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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2001 10-30 CITY OF MERIDIAN CITY COUNCil SPECIAL MEETING AGENDA Tuesday, October 30, 2001, at 6:30 p.m. City Council Chambers 1. Roll-call Attendance: ~ Tammy de Weerd --2L- Ron Anderson X Cherie McCandless X Keith Bird - ~ Mayor Robert Corrie 2. Adoption of the Agenda: 3. Presentation and Discussion by Elaine Clegg of Smart Growth: 4. Presentation and Discussion by Doug Hardman of Ada City-County Emergency Management: Meridian City Council Special Meeting Agenda - October 30, 200 I Page I of! All materials presented at public meetings shall become property ofthe City of Meridian. Anyone desiring accommodation for disabilities related to documents and/or hearings, please contact the City Clerk's Office at 888-4433 at least 72 hours prior to the public meeting. Meridian City Council Soecial Meetina October 30. 2001 The special meeting of the Meridian City Council was called to order at 6:30 P.M. on Tuesday October 30,2001 by Mayor Robert Corrie. Members Present: Robert Corrie, Keith Bird, Ron Anderson, Tammy de Weerd, and Cherie McCandless. Others Present: Gary Smith, Mike Worley, Ken Bowers, Jim Johnson and Will Berg. Item 1. Roll-call Attendance: ~ Tammy de Weerd -----X- Ron Anderson -----X- Cherie McCandless -----X- Keith Bird ~ Mayor Robert Corrie Corrie: All right. I'm going to open the special meeting of the Meridian City Council at 6:30, October 30, 2001. The Council is going to meet for a presentation, discussion by Doug Hardman of the Ada County Emergency Management Group. Then also, a presentation by Elaine Clegg of the Smart Growth. First off, I see a lot of young people and scouts out there. I want to welcome each of you here tonight. We're glad to have you here. If you have any questions about what we did tonight, Keith is our Council president and he would be happy to answer any of the questions you might have. I learned a long time ago, young people can ask some very pointed and very discussion type questions. If you have any questions of any of us, at the Councilor myself, after the meeting, we would be happy to answer them for you, Once again, thanks for being here tonight. Council, we have roll call please Mr. Berg. Item 2. Adoption of the Agenda: Corrie: Okay, we have the adoption of the agenda as presented. Anderson: Mr. Mayor. Corrie: Mr. Anderson. Anderson: I make a motion that we approve the agenda as presented. Bird: Second. Corrie: Okay. All those in favor of the motion say aye. MOTION CARR I ED: ALL AYES Item 4. Presentation and Discussion by Doug Hardman of Ada City-County Emergency Management: Corrie: We're going to kind of deviate just a little bit, have Doug first and then I think Elaine should be here very shortly. After Doug, we'll have her presentation. Doug Hardman. Meridian City Council Special Meelil.g October 30,2001 Page 2 Hardman: Thank you Mr. Mayor and Council. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. I'm going to have to stall here just for a minute so we can get the PowerPoint fired up. What I would like to do this evening is, it might be a little redundant for some of you but I wanted to start with the basics about my office. What it is that, what my office does primarily, who we are, some of the things that we do. Talk just briefly about some of the hazards that we face in this community in addition to terrorism. I will also spend a few minutes on how we respond to emergencies and disasters. Since September 11th, our office is pretty busy. One of the challenges that we have on a day-to-day basis is finding people interested in preparing for things that may never occur. Most usually, people are apathetic and its difficult sometimes to get people motivated but we do the best we can. Since September 11th, we have been unfortunately, I would have to say business has been good. We've been extremely busy with requests for information from the public, from the media, from elected officials, from other department heads. So, we've been scrambling to try to keep up with the demand the best that we could. It's a good thing because we've noticed a lot of the agencies; the emergency services agencies and other department heads pulling together like they've never done before. For us, that's been really rewarding. We've also, I might add, we've established a terrorism task force. I will talk about that in more detail once the slides get going. I did want to say that that's a group of about 30 to 35 members that meet now every Tuesday and we discuss some of the current issues, things that are going on throughout the communities and throughout the state of Idaho. There's a federal terrorism task force and then also what's going on down at the national level. While Ray is still doing that, let me talk. I'll jump ahead. Let me talk about terrorism. There's really nothing new about terrorism other than we had an actual incident on US soil. We've been practicing terrorism and that's been one of the threats that, or we haven't been practicing terrorism but we've been preparing for terrorism. That's one of the threats that was identified back in the early 90's. Since the mid 90's, we have had a considerable number of federal courses available to emergency responders to attend to meet that need. In, it was late 1997, we established the Ada County terrorism tack force. One of the primary objectives was to put together a terrorism response plan, of which we did. Very few communities, I think even across the nation have one of those. So, we have a very detailed, well- done, terrorism plan. In addition then we also put together a conference. It was a national conference on terrorism. We held it here in 1998, in the spring. We had about 250 participants from 17 different states and Canada attend. We felt very good about accomplishing that. As a matter of fact, a couple of the speakers were a New York police officer and also a New York fireman. They are both okay since the World Trade Center event. Those individuals did come and talk. What they were talking about at that time was the bombing to the World Trade Center. One of the challenges that we have, especially with terrorism, is trying to balance the terrorism preparedness and the threat that we have to deal with and also with a community acceptance. So, again probably a lot of things I'll say, is prior to September 11th, we were a little different. That was a little more of a challenge than it is today. Okay, Ray, I'm ready. I had mentioned I want to talk just a few minutes about where we came from because I've met most of you but some I have not. So, I wanted to start from the very beginning. Civil Defense started back in the 1930's and 1940's. It was based primarily on attack preparedness. Some of us old timers probably remember the old duck and cover drills we had to do in school. During the 60's we developed the --. Meridian City Council Spccial Meeting Oetober 30, 2001 Page 3 President Kennedy developed fall out shelters and they stocked those fall out shelters and it was primarily based on nuclear attack. Okay. Beginning in the late 70's there were so many natural disaster occurring that the federal government decided this is crazy, when we have a major event. We could have over 100 federal agencies. They're not talking to each other. They're not organized to be able to respond. We have attack preparedness and we have natural disaster preparedness. Under Jimmy Carter in 1979, it was decided to combine the attack and disaster planning into a new agency called the Federal Emergency Management Agency, The emphasis of that agency was to look at all hazards, not just the nuclear attack. A little history on the office that I'm a part of. I went back and did some research a few years ago to find out where civil defense or emergency management came from in Ada County. By state code it says that each county shall maintain a disaster agency or participate in an intergovernmental disaster agency. So, I found that from 1956, Ada County and the City of Boise had a combined office and they called it Ada Boise Civil Defense. They decided to have representation, a 15 member board which represented the community at large. I n the 70s the name changed again to Ada County, Boise Department of Emergency Services. It changed again in 1977 and it was called the Ada County Civil Defense. That 15 member advisory board changed to a 10 member, what they called an executive council. Basically it was the County Commissioners and the Mayors of each city. I started here, I moved here from Wyoming in 1991, or in 1989. In 1991, the name was changed again to Ada City County Emergency Management. We picked up Ada County Highway District as a member. In October of 91, Ada City County Emergency Management was moved under Ada Planning Association. The reason for that is because all the cities and the highway district will contribute funds into the county and there was a little bit of a rub there I think because all the city's money went to the county and the county had the ultimate say in writing vouchers and purchase orders and things like that. So, they were looking for a neutral agency and that happened to be Ada Planning Association. Then in 1992, I had to go around --. It took about 6 months; I had to go around to each city with a resolution. Each city then by resolution adopted a formal statement saying they were part of the intergovernmental agreement and support emergency management. Our name is a mouthfuL That Ada City County Emergency Management. Dirk Kempthorn, when he was Mayor at that time, came up with that and it was again, we weren't just Ada County or just the City of Boise, or just Meridian. So, that's how we came up with the name. We represent all those communities that are listed there. So, it's all the cities, the county, and the highway district. Again, our funding goes through, which is now called Community Planning Association. It really ends up being a good deal because we're the, --. There's 2 counties in the State of Idaho that do it this way, Lewiston, Nez Pierce, they have a combination between the city and the county budget wise. They both pay towards emergency management. This is spread through the 6 cities, the county and the highway district. So, we get a 4 person staff for very little cost to any of the individual cities. We have a 5 person staff. I'm the director of emergency management. Ray Corino's here with me this evening. He's in charge of writing the plans. We also have a training and exercise coordinator. His name is Mark Robertson. We have a public education coordinator. Her name is Mary Barlo-Brusaw. Those 2 this evening are in Twin Falls attending a public information officer's course and were unable to be here. The latest one, maybe some of you have met, she reports to me is Sally Goodell. Meridian City Council Spceial Meeting October 30, 2001 Page 4 She's the water coordinator, deals with the water quality, flood plain issues. I did want to mention, we're all housed at 7200 Barrister Drive, where the police and the sheriffs department is located. We're tucked away down there in the basement like all good civil defense offices. So, if there is a nuclear attack we have that good radiation protection down there. When that office was built in the emergency operations center, 50 percent federal funding was used for constructing that office and the emergency operations center. Going back to what Ray does, on our staff. We develop plans, some of the plans are listed there that we have put together. Each one of the Mayors, throughout the valley have a copy of these plans. It's a large binder, if you look in the picture on the top right hand side, it has a yellow spine. It says Hazard Specific Contingency Plans. Mayor Corrie has one of those. Your fire department has a copy of the plans. The police chief has a copy. I think your Public Works director has a copy of the flood plan. 2 of those plans are also available in your library. We also make those available on our website. I'll give that at the very end. Those are all downloadable. Somebody can go to the website and download the plans. We have, probably somewhere between 100 and 125 copies of those plans distributed throughout the valley. Mark Robertson deals with training and exercise. We host some of that. We coordinate it and facilitate as much of that as we can. The training, we try to find courses that are important to the local responders. There are state offered courses and we also send people back to the national fire academy and the national emergency training center in Emmetsburg Maryland. The exercises, we do a variety from an orientation to tabletop, or a full-scale exercise. Some of these pictures on the right here are from the latest full-scale exercise we did up at the airport. Those can be pretty involved. That one had about a little over 200 responders, about 35 different agencies and took us about 5 or 6 hours to complete. For public education, some of the things that Mary does, family emergency preparedness. She goes out and gives talks to groups on how they can be better prepared themselves. We also do a class every year for schoolteachers. Its called Tremor Troop. It teaches them how to put the earthquake safety in their natural science curriculum. We have an earthquake poster contest every year. We get about 500 elementary kids participate in that. You can see Scott Dorvall there is usually our master of ceremonies. We get all the prizes donated. The grand prize is usually about a $300 mountain bike. So, that's a lot of fun with the kids. She sends out monthly preparedness pointers. We participate in all the national preparedness campaigns like severe weather awareness week will be coming up and we develop lots of different brochures and flyers depending on what the hazard is and what it is we're trying to educate the public on. I want to spend just a couple of minutes about hazards. When Mary does these talks, and she goes out into the community this is one of the key ones because you cant prepare for emergencies and disasters until you find out what those are, what your community is susceptible to. We rank those hazards, whether they're natural, technological, or civil. Natural would be a flooding or wild land fire. Technological would be something like a hazardous material spill. Civil could be a civil disobedience, could be a riot. The picture down there is the World Trade Center Bombing several years ago. We also then, rank the hazards. Once we've identified what the hazards are throughout the community, we rank them by magnitude and frequency. In other words, what's the worst thing that could happen to us? In the upper left there, if we had a nuclear attack on the United States that would certainly be one of the worst things that could ever happen to us. The likelihood is very, very Meridian City Council Spccial Meeting October 30, 200 I Page 5 remote but it could happen. The second one is a little more likely, although not much is the failure of one of the dams. We have 3 upstream dams. That's a picture of Lucky Peak. They hold just under a million acre feet of water and if one of those were to let go, it would create some severe problems throughout the valley. When I was going through this, although it occurred to me Meridian is sitting at a very safe spot because you don't have too many wild land fires up here, the threat from the river is not very high. One that could effect you however is an earthquake. Idaho is ranked fifth in the nation for seismic activity. The Borah Peak earthquake in 1983 was a 7.3 and we could certainly have more. We have 2, what geologists consider active faults. One is in the Squaw Butte area and one is called the water tank fault, which is in Owyhee County. So, the earthquake threat effects us all. Again, the last one would be some type of terrorism attack on the United States. Again, effecting Meridian, Ada County, or the State of Idaho for that matter, is small but it could have great consequences if we did have one. We do get threats here, although they may not be real. They still impact the economy and impact people and business. We do get lots of bomb threats. They're not widely advertised but those are things that effect all the communities. In addition, I showed one of the power substations there. We're such an interconnected community, nation wide now, that it doesn't necessarily have to be a disaster in the Treasure Valley to effect us. If you remember a few years ago, there was a problem with a power plant in Wyoming and it shut down the power in the entire northwest. So, we're very interconnected now with our utilities and our communications. That makes us somewhat vulnerable. The other one there is showing the large number of people down there. Whenever you put a large number of people in a small geographic area, your risk goes up. So, that's one of the things that we'll have to look at now in the future whenever we have big community wide events, the security issues that we'll have to deal with. I mentioned, we rank hazards by magnitude and frequency. What's most likely to occur? One of the most likely is a hazardous material spill. In the upper left, you see how --. I took this picture a couple of years ago. I thought it was --. It showed the large storage containers in the back. We've got propane gas tanks in the center there. There's a railroad line that runs through right through it and a major roadway on the side. So, that kind of stuff is out there. In addition, there's pipelines and we have thousands of shipments of various types of chemicals and fuels going up and down our highways every day. So, that's a real threat and something that happens quite often. Flooding is another issue, although not so much for Meridian but down in the Boise City area, the Boise River and out of the foothills, we have flash flood problems every couple of years. Again, it doesn't effect you as much, but the wild land fires seem to happen on an annual basis, to some of that wild land urban interface area. So, if we have an event, how do we respond? That will come down to, within Meridian that's going to be your Meridian police department, your Meridian fire department. We've worked with those guys for many years. They do a super job and they're your first responders. They're the ones that will take care of 90 percent of your problems. If, however you run into a problem where you're going to exceed your resources, you can ask for help. The way you do that is through the Mayor. The Mayor can declare a disaster if he needs to. The Mayor and the Chairman of the County Commissioners are the only individuals that can do that for a jurisdiction. If the Mayor were to declare disaster, we can open up what we call our emergency operation center and provide then assistance and coordination with the City of Meridian. Some of the things that --. One of the Meridian City Council Special Meeting October 30,2001 Page 6 questions that we always get asked about is what about evacuation? Well, evacuation is a Jaw enforcement function and if, in the middle of the night here in Meridian, your fire chief something catches on fire or you have a spill, it just takes one call to dispatch saying we're going to evacuate 4 square blocks. They'll contact the American Red Cross and they already have agreements in place with every junior high or middle school throughout the valley. They have the written agreements and national insurance and they have shelter managers already trained. So, within about 30 minutes or so, we can get somebody to arrive at that junior high and they'll take care of the people that have to be evacuated. I would say, though, typically people wont go to an evacuation center. They'll go to a hotel or friends or relatives. We can set up a big evacuation center but not often do people go unless they're really forced to. One of the ways that we notify people also, so that you know, of the disaster is through the emergency alert system. It use to be called the emergency broadcast system but now days, they call it the EAS, emergency alert system. That's through your radio and TV and for those that have a tone activated weather alert radio. Above the City of Meridian, I guess, in the scheme of things as far as emergencies, I had mentioned we could declare a disaster for Meridian and we can activate the emergency operation center at the county level. This is some slides of when we actually have used that after the September 11 th attack. I know that I've been working with Kenny and Joe Silva and they're looking at what their newer fire department there. They have a nice training room to use that as a City emergency operations center. I think that will work out great. We're working on a slide presentation for them on how best to set that up so we can communicate back and forth between the City and the county. We can bring in again, we can bring in elected officials, Mayors, Commissioners or you can have your police chiefs, fire chiefs, department heads in there working on a problem. Above the county level. Again, if we --. Our main function in there is to allocate resources. If it looks like an event is going to exceed our capability, we can appeal to the state for assistance. The chairman of the County Commissioners can declare disaster. Who I report to and through is the Idaho Bureau of disaster services. They have 6 regions throughout the state. Their main office is up at Gowen Field, That's our connection to the guard, through General Caine. Because terrorism is on everyone's mind, I wanted to show another state resource that's here. Its called the 101 Weapons Mass Destruction Civil Support Team. They've been in existence for a couple of years. It's about a 25 member crew out at Gowen Field. They have specialized training and equipment, they can detect and monitor chemical and biological accidents, It takes them about 2 to 4 hours to deploy. They can travel by ground or by air. They're not a SWAT team. They're not going to come in and take care of terrorists but they're used for monitoring, decontamination, things like that. Above the state level, then, I'm sure you're all familiar with the federal level and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA, as its called is broken into 10 regions also. They can activate what is called their federal response plan. They primarily provide --. They're not really first responders. They do have the capability as far as their urban search and rescue teams. Primarily, they're in after the fact and they can provide federal assistance, public assistance, those types of things. Our connection then would be from Meridian to the county, county to the state, and state to the federal office. I wanted to put this slide up here to show you that we do have a website. It's at www.accem.ora. That's up there. We have a radon. That's the front page and there's a new terrorism Meridian City COlLncil Special Meeting October 30,2001 Page 7 preparedness page. So, you or members in the audience today, if you wanted to take a look at that and find out information on biological and chemical weapons, on anthrax, on mail room procedures, suspicious packages, what they look like. All that information is there. We made that available. I also wanted to remind you that I work for you. I work for --. Our budget goes through COMPASS. I work directly for Mayor Corrie through that, what was called the executive council. Although Claire Bowman is my direct supervisor from day to day and my budget goes through COMPASS, I really answer to the Mayors and the Commissioners. They are the ones that set policy. I'm here for times like this when the public calls you up and says what are you doing about terrorism? What can we do? You haven't done anything. You can say you have 4 people working on it full time. That's my staff and I. Any questions that they have, if they're looking for literature or information or assistance, business and industry if they want help writing a plan, if they want to know how to put on an exercise, any of those types of questions, we can provide that service and help them out. So, we're here to, again, we represent and work for all the cities, the county and the highway district and that's what we do. The terrorism thing, Mayor, real quickly, to finish up. To let you know, recently, what we've been doing, I mentioned we reactivated the terrorism task force and we're meeting every Tuesday. Ray would you grab those forms out of that box? We got so many calls for suspicious packages that it was just making the emergency services crazy. The manpower shortage of trying to respond to all these, so we got all the emergency services together within Ada County and we drafted up a new suspicious package procedure. The chief has his. The police department got theirs a couple of days ago. I brought copies for you to take a look at. Basically what it is, there's a questionnaire that dispatch will ask the person over the phone depending on how they answer it, there's a chart here on the type of response that we'll send. On this side is a checklist for the police officer when they get there, some of the questions to ask, things to do, the procedures for bagging up an item, a piece of mail. We also have to have an authorization from the individual to open that mail. We have to find out, do they want it back or can we discard it. So, we developed these new procedures. I think they've cut down on the number of calls, some. I had no idea how much white powder was out in this community but it seems to be everywhere. We developed some mail room procedures. We developed an anthrax flyer. We have some public health guidelines that we got from the Department of Health of Welfare. So, we've been hopping the last couple of weeks and we're trying to be as prepared as we can. With that, I would be happy to answer any questions. Anderson: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Anderson. Anderson: I did have one question, Doug. Just kind of tracing back through your history and your roots and how you were the city and the county. Then you were put under Ada Planning. Now that Ada Planning is COMPASS and community planning and incorporates more than one county, and other cities like Nampa and Caldwell are paying into COMPASS, then are part of your funds that you derive coming from those cities? Are you then going to be expanding your role to emergency planning for both counties? Meridian City Council Special Meeting October 30, 200 I Page 8 Hardman: You know, I don't know for sure. We've had the discussion. The last I heard was the Canyon County Commissioners wanted to think about it some, what route they wanted to go, weigh their options, having some combination of keeping their person or not involving my office with theirs, all the way up to having me incorporate that office into ours completely. So, I don't know if they've landed on --. I haven't been told a decision has been made but I know they've been talking about it. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor. Corrie: Mrs. de Weerd. De Weerd: Councilman Anderson, when we got the presentation at COMPASS, we were actually in the facilities, After the meeting, several --. I talked to one of their County Commissioners and he said they are thinking about it but they do have their own process and they know that this is available as a resource to them. I don't know if its gone much further than that but they're fully aware. We're trying to integrate a couple of things that we're doing over in the Ada County, that Canyon County hasn't quite merged into. That most likely is coming down the road. Anderson: I know that, I mean, Canyon County, they have a, there's a law enforcement lieutenant that is in charge of that and he has half of his responsibilities are emergency planning but half of them still law enforcement. Obviously when you have one person working half time on it, versus a staff of 4 people it would seem like it would be much more productive with the staff that you have. You also talked about your terrorism task force. Obviously, terrorists are not going to disrespect a county boundary or something like that and it would be good I guess in my mind that if planning for those types of events was more widespread, more like COMPASS is obviously than just keeping it within a county boundary. An event of that type of magnitude is going to draw resources and require planning in all those cities. Hardman: Mr. Mayor, Councilman Anderson. One of the things that we've been doing in the interim is inviting Roger Sharp to all the terrorism task force meetings. He's attended one or two I believe and we've tried to, these forms that we developed, we send that out to them. He didn't make it to today's meeting but the coordinator from Boise County came down. I agree with you 100 percent. There cant be any borders to this. This has got to be a valley wide thing. So we send out the information and try to communicate the best we can and get it out. Corrie: We were discussing it, Ron, (inaudible) Treasure Valley Partnership as well. See If we cant coordinate the whole, rather than just pieces and bits, It probably would be a lot better. Canyon County Commissioners have not embraced it at this point. It's a very good possibility. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor. Corrie: Mrs. de Weerd Meridian City Council Special Meeting October 30, 2001 Page 9 De Weerd: I think, also, one of the threats you said that Meridian would probably be effected by would be transportation in the rail corridor or through 1-84 and certainly there's no boundaries to Canyon County and Ada County on that. There's also a natural gas facility. I think its in Canyon County but, certainly it would have a high impact on Meridian should there ever be any tampering of that. We also have mutual aide, which lends into our emergency response. I understand Mr. Mayor that we have a committee looking at our emergency response. Are they working with you in formulating our own City's response? Corrie: Yes. De Weerd: Okay. You did mention that you would work with any of our area businesses on preparing a plan for that business on how to respond to an emergency? Hardman: Sure, absolutely. Any, from a day care to the school district to business and industry. We have a lot of that available and we work with everybody. So, yes, they just have to give us a call. We're a little pressed for time. We can't write a plan for them but we can give them all the documents necessary, the how to. It's very easy to do. There's memberships, we have Albertson's and Micron and SCP Global, and I can't remember exactly all the representatives that serve on what's called our local emergency planning committee. We try to get a real good broad representation. De Weerd: Well, this is such a timely issue that, you know, I know you have your time well spent and spread thin but it might be something that maybe we should get a program at our local chamber and let the businesses know that you're out there. It might save you time in the long run as well. Hardman: Mr. Mayor, we would love to. Corrie: Just so everybody knows, we're working on that emergency plan, excuse me. I'm about to lose my voice tonight. With the fire chief, the police chief and Public Works director and the City Clerk and myself in preparing a disaster type plan, what we would do and where we're meeting and the communications. That should be done hopefully, within about 30 days. Then we will incorporate that into the county and into the state. So, like if we have a disaster, who do we notify, the press (inaudible). Any other questions? Bird: I have none, Mayor. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor. Corrie: Yes? De Weerd: Just a comment. During our tour of your facilities, it was very impressive and your system looks very well thought through. I appreciated the tour and I hope we never have to use you. Meridian City Council Special Mceting October 30, 2001 Page 10 Hardman: Thank you. Corrie: Doug, thank you and Ray for being here tonight. I'm going to do something that I didn't tell you about. Is anybody --. I'd like to take about 5 questions, if there's anybody in the audience that has a question for Doug. Yes? Okay. Unidentified Speaker: In review, in lieu of the event of September 11th and the number of emergency personnel that responded and were lost. Was there anything that came out (inaudible) protocol as to when do you withdraw? Did they have any idea, that magnitude of the building collapse? Hardman: I personally haven't seen anything yet. Maybe, Councilman Anderson can help me. I haven't seen anything but I know in discussions that emergency services one of the things they look at is where they set up a command post. Often times, __. I'm sure they thought that would never, ever collapse. Having that many people there, they certainly wouldn't have ever put them in harms way had they thought that was going to occur but one of the things that you law enforcement, fire, and police, or law enforcement, fire and EMS have to be very careful is where they set up a command post. Something that (inaudible) or toxic so they're usually very cognicent of their (inaudible) and upwind and (inaudible). That one occurred to me right after the event. Unidentified Speaker: They even had on the TV while it was happening, while the fires were burning before the collapse, had the first building collapse they had an engineer that was on there. Maybe it was just time, you know they didn't have time to communicate that hey there's eminent disaster here. (inaudible) said they weren't surprised you know with the intense heat of the fire when the first building came down and then shortly after, the second building came down. So, nothing has come about as far as --? I mean, certainly in the public's eyes you want to keep emergency people there, you know trying to rescue, but they suffered quite a huge loss too. Hardman: I'm sure for years that there will be studies and there will be reports out and all kinds of lessons learned. I know there's a national conference coming up next week in California. A lot of it is on lessons learned already but I'm not sure what all they did on that. Anderson: I would like to comment on that. I serve, for those of you who don't know, I'm also the fire chief over in Nampa and have been a firefighter now for about 26 years in this valley. I have an older brother who is a fire chief in Spokane and he actually went back and worked on the disaster in New York for 2 weeks after the incident there. In high rise firefighting, typical techniques that Doug talked about is the firefighters, they have to leave all their trucks and they have to pack all their equipment to where the fire is. They were in the process of doing that and evacuating the building. You try to stage all your manpower and equipment at least 2 floors below the fire and you establish the command post down in the lobby area of the building that the fire is on, That is a technique that is now being re-thought because of this disaster and the fact that the building may collapse, There's been a number of fires occur in high-rise buildings around the country where the buildings are non- Meridian City Council Special Meeting October 30,2001 Page 11 combustible. They're made out of concrete and steel. The thought always that the contents, the plaster, the chairs, the furniture, all that type of stuff will burn out but the structure will still be sound. That's what has occurred in high-rise buildings in the past. Even when they build these buildings, when they put up the steel girders, they put a spray on protection that's a fire proofing that they put on top of these. Nobody has ever done any testing and when builders, developers build buildings, they're not anticipating people flying airplanes into them that are full of fuel. So, nobody had ever tested buildings and the fire resistive materials that they sprayed on there with that much fuel load and that intense of temperatures. So, New York was the first fire department to ever experience that. Now a lot of people will be rethinking that tactic depending on what the fuel load is, you may see evacuations of the buildings much earlier. This was a real tough situation. Since it had never been encountered, nobody would have thought that that building was going to come down. The firefighters were doing their job, heading up to attack the fire and get the people out of the building. I'm not so sure that even if that occurred today and knowing what we do now, those firefighters would probably still put their lives on the line to do that. Unidentified Speaker: Looking at the images, as it was occurring, it didn't look to me that they had much hope of fighting the fire above them but certainly they would want to try and get as many people out as they could. Anderson: Mainly, with a flash fuel like that, that fuel is going to vaporize and it will burn itself out real quick. There'll be a huge fireball initially and then it would be a fire that you could fight once the fuel has burned most of itself up. Corrie: Yes? Unidentified Speaker: Is there any plan for the school districts high schools and middle schools and stuff like that for if there was some sort of a terrorist attack or actual disaster like that? Do they do any preparation? Hardman: All 3 school districts that (inaudible) have emergency plans, I sit on the Boise school district safety and security committee meeting and they have a standard evacuation procedures, lock down procedures, which some or all of those can work in the event of a terrorist attack. It just depends on what it is. If it's someone threatening outside, they could do a lock down. If something happens in the school, they would use the evacuation plan. All of them do have procedures that's required by state law. I'm sure after the terrorism attack, they are reviewing those and looking at their checklists. One of the things that they'll have to deal with as well as all the cities, the City of Meridian and all the agencies, is this biological thing. If it happens, mailroom procedures. I know, one of the ones at the school districts, to give you an example of what they have to deal with is their mail procedures. At the junior high and high school level, someone will typically bring it in, the mailman will bring it in. they'll drop it on the front counter of the principle's office. Sometimes they have some student interns helping open it, and distribute it. Most of them will not be doing that in the future because of the threat through the mail. So, they have to re-Iook at all those procedures on where they go (inaudible). Meridian City Council Special Meeting October 30,2001 Page 12 Corrie: Done? Oh, we've got (inaudible) (inaudible discussion amongst Council) Unidentified Speaker: I'm interested in family preparedness. You said that was one of the areas you looked at. I'm interested to know if your papers and things that deal with that topic are on your website or if you need to contact someone to get them. What I'm interested in, is you know what myself, my wife and children should do for preparedness, not just for terrorism --. Corrie: Yes. Hardman: We have a deal for you. There's a flyer that we've developed specifically for Ada County that is available on the website. Also its in PDF format, you can download it. That's one of the flyers, you can make as many copies as you want or we can get you copies. That one deals with all the hazards, how to put together a 72 hour kit, things like that. Then we have very specific ones, on just the kit and how to sanitize water and (inaudible). That's all on the website. If you think of other questions, I'll leave some of my cards in the back. Please give me a call and if we don't know the answer we can find out for you. Corrie: Doug and Ray, thank you very much. Bird: Thank you. Corrie: Great, thank you. Is Elaine Clegg, her group here? She didn't make it? Okay. All right, well, I guess we're not going to have much on Smart Growth tonight. We do have growth but I don't know the difference between Smart Growth and dumb growth but I thought maybe we would learn that tonight. Again, I want to thank each one of you for being here tonight. It's a subject that is very apropos for right now. As you know, the television, everybody's telling us to be ready for another one. A lot of people are saying, well why don't you tell us what it's going to be? If you think about that, I just thought this when I was coming to work this morning that if they said what they knew it was going to be, what it was, they would be able to go back to the original source, the terrorists and find out the people on the inside giving them the information. There's a lot of ramifications of telling everything they know and try to tell you as much as they can. I know in police lineups, not lineup but, when they go out to work, they always tell them to be on your toes and be better prepared. I don't know how they would do that. They're already prepared at a high deal right now. Like they said, if you see something that you're driving by or walking by that doesn't fit, call the police, call somebody. You never know, it may be here in Meridian and not just white powder. It can be brown powder, it can be black. I've told all the people in the City Hall that if they drop any creamer in their coffee or on the counter and then walk away, I'm going to have their heads because we would have to clear out this whole City Hall just because they didn't tell us that they dropped some coffee creamer in there. We're trying to do as best we can. We're changing our procedure on the mail and things of this nature. So, just everybody be on your toes. Don't be afraid. That's what they want, everybody to be so afraid that you don't do anything. Again, thank Meridian City Council Special Meeting October 30, 2001 Page 1 3 you for being here this evening. Council, do you have anything that you want to say? Okay. Bird: Mr. Mayor. Corrie: Yes, Mr. Bird. Bird: I would like to have an executive session as per Idaho State Code 67-2345 ( c) De Weerd: Second. Corrie: All right. Motion made and second to have a short executive session. All those in favor say aye. MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES Corrie: I will entertain a motion. Bird: Mr. Mayor. Corrie: Yes Mr. Bird? Bird: I move we come out of the executive session. De Weerd: Second. Corrie: Motion made and second to come out of executive session. All in favor say aye. MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES Corrie: Let the record show that no decision was made and that we talked about a property. We will continue that at a public hearing. Bird: Mr. Mayor. Corrie: Anything else? Mr. Bird? Bird: I move that we adjourn. Corrie: Okay, do I hear a second? Anderson: Second. Corrie: Motion made and second to adjourn. All those in favor say aye. MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES Meridian City Council Special Meeting October 30, 2001 Page 14 MEETING ADJOURNED AT 7:50 P.M. (TAPE ON FILE OF THESE PROCEEDINGS) APPROVED: I~ II / w / tJ( DATE APPROVED CLERK