructure and do an initial windshield survey (that is: stay in the car and drive by houses), but you can modify your plan to fit the situation.

The town has a EOC Call-out Sheet with names, emails and phone numbers of the town personnel to contact in the event of an emergency. This document can be found in the Private Documents page of the password-protected web site.

You need to reach out to the staff (in the specified order) until you reach someone. The call-out sheet also has email addresses to use to send updates.

If you cannot reach someone in 30 minutes you should call Santa Clara County OES (contact numbers on the call-out sheet) to notify them that CERT is activating according to the town’s emergency plan.

4.4. Initial assignments

There are some actions you should take in advance of the ARK opening.

  • You should start a Recon team to start surveying our critical infrastructure.
  • You should send a ham to the ARK to support people who do not have ham radios. This person can report who is there, and relay any instructions.

4.5. Eventual assignments

Once approval from town personnel is obtained you can proceed with opening the ARK and EOC. Once they are up and running you can pass control to the IC at the ARK or move to the ARK yourself.

  • You should start staffing the EOC. The minimum staff is two hams, eventually going to three people.
  • You should start staffing the ARK. The ARK should be staffed with at least five people (including the ham operator already there). One of these people should be designated as your replacement IC.
  • If you have sufficient people you can start a second and third recon team.

All these headcount numbers can be adjusted based on how many responders are actually available.

(TODO) Add section about staffing EOC and ARK