short professional rant

[somedaybitch]

what jackass would tell someone to stay put in a building that had just been tagged by a commercial jet?

dear dispatchers,

i can't imagine how that day had to suck in ways that no human should ever have to endure. but do me a favor, would you? stop telling people in burning buildings not to leave them. jeezusgawd that's fucking stupid.

love,

me

p.s. and by "love", i mean "step away from the headset and no one will get hurt you stupid idiot."

Comments

[bexxa.livejournal.com]

Dammit. I had a long reply drafted and lost it by being stupid. Dammit.

Upshot: to play Devil's Advocate in answer to your question -

The jackass in question followed a flawed script.

Disaster recovery planning didn't consider an event of such catastrophic magnitude, and the people with the headsets didn't know that the scripts they'd been trained to use were tragically inadequate.

Huge buildings, thousands of people. The assumption was that fires would be relatively small and relatively localized, and that only the people in the immediate vicinity were in immediate danger. The assumption was that complete evacuation of the buildings was not necessary. The assumption was that fires could and would be contained and suppressed. The assumption was that commerical airliners would not be deliberately flown into highrise office buildings, causing massive fires over multiple floors at the same time. The assumption was that the buildings wouldn't collapse.

Hindsight makes for a lot of jackasses. I wish that weren't so.

I believe that most people most of the time aren't jackasses on purpose.

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

absolutely not jackasses on purpose. guess i should have specified with a "dear trainers" instead.

they do the very best job they are capable of, and i am always amazed and grateful that people continue to put on a fire dispatcher headset. you wouldn't catch me dead doin' that job.

what i don't understand is how a fire dispatcher could possibly tell someone to stay inside a building and wait for rescue???? that is just ludicrous. and not knowing it's a terrorist attack has nothing to do with it. not knowing the full scale of the disaster has nothing to do with it. that's just basic survival in a building that could be on fire. building on fire? you should leave. our dispatchers (next city over that dispatches our fire) won't even let people go back into a building if a vehicle is on fire in the parking lot or driveway.

and hello? who do you think your personnel are? superheroes? the WTC was one of the largest buildings on the freakin planet. you could have rolled every single police and fire guy you had in the entire state of New York and not had enough personnel even if the buildings hadn't collapsed. that's just dumb.

part of a dispatchers job is to manage resources. you know what kind of crew and equipment you have. you know that however much you have it is never enough when the shit truly hits the fan. why in God's name would you try and make that job infinitely harder by telling people to sit and wait to be rescued????


i was on duty that morning. i watched the 2nd plane hit live on CNN. i knew what had happened the second that plane crashed. dispatch centers have tv sets. they have stereos. they have cops driving around listening to stereos. they have firefighters sitting around watching the morning news over breakfast. within about 10 to 15 minutes, those comm centers would have known that it was gonna just keep getting uglier.

is it easy to sit around and say they should have done X versus Y. sure. i wasn't there. but that wasn't a case of not being able to triage under the enormity of the event and those dispatchers making bad decisions on the spot. they didn't. that was a case of telling people what they always tell people because you revert back to how you were trained under extreme stress. that was bad training and i hope that got corrected.

my heart breaks for those dispatchers. i can't imagine the kind of guilt and nightmares and self-blame they had to have experienced, and may still be experiencing. i've watched dispatchers vapor lock after an on duty incident. it's hugely sucktastic.

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

also...re assumptions...i don't believe that to be the case. i do not believe they are trained to assume that a fire can be contained or that people can be evacuated. we aren't, and we don't even handle fires. we are trained to act under the belief that the building is going to burn to the ground in seconds and that no one will be able to get out and that it's our job to give firefighters as much help that way as we can because they're busy trying to put the fire out and do the tricky rescues.

i also don't believe that once the 2nd plane crashed any incident commander was believing this was an accident. we're all taught the laws of probability and coincidence and Murphy and how they apply to emergency services. you are trained to assume that shit is only gonna get worse and that you never have enough time. that's how, on the good days, shit doesn't get worse and you end up having enough time.

[bexxa.livejournal.com]

When I talked about assumptions, I should have made it clear that I was meaning the DRP process. I never thought that the dispatchers were making their own judgments about the situation - although if they had, things might have turned out better than they did.

The assumption I made (playing Devil's Advocate, remember) was that the dispatchers were trained to follow scripts that had been written by other people, and that the scripts were based on the disaster recovery plan for those buildings. If fault is to be assigned in this scenario, IMO it should be assigned to the DRP.

It seems logical to me that the prudent course is to, as you said, assume that the building will burn to the ground, and that yes, people should get the hell out of the building. The WTC (as I understand it) was thought to be a class unto itself - so much larger than "normal" highrises that (again, I'm talking DRP, not the actual dispatchers and responders) the disaster scenarios were customized accordingly.

Before the fact, would the immediate evacuation of thousands of people have seemed more likely to help or hinder the first responders? People in the stairwells, people in the lobbies, people in the streets and open areas adjacent to the buildings? I've heard of "shelter in place" plans for some types of disasters, and I assume, for the sake of argument, that this might have been part of the DRP for the WTC.

And as the report that you linked to in the first place concluded, the people on the scene did, for the most part, do the right thing - they got themselves the hell out of there. The buildings, gods bless them, held up long enough to give thousands of people time to get out before the collapses.

For all the things that went wrong that day, many things went right, as well. Lessons were learned, and gods forbid that such a day should ever happen again, but one hopes that the outcome will be better.

And I ache for the dispatchers who were on duty that day.

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

Before the fact, would the immediate evacuation of thousands of people have seemed more likely to help or hinder the first responders? People in the stairwells, people in the lobbies, people in the streets and open areas adjacent to the buildings? I've heard of "shelter in place" plans for some types of disasters, and I assume, for the sake of argument, that this might have been part of the DRP for the WTC.

i don't see how that's practical, safe, or even legal. the point of emergency response is to evacuate a building as rapidly as possible. if folks are doing that on their own, bueno. if emergency personnel have to jostle some, that's their problem.


re DRP...while i don't know if that's the case, i can't see how it would be a blanket response for every occasion. no emergency goes down the same way twice, not even if the essential circs are similar. a building that has a plane sticking out of it is inherently extra dangerous because of the jet fuel that could now be making like a damn that just broke.

it would have been helpful, and provided more perspective, if stuff like you've brought up were covered in a larger article. bummer.

we have a dvd at work that the dept bought about 2 years ago. it's interviews and actual audio footage of the emergency personnel that worked that day, including incoming calls. i haven't been able to watch it. no one in here has. the dept can't figure out why.

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

and that's dam, one "n". stupid spelling.

[bexxa.livejournal.com]

a blanket response for every occasion. no emergency goes down the same way twice, not even if the essential circs are similar.

FWIW, I don't know of any DRP that has actually gone as planned. I should point out that my DRP experience is in the context of information protection, and the emphasis is skewed toward the techie information systems view of the world.

Still, physical security is factored in, and the safety of people is always the first priority. We've done drills, and practiced evacuating buildings - these buildings were several orders of magnitude smaller than the WTC, with dozens of people rather than thousands.

I don't know whether the WTC had full-scale evacuation plans, or whether they practiced full-scale evacuations. As you say, no disaster/emergency plays out quite the same way from the initial incident. Even if *every* contingency were to be forseen and planned for, I doubt that there would be value in having a script for every possible constellation of elements.

If, for example, there are 10 "flavors" of plane-hits-building, given the real-time need to evaluate the situation, determine which "flavor" it was, identify the appropriate plan, communicate the plan, and execute the plan - I can imagine that the DRP planners might decide that the best option is to establish a plain vanilla most-likely scenario, and plan for that, praying fervently that the people involved could/would improvise as needed during an actual disaster.

I think that's what did, in fact, happen. The magnitude of the 9/11 flavor du jour overwhelmed the rehearsed response.

I'd really like to read that report, about who got out in time, and how. I'm sure that DRPs will improve (and have already) as a result of the lessons learned.

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

disaster response plans will never go "as planned" because, as you said, no one can plan for everything. at best, they help an agency be aware of the specific problems it faces, be they inherent to geography, geology or urban factors, and guide that agency towards being as flexible and well prepared as is possible. that's about it.

also, i think we're still pretty much talking about two different things. disaster response plans do not get activated when you're answering the initial calls of an event. they happen "in the field". the incident commander will activate the "incident command system" and whatever disaster response plans they have. that's not
something that's done at a dispatcher level. depending on the nature of the event, it can take anywhere from a few minutes to 30 or 40 or more....the delay going to coordinating multiple jurisdictions and types of emergency services. my point being, the folks answering the phone are simply working from the info they are getting at the time. calling something a "disaster" happens later. what they do when the phone calls start coming in is what they were first trained to do.

perhaps it's a professional bias on my part, but there is no way i will ever see a good enough reason to not tell someone to leave a burning building. i've been doing this too long. there is no rationale that will make sense to me.

[bexxa.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Training is done so that when something happens there isn't a delay before response. What the training consists of depends (I'm assuming) on the trainee's role in the incident.

911 dispatchers and first responders have different roles than the civilians (for lack of a better term) at the site of the incident. If the trained responses of each party aren't coordinated, it's harder to successfully get through the disaster.

At some point in the DRP process, the plan has to be communicated to and coordinated among all the agencies that will be involved when the plan is activated. This means that before a disaster happens, the dispatchers/responders must know what the civilians have been instructed to do, and vice versa. The jurisdictions need to know ahead of time who's expected to do what/when/how, and how the inevitable real-time on-site adjustments can best be implemented.

As AFD points out below, the "bandwidth" required to move a given number of people within a given amount of time is crucial. If, under the best of conditions, it takes X time to evacuate # people, then as # goes up, so to much X go up, and large buildings such as the WTC simply cannot function in the way that smaller buildings can.

If we agree (and I believe we do) that the best thing is to immediately evacuate a burning building, then the issue becomes how best to do that given the size, population, and "bandwidth" of the building involved. I hope that the release of the report will help all DRP planners and responders improve preparations for future incidents.

[bexxa.livejournal.com]

so to much X go up

That would be "must" rather than "much."

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

What the training consists of depends (I'm assuming) on the trainee's role in the incident.

in the most general way, yes. with the exception of the comm center supervisor, all of the dispatchers, whether they answer phones or work the radio or both, will all be trained the same way in regards to call handling.


911 dispatchers and first responders have different roles than the civilians (for lack of a better term) at the site of the incident. If the trained responses of each party aren't coordinated, it's harder to successfully get through the disaster

legally speaking, and lots of folks don't know this even in emergency services, dispatchers are actually the first "responders" on scene.

i quote this though, to extend your valid point even further...there are different roles even between the dispatchers and the field personnel as regards to any event. the scope, nature and focus of the job is totally different. sometimes that works well and sometimes it doesn't. i don't think that was a factor here really, just tossing it out there.

If we agree (and I believe we do) that the best thing is to immediately evacuate a burning building, then the issue becomes how best to do that given the size, population, and "bandwidth" of the building involved.

we do indeed, and the odd thing is that the planners, prior to this, didn't. that's what i don't understand. i was talking about this last night with my partner and she said that she did in fact see the documentary that i mentioned. one of the things that made her the most angry was how the dispatchers were not trained to tell people to leave a building in that event, and how much psychic trauma it caused those dispatchers. that just completely boggles my mind because it thoroughly circumvents logic, survival instinct and common sense.

[bexxa.livejournal.com]

From the link I posted below, I note this in the conclusion (page 29): 87% of WTC occupants, and over 99% of those below the floors of impact were able to successfully evacuate.

I find that absolutely remarkable. Despite the horrific conditions, and despite the flaws in the DRP, nearly all of the people who could survive did survive. Awful as that day was, it could have been so much worse.

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

wasn't that awesome? and something like an additional 2500 people survived because of personal data technology. groovtastic.

[bexxa.livejournal.com]

Found this link - http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/June2004OccupantBehaviorEmergencyCommunications.pdf.

[arthurfrdent.livejournal.com]

on that day, when we were sitting in shock, most of us shortly after arriving at work, I talked to one of my group who had been there in '93. She worked for Morgan Stanley at the time and they had been in the 80's of tower 2, till they started laying off people in the late 1990's. She said that day had been a bad one, because of the long walk down, the electricity was cut by the explosion, the smoke filled everything... so she walked down 80 something floors in the dark choking smoke, along with thousands of others...

as we sat and talked WTC1 collapsed on TV and she quietly informed me that her best friend had just died. She worked for Cantor on 103 of tower 1. The magnitude hadn't hit us yet. The sky wasn't quiet yet. The squadron of F-16's hadn't all simultaneously hit their afterburners over denver yet. As our boss told most of us to go home, knowing no work would get done that day, I thought about evacuation. I have worked in and been in many tall buildings, but also just large ones, the building I was in at that moment was roughly the size of an aircraft carrier, jutting out from the side of a mountain. Periodically there were fire drills, but no one ever bothered to time like they do in school, and sometimes the people supposed to take roll weren't there.

How do you move tens of thousands of people out of a building that is on fire? If stacking people up is the most efficient way of running a business, it certainly thwarts rescue. Like millions of people trying to leave florida at the same time, there is only so much throughput in the arterials to leave. Once you are more than a few stories off the ground, only your own power will get you out.

What difference does all that make? I don't think there was any answer better than any other. Like all the Firemen killed, because they had their command in the wrong place, there are too many variables to manage. If you tell everyone to leave, and someone falls in a stairwell and takes 25 people down with them, whoever is above will be delayed. If there is no BUILDING Standard Operating Procedure, and people aren't drilled in it, if there was, the evac is impossible more less. If there IS an SOP but it takes 3 hours to take 10000 people out...that's 90min's too long anyway...

I don't believe that there couldn't be improvements of course, but in their heydays these buildings held 50,000 people. the bottom line is that there ISN'T a way to evac that many in a hurry, no matter how smooth you are. Some will die. And if you think about it, any skyscraper is simply an assemblege of odds. The people who designed built or paid for the building are hoping that they are low, but they are still there. In the Sears you cant go straight down for the most part, you have to change blocks as you go. The people above the fires in any building almost always are in trouble.

What can be learned from what went right about the situation? What the article points out is what people can do when they take responsibility for themselves, and do what they feel is best for them. What could be done if we were to combine proven ways of emergency response, with people looking out for themselves in a formal way?

Longwinded bullshit later, I'd have to agree that 9 times in 10, you want people to get the hell out, but there may be not a good answer for large skyscraper building. I doubt if most people are willing to think about what that means. The human capacity to delude themselves is pretty amazing...

for what it's worth... ;) D

[bexxa.livejournal.com]

Exactly. I think that's where the "shelter in place" contingencies could come in - doing what can be done to protect people who can't, for whatever reason, evacuate immeditately. Not that staying in a burning building is something I'd want to do, but if I can't get out of the building, is there something else I could do that would improve my chances of survival?

Plan B, in other words.