- UASI, Bureaucracy and Terror

Homeland InSecurity

This week I was, in turn, amused, maddened and fasincated by disaster. I had the opportunity to do both leadership and followership as officials from the “Seattle Urban Area” considered projects to submit for grant funding from the fedgov Department of Homeland Insecurity.

This whole process is a look into the little-known culture of “homeland insecurity” which has blossomed over the last 7 years.

Let me say, right at the beginning, that September 11th, 2001, was a horrific event and a real wake-up call for the United States. We’ve been taught the same lesson we learned on December 7th, 1941 – two huge oceans do not make for a nation secure from the enemies of our way of life. My somewhat humorous tone in this blog is not meant to make light of the serious threats we face.

But what is our major response? Pretty typically, we create a giant bureaucracy, slosh a lot of political rhetoric and some money around, and get prepared to fight … the last war.

The major bureaucracy is, of course, the Department of Homeland Security, or Insecurity, as I’ve named it, because it heads an industry and set of programs based upon the fear and feelings of insecurity of the American People. DHS is really a myriad of individual bureaucracies and programs, sometimes working at cross-purposes and often duplicating effort.

But I stray from the subject – the Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI), usually pronounced You-Ah-Zee. In 2009 about $1.8 billion will be granted to urban areas through a series of programs as shown here. The UASI grants are made to “urban areas”, a carefully defined (by the fedgov) set of metropolitan areas which share vulnerabilities and threats. The “Seattle Urban Area” is the City of Seattle, its surrounding King County, and the counties to the north and south. The Seattle urban area is eligible for $11 million, more or less, of that $1.8 billion pie.

Now $11 million may sound like a lot of money, and it is. But think about the Seattle Urban Area – a population of 3 million people, two major ports (Seattle and Tacoma) into which ships with nuclear bombs or bioterrorism agents or chemical weapons could sail, three major military bases (Naval Station Everett, McChord Air Force Base, Fort Lewis), and vulnerability to a potential magnitude 8.0 earthquake. We probably have 12,000 cops and firefighters (Seattle alone has 2,200), each of which needs radios and hazmat gear and training. All of a sudden, $11 million doesn’t sound like a lot, and it isn’t.

Its also a little amazing that places like Vermont and Wyoming – not exactly your typical terrorist or disaster targets – get $6 million each. But that’s the reality of politics in our 2009 world with two senators from every state and a lot of dollars to be allocated.

Each year, a group of officials from the emergency management, law enforcement, firefighting, public health and technology disciplines – the officials responsible to prepare the region for disasters and terrorist events – get together to consider projects for UASI funding. We did that this week in the Seattle Urban Area. We have a strategy to guide us but it is still a give-and-take to determine which projects are most importnat to the region.

I lead the subgroup of technical and operational staff responsible to consider and prioritize interoperable communications projects. These are the networks and systems which allow first, second and third responders to communicate with each other and with their dispatch centers to prepare for and respond to disasters large and small. They include handheld and vehicle-mounted radios, computer and telephone systems, and fiber optic networks.

Small disasters are the ones which occur every day – such as when I fell off my bicycle, shattered my arm and called 911 for help. The large ones are the fires, landslides, earthquakes, and (God forbid) terrorist events which may afflict our region.

Finding projects which prepare us for those disasters and which fit into $11 million is daunting. In the past we’ve procured fireboats and helicopters and personal protective equipment. We’ve found money for training our responders, buying radios and for public outreach and disaster preparedness campaigns. It is hard work to winnow 100 proposed projects and $40 million in needs down to a dozen or so projects with $11 million or so, but we mostly did it this week. In future blog entries I’ll talk about some of those projects – the ones I can reveal without making us more vulnerable to terrorists (and that is most of them).

In the meantime, I’m just proud of the emergency managers, fire and police officials, and technical staff I was able to spend time with this week, prioritizing projects to keep the Seattle urban area safe.

And I’m tired!

- City Averts Power Outage

Seattle City Data Center under Full Power

Seattle’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC) was activated yesterday, Friday, August 15th, for a downtown Seattle power emergency – several banks of transformers failed at City Light’s Union Street substation, one of two substations serving the downtown core.  City Light (Seattle’s municipal electric utility – a department of City Government) shut down power to some portions of the waterfront, and asked downtown buildings to significantly reduce their electrical use in order to avoid a complete failure of the downtown grid.  All this on one of the hottest days of the year (95 degrees) for Seattle.

There was no exensive power failure, so the headline “City Light Avoids 90 Degree Outage” in the Seattle PI was buried in the local section, and the problem was just a footnote in the Seattle Times.

How do City government information technology workers respond to emergencies like this?   We’ve had lots of practice – WTO riots, Nisqually earthquake, electrical vault fires, windstorms, actual cyberattacks - and we intentionally conduct emergency operations drills both as a Department of Information Technology (DoIT) and as part of City-wide or region-wide drills such as Soundshake.  

Yesterday we went through our well-drilled disaster response:   directors and managers alerted all employees.    On our own – even before the EOC was activated – we sent desktop and server technical staff plus telephone, data communication and radio system technicians to the EOC to prepare it for activation.   The EOC was activated using a DoIT-maintained “community notification” or telephone call-out system to all critical City government executives.   When the EOC was activated, we sent an executive there to support the City’s leadership in making crucial decisions about the event.  (See also my previous blog entry about the City’s new EOC facility.)

Because this was a power emergency – and because our data centers are a major consumer of downtown power – we activated a long-standing protocol to reduce power consumption.   All servers and equipment in the data center are color coded based on their importance to government operations.   We shut those systems down in an orderly fashion as rapidly as possible.   We also have uninterruptible power supplies and a one-megawatt backup generator for the main data center, plus many other backup generators for critical technology services throughout the City of Seattle.

Yesterday was a hot day in Seattle.  It didn’t get hotter, thanks to well-practiced disaster drills and pre-planning!

- Dedication to a Safer Seattle

City of Seattle's new Fire and Emergency Ops Centers

Original Post:  17 May 2008
I was privileged today to participate in the dedication of the City of Seattle’s new Fire Alarm Center, Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and Fire Station #10.   The City is committed to building or remodeling all its fire stations, funded by a levy passed by Seattle voters in 2003 (more information here).  
This building – and the people who work in it – are dedicated to managing and mitigating disasters.   These disasters could be personal ones – a heart attack (Seattle’s long been known as the “best place to have a heart attack“!?) or an injury from a car accident or a house fire, as all calls to 911 in Seattle for medical emergencies and fires will be accepted and dispatched here.  Or the disaster couple be a regional one such as an earthquake or a terrorist event or a trip by the Seattle Mariners to the World Series.  Well, that wouldn’t be a disaster, exactly, but because of the security needs, we’d activate the EOC.
I’m especially proud of this facility, as over 120 employees of the Department of Information Technology (DoIT) and IT employees from the Fire and Police Departments worked to put $7 million in communications and technology into the building.   This includes, for example, connections at Fire Dispatch consoles and every EOC table to the King County public safety trunked radio network.  There’s also a state-of-the-art 96 way video switch for accepting input from traffic cameras, commercial television (CNN, Seattle broadcast stations), and video conferencing, and routing it to HDTV screens on the walls and at the desktops throughout the facility.   There is fiber and phones and links to 911 and homeland-security-military-grade secure communications.   All installed by this set of City employees in a remarkably short time – essentially over six months once the building was ready.  Helping to fulfill the Mayor’s pledge to make Seattle the City best prepared for a disaster, including the small, personal, ones.