This week we are airing a previous episode from one of our good friends and instructors with USAR: Chief Walt Lewis.
This Podcast has moved to the Readiness Lab.
Previous episode with great content! Chief Walt Lewis serves on the Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) Florida Task Force 4 team and operates as a District Chief for Orlando Fire. Chief Lewis has been able to successfully combine forces with his emergency management counter-parts, looking at the fire perspective and coordinating other stakeholders of the disaster lifecycle.
In this episode we talk about leadership, firefighting and the culture of fire rescue, training, and incident command. As noted in the show, all groups that play a role within the disaster lifecycle should apply these principles of success, which highlights the need for cross-sector training and collaboration.
We want to provide a big thanks to Disaster Medical Solutions for inviting Doberman Emergency Management the the State Urban Search and Rescue skill based training conference. Joe Hernandez, C.E.O, is a great friend of the show and led a flawless conference. It is at this SUSAR conference that we met other powerhouse first responders and instructors , like Chief Lewis. Thanks again for the invite Joe!
Host: John Scardena (1s):
Everybody we're at USR our training, that's a urban search and rescue training, with Walton Jones and the other guys that we work with. We've had several episodes with them. We want to replay Walt's episode because he's one of the instructors here and we have really great information. That's what we're playing this week. We'll see you next time.
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Host: John Scardena (1m 57s):
Welcome back to the show everybody, it's your host, John Scardena. I am so excited for this week. Two weeks ago, I was at a state urban search and rescue conference basically north of Orlando, Florida. I met just amazing men and women who are true heroes, and have a ton of courage and they were at the out there doing medical training for search and rescue, and they were in pancake buildings the entire time. They were working on really intense situations. I got to be there to observe and to do after actions and to see how that coordinates with the bigger picture with a strategic planning. While I was out there, I met Walt Lewis, who is a District Chief in Orlando for fire. We had these amazing conversations talking about the role of firefighters and the future of firefighting and what's going on, and what's some of his career experiences. I was like, man, we have to have this guy on the show. He's actually with the Florida task force four, which is out central Florida. So he can talk about USAR too, well, welcome to the show.
Guest: Walt Lewis (3m 4s):
Hey John, thank you very much for having me.
Host: John Scardena (3m 6s):
I was just talking about how I should call you Chief Lewis on the show and I introduced you as Walt. So thanks for the informality.
Guest: Walt Lewis (3m 14s):
That’s what my parents named, me so that’s where I started out as, I am very fine with that.
Host: John Scardena (3m 16s):
That's awesome. You're obviously a really cool guy because when we were talking out there and I was seeing how these different parts of emergency services coordinate and work together and this very hyper specific field of medical USAR and how to move into that from the firefighting side, it was just really incredible to think about. Just looking at the use cases there, let's talk about going back from your experiences, how did you get into firefighting, and then what drove you towards USR perspective?
Guest: Walt Lewis (3m 58s):
Okay, well, I'll try to keep it short. So anybody that knows me, my wife always jokes that I'm like 44,000 minimum word per day. I'll try to keep it in under an hour.
Host: John Scardena (4m 10s):
That's good for podcasting, by the way.
Guest: Walt Lewis (4m 16s):
So I was fortunate to be exposed to it early on in life. Both my older brothers, my father worked for volunteers in a small town in New Jersey, and each of them were very active in the volunteer firehouse. Being nine years behind my older brother, as a youngster was seeing the firetrucks and the enthusiasm. As time grew on, my father retired, moved to Florida, and I got to be an Explorer in my hometown of Palm bay. With that the exposures were there and early on with Palm Bfire department when I got on there, we responded down to assist and what we thought we were assisting with hurricane Andrew. That was my first exposure to use, or here's this major natural disaster. I was dating a girl down in Miami at the time so I knew a little bit of the area. To go down, there our people that coordinated, it didn't want it. They took it for what it should be as far as the disaster. They brought their own camper food supplies, and they laid the groundwork for our group to be able to operate because so many people flooded Florida. Hey, we're here to help. Where do we stay? Where do we eat? We had certainly realized what that impact is. So fortunately our agency did the right thing. Jim stables, the Fire Chief, now in Boynton beach, back down to Florida, he helped coordinate a good part of that effort and showed us how we could do this in a good way. So in small teams, we went down to operate out of firehouse 29 and Sweetwater, and provided some aid to Miami-Dade fire rescue. I thought it was kinda neat. The USAR system was coming online. FEMA was coming about from CD, civil defense, and my brothers were involved in civil defense. That's what funded the fire department part of it in Maywood. So in retrospect, it's kind of neat how it connected and then fast forward, and getting on with Orlando fire department. After a couple of years with Palm Bay, the 9/11 disaster, the 9/11 tragedy highlighted the need for regional and local teams to be able to be self-supportive at least for the outside of the emergency, unknown if it would be just an isolated event prior to then it was really thought of disaster as being pretty much localized or stole in their aspect. But 9/11 really pointed out that you would have major disasters in so many locations. Outside of the hurricane or the earthquakes in California, where you had large areas, heavily devastated, here you've got the Pentagon impacted, the trade centers impacted, and had the flight 93 made its impact where its destination was another site, perhaps. So that highlighted our system and we were fortunate with Orlando, Orange county, government, Seminole county government aligned to create under the umbrella of the state of Florida is created one of the regional task forces. With that Florida four was born. Originally, 12 teams were supposed to be created. There weren't enough areas to support it. Florida's one and two, which are already in the system, its FEMA teams were also pulled on the umbrellas of Florida asset. So they're a dual role team and they're great set of assets.
It's great having older teams with more experience and seasoned veterans there to kind of give us some guidance on things. They've been some great heroes in my career to help me with get answers. I'm very fortunate to have one of them that's retired from Miami Dade, Dave Downey, living in the Orlando area. So I get to talk to him every once in a while and get some really good insight on stuff. I have a great pleasure working with him because years ago he was a guy, and I still do, look up to and want to follow as far as leadership and great decision making. So I try to follow what he's laid before, because he's done a great job, and I want to continue that tradition. So that puts me in a position of a joining Florida four in 2003, the team stepped onboard in 200 hurricane Charlie hit the map across Florida, and then three other, two other storms followed St. Francis and Jean, each of those cross the Orlando area. Once we were able to step up our team and get out the door, we started to become active light rescue. A lot of searching and verifying was done and being able to support the community in humanitarian needs was started. So our team got a couple of deployments out to Wilma, Katrina, Ivan. With all those deployments, we got quite a bit of seasoning. Then we had a drought which was kind of good for the nation, kind of good for a lot of areas that we didn't go out the door for another 12 years. So it was a challenge staying on the team, staying motivated. I saw people do a whole decades of service on the team and never deployed.
So that part's a challenge and keeping people motivated now, as I've advanced and had the pleasure I have the honor of now serving as one of the task force leaders, I get to be that cheerleader still and keep people engaged in the team. It is easier when you dress up for the rehearsals a lot, and then there's a performance. So if you're a bridesmaid, a bunch of times, and you don't get married, it gets a little disappointing for us. We're fortunate that we get that opportunity, but we never like to see the tragedy. We just always are happy to be able to assess like any team out there.
Host: John Scardena (9m 11s):
Okay. So you hit on12 different topics that I want to talk about. So that's awesome. I'm glad that you're the 44,000 a minimum because I'm the same way. So let's go down this list a little bit because I was literally writing this down as you were talking. You mentioned Andrew, which is a game changer, you mentioned 9/11, you mentioned Katrina, you mentioned all these different events that have really changed both the USAR perspective and the emergency management perspective. If you really think about it, for our listeners, I keep saying that everything before 9/11, whatever emergency management was then is not what it is now and it should not be, after this pandemic. I hope more people wake up to what it can do in terms of coordination. We hit that next phase and we can talk about that later, but you're talking about some major events that are happening and you're involved in those in one way or the other. So that's awesome, just to have that perspective on the show, and then you kind of switched over and you're talking about leadership, which is a very big thing that we talk about here. I thought it was interesting how you're talking about keeping people motivated.
We're kind of in a weird field because we never want disasters to impact people, but we're in the field for a reason. We want to work. We want to get out there. We want to be able to prove our skills and whether you're an emergency planner, you're a firefighter, you're a humanitarian aid doing a nonprofit. You want to be able to do your job and to help people essentially when you don't… oh, actually I'm going to back up for a second. A week or two ago, we had Joe Delmoro on here from a FEMA and he talked about, how you have to go to your town and say, hey, I need money to stop bombs from happening. You hope that a bomb will never go off in your city, but how do you get funding to make sure that bombs never go off in your city? So you're always fighting the money man there. On the same side, you talked about keeping people motivated, not deploying for 12 years is a pretty tough run. I'm not gonna lie. I would sit in house at FEMA sometimes for like eight months. I'd be like, I started like to twitch, I'm like get me out the door. There's things happening. I want to be there. So how do you do that? How do you keep people motivated? What tasks do you focus on? How do you, how do you keep that level of energy up? So if you do deploy you're prime and ready to go.
Guest: Walt Lewis (12m 1s):
Well, it's not easy that's for sure. You're going to have members that are only there for the t-shirt. You're going to have members that are the adrenaline junkies and to touch on that point there, it was a bad thing many, many years ago and I put some thought to it as far as why, you know, touching on your point. It's not that we're adrenaline junkies, where we want to see devastation. We have prepared for a major event and we enjoy the mental and physical challenge to be able to encounter that and do it with success so that we can succeed for the people we have signed up to serve. I think that's a better answer live in saying that, yeah, we just hope nothing ever bad happens, but the fight the dollar certain circumstance.
That's a challenge and try and keep people motivated. Big thing is training. There's always the events there's we don't know what mother nature is going to throw at us next year, but there's always a manmade problem that can come about. There's been enough tragedies here as of late that identify that we need to be on our guard. As a USAR team, we need to be prepared for whatever is under our umbrella and incapable, but ultimately it could be anything. It could be wide area search. So we started developing our team for that one, several children, a couple of high profile cases. The area went missing and we could have been tested as a utilized resource. We have the rank structure. We have the radios, we have the personnel, the equipment, people, the vehicles, the GPS units. It was just a matter of being another extension. And sometimes we just weren't thought of, or we weren't in plate or what's going to cover the insurance. So it wasn't planning on the front side to enable that so we could work on that. But before they asked us to go, let's make sure we can answer that call. So we did training in that arena and got a lot of people. We had some experts in the field that were less involve members, but when they're engaged and tasked with a project, they become more engaged and more available, interested in being involved.
The biggest thing, if anything, it's consistency. If you don't have consistent training every month, every three months, people start to forget about it. Then they dissociate and they do it. They put their time to something else and it's always going to be cyclical. People have kids, they get older, they retire again, people that want the t-shirts, they don't have the enthusiasm to begin. So you have to keep, at least the majority engaged. You're not going to get everybody but understand your audience and what is their motivation? I mean, that's a leadership principle and it's plaguing every service. But you've got your veterans, you've got your boomers, you've got your gen X-ers, millennials, everybody in between. What drives them? What's their motivation? What do they want to achieve? And how do you make your drill? Can you make your training, your team fulfill what they want and just use them? What Forbes lists or why do people leave jobs? It's not money as the top answer it's fulfillment, right? So if we can fulfill some of our members, even if it's a short amount of an hour training, two hours, hey, coming out of the firehouse from nine to 11, we're gonna be doing some training, come by the warehouse. If nothing else stay engaged, see the people again so that you learn a couple new members. You remember the old members, people see your face so that when the deployment happens, the people and we're able to move quicker because especially in our agency, we have three main agencies. So I named Orlando, Orange county fire rescue, and Seminole county fire rescue, were supported by other agencies and region five to 70 fire department, Winter park fire department, Osceola county fire rescue, Martin county, we've got Claremont fire rescue. We've got numerous agencies in our region that also provides the personnel and a big one Lake County fire rescue. Their fire chief is a former Seminole county fire chief or a chief officer. We got a lot of people that are going to integrate just like in a FEMA building. They're going to be coming from different places when you have that association to those people it's going to work smoothly.
Host: John Scardena (15m 50s):
Okay. Again, you mentioned about 12 different things I want to talk about. I love it, dude. I love it. You're already giving us a lot of clips we can use. First of all, the t-shirt one I find is hilarious because the national strike team is there only for response. If there's not a response, we're really not doing our job. We work on policy. We worked on training. We did a ton training. We'll talk about that in a second. But when I would get it to deployed to the hurricane Harvey, the hurricane Matthew, the wildfires, the tornadoes, whatever disaster where you got to deploy to, 90% of it was natural. One of my metrics for demobilization was when staff that we'd bring in, because we'd have 200 staff and we had what 25,000 people deployed when my staff started asking me about t-shirts. I knew that it was time to go home or not be in a response anymore. Right? Like you're doing 18 hour days. You're trying to coordinate all these resources. I specifically was trying to figure out where the USAR teams should go. I was working directly with the emergency services branch director and we were doing all these different things. So they use our teams, would go out and we were tracking all this stuff and trying to help out.
Then one day people started asking for t-shirts and you're like, okay, that's not that anymore. So that's really funny. I will say on the other side of the coin, if you do want an awesome t-shirt, you have to get the Disaster Tough T-shirt from a website. Okay. That's really dumb. There you go. Good man. The other thing that you're talking about is the mental challenge. I really like phrasing it like that. That's a good idea that the conference that we were at talk about a great mental challenge. I like to call a strategic level emergency management, to be fair. When I was talking to most of the firefighters out, there are people trying to go in the USAR Teams. They had no idea what emergency management was. We'll talk about that in a second, but I love the idea of a chess match. I like to say, okay, there's a category five hurricane coming in. How am I going to reduce the level of impact, to the max and what do I need to do to do that? That mental challenge of figuring out who, what, when, where, how bad, and reduce that impact is a great mental challenge. So I like that a lot. Then what you're talking about this last point, and we're going to talk about this one quite a bit, where you can fill us in here is consistency. I was very lucky to work on under somebody similar to you, Rodney, Melsick, who, when we didn't get deployed, man, we kept that culture up of deployments. We did trainings all the time. We did what we call lightning bolt exercises, which is basically, you're in go mode. You get the call and you're going through all the motions. We did a lot of training and we just refined and refined and refined and so when we went out there wasn't any rust, right? And luckily I was on a team that we didn't have a lot of t-shirt people. They brought in the best people, but consistency is really key. How do you integrate the consistency of training? I'm going to go back to this money thing again, because it was a lot of times for us, it does come back to money. How do you give people the training that they need if they're not getting deployed? Those dollars could be not there. What type of exercises would you suggest?
Guest: Walt Lewis (19m 28s):
Well, there's a ton of stuff. It's just got to put the time to thinking about it and you don't try and do it alone. Talk to some other task forces, TRTs, and other people that are in your field and see what they've done for success, or at least brainstorm for the lack of the old term, but get everybody together. What worked out well for us during most of that 12 years, I grew up on a team as a text rich specialist. Then to me, that's one of the most important roles in the sense of you can't find victims, there's nothing to do. So with text search, we needed to stay good with our skills with our GPS use. Well, everybody's going to look to us to make sure we know where we're going and how it's gonna work. So let's stay focused on what our demands are and to work with a small group, I approached our team management and said, hey, doing the road training's great, doing the confined space training, great, all is good but we're not staying highly proficient on our skills. What's important is frequency, recency, and accuracy equals proficiency, right? So by having those three things, if we're not frequently training on it or doing it accurately or not doing it recently, we're not going to be good at it. So as the team management, would you mind if we broke away and did our own group training for canine search specialists and techs are specialist. It's open and available to anybody else that wishes to attend and we'll need those extra help. So we started working with our canines and I got to see firsthand some of our dog operators and they are fantastic. Love those as resources. I had true faith in our canines when they would go out and search, if Marcia's dog hit, I knew there was a victim there, it wasn't. I needed another dog to come check because in seeing their dog operate all the time, I had confidence. Same thing with Susan Wesley's and Jen Browns, I knew that the dogs were doing their job and I could have confidence that we could start doing the rescue work rather than delaying it any longer. The problem was in the pile that dog barked at me, I would really like to just start coming to help me wait for rather than wait for another dog to come bark at me. But I understand the reasoning so I can appreciate that too.
But the fulfillment part of it, doing those training skills, look at where you may be deficient. What do you truly need to focus on? But also, what can you do at the cheek? There were other agencies that need to do training as well and have a small training budget, but can't fulfill what they want for their training, because they don't have enough people or resources. Fish and wildlife commission, the official wildlife commission. What do you guys got going on? The next year, well, we got a couple of flight trainings we got to do, and we've got some ground search. You mind if we integrate? That would be great. So with them, we got to do airframe training, find out what equipment we can carry, how far we can go, how long the air ship can go, how to do loading procedures. They teach us, we teach them everything on the front side so when we go out and we have to meet, we already know these people and we know what exactly we're going to do. It was their training budget we used. We just applied to people to drive down to Lakeland airport. Well, we're going to Lakeland airport to do the training. Lakeland fire hosts, the technical rescue team. So I call Matt brown. Hey, Matt brown. We're going to be in your backyard. Would you like to get some training, free training for him? It happens to be in his backyard. So three different layers of training involved, all on the cheap search and rescue training. You can do search and wide area search training. It's not much to take out maps, but you can do search training in your own backyard. That's easy. Everybody knows the major geographical regions, but pull out a map of the Apalachicola national forest and then give it to our search managers and now they got to try and work on an exercise we're deployed to here, lay out where you're going to do and where your boundaries and what you expect, your genuine travel time for your people and doing their willingness search.
How do you set up your drills? What are your support mechanism and have them truly walk through everything and have it come out with and then have the experts stay silent. Then at the end, let them follow back in with, and think about these other couple of things rather than inject every little thing. So this way they learn not necessarily the hard way, but they truly get all their thought out of their head and then get the introduction or the extra points. And it's as much as you want to try and do really, what's going to be your primary or prior priority responses and work your way down there because it's possible. It doesn't mean it's probable, but go with the probable and handle the possible as well. The disaster medicine for a while, we had some pretty motivated medical specs. We would get mad cadre back again. We would integrate them with a couple exercises and not only did we find the victim with the dog, searched them with a camera, hurt them with a Dell star, but then we had a med spec come out. We would remove the victim to some degree and then the med spec had to medically manage the patient in the pilot future training. We hope to set up and hopefully with the development of our future training center, we can create that training environment that will integrate every aspect of our USAR components. That's something that I see. Here's another, another segue for you is some of our training facilities, they do really good for a couple of points of use are, but not all of them. It might be good for structural collapse or for shoring or search, but not really good for the medically needed management patient. Like the M sock training that you went to. Joan does a fantastic job with a group for disaster medical solutions of setting things up to make it as realistic as possible. That should be the run or the sprint level and sometimes we do have to do that crawl level with our personnel so that we can get to there, but there's always some crawl stuff we can do. We can only do GPS training. That's great. We can do math training, that's free. We can do winch and off-road vehicle operations. That might be a constant curve because you might break something, but there's a lot of little things that you can do. Again, it looks look at your priorities.
Host: John Scardena (25m 12s):
Okay. Wow. Again. So this is really interesting. You talk like a firefighter, but you are using emergency management principles and pretty much everything you're doing so far, you have talked about three of maybe 10 things that we hit on. You talked about the issues of planning, specifically planning before a deployment. That can create a hiccup. That's a big time of emergency management thing of like coordination and planning. I already used the word coordination, coordinating between different teams is what emergency management really does. I run a company called Doberman Emergency Management, and yet I think emergency management is a misnomer. That's kind of my problem, but emergency coordination is really what we're supposed to be doing. Great emergency managers, great first responders coordinate with all the different groups in the house. Quite frankly, when you're out there doing your job, you shouldn't be coordinating at that point. There should be somebody behind the scenes assisting you, helping you coordinate those resources. The last thing you talked about was training, Joe Hernandez and the disaster medical solutions. I do not do endorsements on the show very much, but I will say this I 100% endorsed Joe Hernandez and the disaster medical solutions.
That was probably the best training skills-based training I've ever seen. I have been to a million trainings. In fact, I've put on a lot of different trainings and hopefully those went pretty smooth as well. However, this was top tier for sure, full integration, by the way, he kept on saying crawl. That's kind of a huge pun for USAR. I don't know if you caught that, but I've never been in a pancake building so much in my life than last week. As an emergency manager, I kept on every day, I would take these notes and I'm like, man, there needs to be so much more coordination between our side of the house and the USAR side of the house.
But in terms of that training piece, like everyday was flawless, right? Yeah. You had the skill-based training in the morning or the discussions in the morning and then the afternoon and evening, they would actually go out there and do it. When I say do it for those listeners, they had a cadaver and they were actually performing amputations and tracheotomies. I learned about ketamine out, like everything in the pancake buildings, it was about 300 ML of ketamine and then another 200. I was like, okay, I basically can do USAR now. But yeah, let's talk about that. You start trading specifically, because you're out there as an instructor yourself, there was a lot of instructors. It was almost one for one. Well, it was like 2020 instructors that I counted with 36 students, a lot of different skills going on. What do you think sets apart that training and in your perspective, am I missing something? Is that just kind of the standard or does that training really stand out for you as well?
Guest: Walt Lewis (28m 23s):
No, I didn't. I'm not going to do mass, any other training agency or groups that are out there, and there's a lot of great ones, but Joe has dedicated from the early days. And this originated underneath John Holder center rescue training associates many years ago where we provide the disaster medical specialist class. Eventually when that company folded, Joe kept this going and created disaster medical solutions and he has the eye too, super nice guy. I know salt of the earth superhuman, great humility, but he has the ability to just create great connections and friendships with people. There's so many high level people. I really don't even count myself as an instructor in the group because there's so many smart people in the group that I have the pleasure of going, just to be able to hang out with them and have fun with them. I bring a very small piece of the pie and they have done pretty much the whole.
Host: John Scardena (29m 18s):
You're full of it, by the way because you literally, the last 20, 30 minutes just proved why you are one of those smart guys. So that's BS anyways.
Guest: Walt Lewis (29m 30s):
So I took notes from that conference, but their focused goal, the thing they're focused goal, you know, Vinnie Johnson, Wanda Rica, the guys that are helping run the thing, is to make it as realistic as possible so that when you are forced with that event, the decisions you're going to make, how are you going to respond? What needs to be done? There's no question because most of the time, those medical specialists, they may be completely on their own without the yet conference on a doctor nearby because you're in the disaster environment. You may be in Haiti where the doctor is one and there's four med specs and each of those with patients, and you've got to make the decision, what is being done for this patient right now, IB therapy by carve onboard and EKG tracing. If I've got the machine available, if not, then I've got to make my other decisions based on symptomology. Having that depth of knowledge is way beyond we're just paramedics, you know, continue to learn from, and also want to break the mold of standard, not against ALS or any other teaching platform, but when the situations are presented, do you have pretty much a basic mannequin? You might have a sim man, which is very interactive, but to go the further level of the mannequins over there and trauma effects. Forgive me for not having an accurate name of the company, but trauma effects has moved on to another company name and to have the realism that's there with that high level, multiple patients scenario that is true to life it immerses you in the true scenario. So when the students would come in, we had to break the mold. In a day one we gave a little forgiveness too, we started hitting them day three, I have plenty of dumb looks and I would give him a lots of dumb looks when they would ask me a question about a patient that they should be able to find out themselves, but they wouldn't get it because they didn't take their gloves off. The work loves to expose their patient care gloves, to touch the patient. I'm not going to tell you anything. This is not a mega code. This is a real life scenario. Do everything that you can, and the patient will talk back to you. The noises, the smells, the sounds everything's coming about to make it as realistic as possible. So it has all information-based decision-making not just me telling you something, you just, all your sensory input. So it's sensory input, decision-making rather than information and for those scenarios, the last day, the goal is to have live interaction. The location couldn't be much better. It's Florida state fire college. It's got a great pile, but also it's when fire standard students are there and lots of them are energetic and interested in participating and learning. So they're right there and they make great role models or a model actors. So they get move lodged up and supported features. You'd mentioned about the student does structure, a student to instructor ratio. If we engage in a football game, we'd probably give them a run for their money. Absolutely instructors, because it was the thing. One to three, as far as in orange shirts, but it was very close to being one-to-one or one to two and a lot of scenarios and we want that. We want that immediate, full attention as much to the students as possible so that they have full confidence when they go back to their local jurisdiction and they can be the authority so that their fire chief, their emergency manager, their EMS director had full confidence that these are highly trained well pointed individuals that are fully capable of providing whatever scares needed, when that disaster happens. The downside is going to be sustainment of that training. So we invite those students to come back and when we have other exercises in those regions, we try to reach out and stay in visible. So certainly go to their websites and know when those events are coming so you can come back up and revisit just so that's availability is there and that's something that we don't do a very good job of it.
We typically take a class, but we don't do a lot for sustainment later on. We expect our agency to follow through it. So we allow that to happen too ahat's a great vision of Joe and it's the personnel that work there. I love being around them. I mean, we tried each other, we have a great time, but I know that at any moment, if I needed help, I could call any of those 20 people and they'd probably be at my house tomorrow, if not tonight, whatever I needed. So they're a fantastic group of people, very intelligent, very humid, humble, and just experts in their field. And I'm privileged to be around.
Host: John Scardena (33m 47s):
Yeah. In fact, I was privileged. I felt the same way. I felt like it was an awesome learning experience. I like what you said earlier, when you said you don't want to knock any other group and to that credit, I'm kind of one of those people who says something like, I'm the best other people are the best too, but I don't want anybody to be any better. Like that's how hard I want to push. I hope everybody gets to that level. I think of things like tears in terms of training, that USAR training is top tier in terms of, it was as close to flawless as I've seen it in terms of the purpose, the mission and the outcome.
When I was w observing the students, again, I'm not a medical guy, but I have had some training working with people and understanding communication and understanding emergency services and understanding that tempo and understanding these different things that have to happen. That coordination piece, even just tracking what you're doing, like from a triage perspective, I understand triage because we deal with triage a lot in large-scale disasters, right? And so I was watching them and like day one, man, I was like, oh, this is bad. They were making so many mistakes and day two, even day three, there was one moment where I was really impressed with the two instructors, basically by their lack of attention in this one area, the person that she should have been treating died, or they would have died because they didn't treat it fast enough. They weren't really well coordinated. You could tell the instructors were really frustrated by that because, you want them to do lifesaving work, but when they came back together and they did their hotwash at the end, it was no emotion. It was pure teaching moment and still building up their confidence. Let's focus on what you did, right. Here's a couple of things that you need to tweak, but you really know you're the professional. You already came here. You're already paramedic, you know what to do. So make sure you're doing those things and allowing that, I think what happens a lot of times with the instructors is, if people aren't doing it right, there's a real world try to stop everything. Well you didn't need to be fix this, or they'll give a little hints.
There wasn't really a lot of that. There was, we're gonna teach you the skill. You go do it. Then we'll do a hot wash by the last day, which was my favorite probably exercise I've ever been a part of, because we don't really do with night a lot. We had another guy on here Dr. Steven Johnson, who is a biochem counter-terrorism expert for UK. He goes, we don't really do a lot of night exercises because there's just so much more work. I was really happy to see the night exercise and then watching the students, we actually had her name was Tammy. I was outside the whole, in fact, I was inside the hole a little bit but I was mostly outside of the hole, but we could hear inside. The level of progression that happened from day one, I'm not talking about her specifically, I'm just talking about students in general till the last day was just incredible to watch. That's my favorite thing as an instructor really is bright eyed and bushy tailed morons, usually what happens in the beginning. But if people take it seriously and that's kind of on our side to help them take it seriously. But if people take it seriously by the end, where are they at? And I was very, very impressed where they were at. That's why I was just kind of blown away by what the purpose and mission and the outcomes were of that training exercise. So hats off to all the instructors, yourself included and Joe for coordinating that piece.
Guest: Walt Lewis (37m 36s):
The other group to touch on is also the students. We get a lot of high-level performers and Tammy, the one you mentioned, she was one too. So coming into the program, there are the people that really take it serious, really do the extra study. They're the good paramedics, you know, in the organization and then they become even better or more better exposed.
Host: John Scardena (37m 55s):
Yeah. It's interesting to watch. I'm not a huge Kobe Bryant fan in terms of basketball or whatever, but I did like what he was talking about high school students and they will go and work out and do basketball skills and training an hour and a half, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or they'll do an hour every day. Then he was like, okay, compare that to a kid who does three hours every day. What happens after the year? And he goes, it's simple math. Somebody takes it seriously versus somebody doesn't take it seriously and does like a hundred percent their effort, whatever their level of effort is, sorry, whatever their capability is in the beginning, it doesn't really matter. If you're listening to this podcast and you're like, okay, I'm like really bad at X, Y, and Z, and somebody else naturally just amazing. It doesn't matter if your level of effort is always to the max and theirs is not, you will eventually be better. You definitely saw that with a lot of the students and other students that really impressed me actually, from a coordination and communication standpoint, was a student named Cody. There was one exercise where I'm in the actual hole, they're not relaying information very well. There's five different parties talking on the outside of what they should be doing on the inside, trying to relay information.
So neither parties communicating and Cody tells everybody shut up. I use like the incident commander or whatever. He's like, everybody just got really quiet. He goes, what do we need? And he says that into the hole, they relay it back. He says, okay, let's get them X, Y, and Z right now. I was like, that's the word? A little bit later, he was like, is there, this is a really funny moment for me actually, he was like is there a code word for trying to get everybody quiet? I was like, you just used it. He said what. I'm like, shut up is the code word like that is the way to get everybody to be quiet. Sometimes it has to happen. Now the problem with that is once we told them that, or once I relayed that information, the whole group kind of got excited with using shut up. It’s a little bit, maybe too much, but it shows that like, communication is a big piece. I thought that was another great thing about this challenge, because you're treating them as if they should be able to do it and you expect them to do it. I think that's part of the reason why they were trying very hard. It's like they wanted to live up to that expectation. Right.
Guest: Walt Lewis (40m 27s):
Going into those drills, typically, he's not going to be the whole leader, the whole search manager, the whole, what we're trying to get out of that without telling them is that we're trying to develop you to be the authoritarian in your respective role so that you making that decision. You'll have that confidence that this is what we need to do, this is how we need to approach it. You need to listen to me rather than being the diminutive. I'll do whatever you tell me, but I really think we should do this. We want them to engage their capabilities so that they feel confident and can make those decisions and get that message across, maybe not by telling their team manager to shut up, but kind of more appropriate management in their peer level.
Host: John Scardena (41m 10s):
Oh yeah. You don't tell your boss to shut up. That's a big no-no, but there's a time and place and he used it appropriately, I thought.
Guest: Walt Lewis (41m 23s):
The got control of the problem and got it on track and that's one of the other skills that we're teaching without teaching.
Host: John Scardena (41m 28s):
Yeah. I will say the later in the week, when we had some explosions go off before that he was talking about, we have explosions and a little more real and then the first bullet explosion went off and I caught them on camera. I got to Cody, he flinched. I was like, ah, I knew it. So it was kind of funny that they catch him on that. I think we just highlighted some really good points about training in general. I do that all the time in emergency management. I train people on active shooter because I did more of the operation stuff in DC. So we talked about active shooter and we do skill-based training with that.
I've tried to get people away. It's like a much more complex than run, hide, fight. We try to make the scenarios real as possible. One benefit that I have that I don't think is utilized enough is this geospatial background that I have, map making and visualizations. I think one of the reasons why the USAR training is so effective because you guys were out there actually in the pile. Tabletops exercises can be great and they should be utilized, you know, pretty frequently. But when you're able to pull in maps and injects and people are able to do visualizations and start to make it as real as possible, then you start getting away from having to tell people don't fight the exercise when people are fighting the exercise. It means to be honest, it means the exercise wasn't developed very well in my perspective. It's a call to emergency managers, trainers, instructors, whatever to say, this is exactly what we're trying to do. We're trying to make it as real as possible, as we can and go forth and succeed. Right. And so, again, just hitting on all pistons, I'm giving a lot of praise because I was obviously really impressed. However, I will say, and maybe you can shed some light into this.
I felt like pretty much everybody I talked to out there, had no idea what emergency managers do. Like most of the time I got was like, oh, you deliver the water right now. That's a logging, right? Oh, you can get us food, right? No, that's someone in a VOAD, like, I don't do that at all. So I think there's this disconnect, we're all in. I've been trying to find a word for it. Lately, emergency management and emergency services should be hand in hand. I really feel like that way. It's not as part of the reason why there's so many disconnects in communication, that was a big thing in 9/11 that you brought up, you brought up 9/11 police and fire. Not literally, don't even have the capability to talk to each other. Well, there's an after action. The police helicopter watched the second plane hit. He had no capability. He didn't even consider communicating to the firefighters in the other building. hey, get out now there's a second plane that just hit. That's still a problem in New York city. There's this whole culture thing, BS. I don't care about people's culture. You're going to care a lot because you're a firefighter, but I don't care. Right. In a large-scale disaster it's about lifesaving. But that being said, why do you think or let's actually, let's just be super honest. What do you think that the opinion of emergency management is from a standard firefighter perspective? What do you think that they think an emergency manager is and are, do you think that they are effective? Do you think the firefighters believe that they're even needed?
Guest: Walt Lewis (45m 9s):
I'm going to hate to put words in anybody's mouth. So I'll speak from our perspective. So fair enough. As far as most of it's just education, it's an understanding piece. We're very blessed. We've got a very good emergency management organization. We've got Manny Soto and April Taylor, and they do a fantastic job through this last year. We had full exposure as to what their involvement is by daily situation reports being published by them. In the planning section, chief, I tutored from April quite a few times, ran into her for some guidance on things. Quite a few times always had the answer by high-level performers like that. And you get spoiled. You don't necessarily have to know what they do. They just work magic for what, what does an emergency manager do? If the person at the end of the nozzle or on the fire truck doesn't understand what they do. That can be okay. They have to have faith that there are people above them that understand what the emergency manager to do. It has to be an integrated process. I like that. I think that's where maybe the best disconnect occurs in many agencies. We just started again because of training challenges and time on the calendar and the availability with COVID access and so forth. We're getting our officers to go back to the emergency operation center, to spend some time with our communications personnel, to see what challenges they run into.
Through that exposure that's attached to and under the same roof over EOC, we do quite a bit of training at our EOC. We have nothing else. We close the class there. So our people get to sit in their environment, see the desks, how it's laid out. There's Manny, I can ask him some questions and then a good number of our people, probably a dozen or better are involved in some sort of project that integrates with them. So that helps. So the association, they're not just not a mysterious person behind the door that only shows up when a hurricane shows up and then we have to ask them questions. They can't answer us any way because I don't understand what we do and what do you need me to do? We try to reduce that. So again, on the front side, exposures integration, how can we make it happen? When the pulse occurred, we stepped up our EOC, to some level you probably don't need public works. We probably don't need, we probably know a couple of ESF’s when he says, sit down and think about it. You do. When you square out a mile square of downtown Orlando, you're going to have an influence of how the trash is going to get picked up, how people are going to get access. So the police having a say in it. So all the ESF’s, there's quite a few ESF scenarios that are going to be effective. And like you said, maybe not emergency management, emergency coordination of having the decision-makers in the room that can all integrate and coordinate how it's all going to play out how this is going to impact the community for today, and sustainability. We want to be able to answer these questions because the decision I come up with, it's going to work out great for me today, but it's going to mess you up for the next month.
So having those answers and people in place, and I think we need to give it more value. So where the big challenge I see is an emergency managers of being able to advocate to their community leaders of how valuable that role is. Sometimes they don't even know themselves. Maybe they haven't been in that position. One of the great performances I saw in stepping up, and there's thousands of out there, I'm sure lady named Adrian. She became the emergency manager for Holmes county from a rapid needs assessment team for hurricane Michael or visiting the different OCS. Earlier in the year, she had been in a different role. She took on the role of emergency manager because that person had left. She was still working to go to the classes and then hurricane Michael hit and she was sparse on resources. She's not Orange county, Orlando, the Holmes county. So she's really in trying to get answers. She did a great job with what she had and people she had. She had the match lined up. She had all the streets were open, how things are going when she's coordinated and public works. She had a family at home she's tending to some other family members needing help. She, I don't know how she gets. She did a fantastic job and she earned the title of a accomplished emergency manager by doing it at her level, the best way possible and sometimes that's what emergency managers have to do. But from that, I hope other emergency managers can see where the value is needed for better preparation.
Guest: Walt Lewis (49m 31s):
Then I hate to say respect for the position, but without, for lack of a better way of the position needs to be better understood by everybody that would have to rely on it because once the disaster hits and you're coming to this person going, why can't we? And why didn't we, that's not the time for anybody to say, well, we should have on the front side, that's when you got to pick up the pieces. In the after action report, you know, we could have been better prepared. Had we done this and this and this. So hopefully any previous after action reports pointed out were failures have occurred from be utilized to help drive better change now for better prepare preparation for later on. If nothing else, this whole last year of COVID, our EOC has been activated. The stadium has been activated. So that's been a great primer for what we need to be doing. And why that's set that set up is so valuable for COVID. We didn't need public works every day, but not every emergency is going to require. Every ESF function will be relative to the disaster. You have an active shooter, public works may not be so involved. You have a hurricane, police is going to be involved, but public works is going to be the big drive after your rescue. So it's going to be relative to the emergency, but they all have to coordinate through one hub and that hub is emergency managers.
Host: John Scardena (50m 44s):
Perfect. I love the idea of the hub. Yeah. We pull in all the stakeholders, a great emergency manager understands the authorities that they have to understand that the authorities that they don't have and the perception of the authorities that people think they have, which is a big part of the job. Because if people don't think you're relevant, they're not going to use you. If I'm going a million miles an hour and I have to say, what do you do for me? That's already too late. Right? And I think an emergency manager is forced to do that because they're like, what can you do for me? And how can you make my life better? But a great emergency managers start to understand all the stakeholders, all the ESF’s, all the different community lifelines that get involved and say, okay, this is what's needed. This is what's needed and then there's an expectation that each of those people or those groups do their job efficiently. Right? And so I was telling him just to use our, a students. I said, you know, in so many disasters that I've deployed to, I have directly said, you need to go to neighborhood A, you don't need to go neighborhood B. Right. We have limited resources. We're trying to coordinate teams coming in. I don't do USAR, I do a little bit of USAR now because of that conference.
So thanks Joe. But, and thanks team. But the idea was that I knew I could send some people out into a region and they could do their job. Honestly, that confidence went way up after the training that we just did because it was like, oh, that's why they're so good. But in any case, like, that's the idea, right? If you have the Red Cross come in and do sheltering, I'm not going to go there and check on how's your sheltering going? Every day I wanted the numbers back. I want to know how many survivors we're going to try to get survivors out the whole deal. But when Salvation Army comes in and they do a feeding mission or a religious group, Southern Baptist church, the church, Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, whoever brings in food, I'm going to expect that food to be safe, healthy, and whatever. Whatever the group is, public works, I expect everybody to do their job. However, the biggest problem I've seen is when groups get left out, because nobody even knows about them and so there needs to be better communication. Well, before disaster, you never hand out your business card in disaster, right? That's the idea. To the USR perspective, man, I was kind of frustrated my first day there because I was talking to a lot of the teams, the state teams. One guy, said I've been on a team for 16 years and they've never deployed us. I talked to somebody else and like, I've been on this team for eight years and they never deployed us. You said 12. Right? And I will tell you during hurricane Harvey, because hurricane Harvey, Maria, and Irene were happening at the same time. It was my understanding that every state and federal asset for USR was being utilized and what I was hearing from these different groups was we've never been deployed. And there's a lot of politics at the local level that was preventing that. Oh, we're not NIMS qualified. Do you think I care if somebody's NIMS qualified, if you know, we're doing life saving. No. You know, and so, we need to do better on the emergency management side to understand the resources, but this is kind of a call-out to all those local people who are anybody who's listening right now, if you don't feel like you're part of the process, get part of the, become part of the process, tell people what you can do now. So when there is an issue, you know, you're already in that discussion. So there there's a lot of points to that as well. For sure.
Guest: Walt Lewis (54m 40s):
For sure. You hit on a couple of things if you don't mind me touching on. So prior to Katrina, it seems that the federal response to major emergency use was several teams and that's about it and it wasn't fully activated. Hurricane, Haitian earthquake, was I think the first time every FEMA team, all 28 were scheduled to go there to respond. I may be off on the figures, but I believe that was the precipice offense to activate every single asset available for humanitarian needs and rescue. Since then, we've done more to put resources in play. Hurricane Dorian was probably the biggest Wah wah moment if you want to call it that. But I think it was a fantastic
Host: John Scardena (55m 23s):
That’s the quote of the show.
Guest: Walt Lewis (55m 26s):
Category, five storm that's devastating Bahamas, and it's going to level Florida and I lived there. So I'd really take interest in wanting to keep it up and running. But here millions of dollars of assets, multiple teams coming to the state of Florida that weren't needed. I counted as a win because it was a fantastic disaster response exercise to see what else is all needed without the cost of recovery needs. You're not getting the money back for maybe some of the things, but you definitely got a lot of good answers so that we're fully ready for the next one. I think it was a fantastic preparation if nothing else. So I applaud our response efforts in getting staged resources ahead of time.
One of the other points you made was that the emergency manager shouldn't have to hand out business cards during a disaster, for sure. So if you're in that element where you're not being sought after, by your community leaders go make the approach and then where I've seen a couple of circumstances, it's maybe that top level manager really isn't interested in meeting with you, find out the person in that office that is, talk to them and say, hey, just so you're aware in case we ever have to operate together. Here's my card. These are a couple of things I can do, I'd like to chat with here and meet me for lunch or someday. And then talk to that person that's used at that level. You can determine where you're going to have to serve that group plan for it so that when the disaster happens, you're ready with the answers because when that high level official or that top person who really wasn't interested in you comes in and suddenly need you. And you're ready. Here you go. This is what I forecasted. This may be a problem for you. Here you go. Boom, there's your door just wide open. So that should solve a lot of your issues, but it takes work and it takes a lot of planning and you don't have to be every single plan, but some of the plans go with the probable and that's planning on the front side. That's a lot of what emergency management is, is being ready for the disasters in which your most likely circumstance.
Host: John Scardena (57m 24s):
Yeah, the worst thing an emergency manager can do is to go to approach a high level person, political appointee, especially, and come off as the doomsday prepper. If you walk into a room of somebody who doesn't want to deal with you because they have budget constraints and they're trying to do this, and they're worried about their career and blah, blah, blah. And they don't really see it as an issue. You walk in and say, okay, we want to prepare for the nuke. That's not going to be very effective, but if you go in there and say, hey, we have, every year we have floods and it makes you look bad. Like the make you look bad. Argument is probably the most effective argument I've actually had when dealing with high level people, because they are career focused. I mean, we are in careers, so it's okay to be career focused to a degree, but it's like, hey, you want to stay in office. You want to not have a, a crap storm hit ya. Then, you know, spend one 10th of what you would normally have to spend and let's mitigate this flood by, you know, let's deal with the levy system that's been outdated for 20 years. That's been on the news a couple of times about being outdated. You don't want that to become an issue that happened in Michigan 2019 or 2022 dams gave and big deal impacted 10,000 people. Oh, surprise into that. Or 1999, the Army Corps of engineers said, these dams are vulnerable. You have to fix them. Now it will cost about $10 million to fix the private company chose not to fix the dam. And it became a hundred million dollar problem to fix plus all the lawsuits. So, you know, that happened with Texas power grid, right? Hey, your power, your, hey, you don't have, you don't really store any of your fuel. Maybe you want to start sort of storing some of your fuel, you know? Oh, just kidding. When we had a cold happen cold, right. Everyone starts using their, gas and the power goes out for several days and you know, everybody's out of their job. Everybody about one resigned from that job. That's the kind of things that can happen. I don't know, but there's other motivators too. I like how you said, like most reasonable go for the most reasonable, get their trust to show that you can do your job competently. And sometimes it's not about the job. Sometimes it's just approaching people like humans, Hey, you have kids. I have kids. Right. And I think there's lots of different ways to garner relationships, a great emergency manager, anybody who's who's in the field of communications should be a great communicator anyways. Right. And so if you're not very good at that skill, that's a skill to definitely work on.
Guest: Walt Lewis (1h 0m 5s):
Absolutely. If you're not going to communicate your message, somebody else will, and it won't be the one you want.
Host: John Scardena (1h 0m 11s):
I love that, man. You have all these quotes. So we try to do quotes from the show. Ashley's going to have to put that together for us for social media, but okay. Let's, we're getting to about an hour here. That's where we'd like to keep it. Let me ask you a couple of questions. I actually asked you this question before, and I really liked your answer. It was pretty, pretty simple answer, but it's a good answer. There's a lot of media right now. In fact, let me back up. When FEMA became on, came under department of Homeland security, we added a fifth element to, prepared, preparing mitigation response recovery where the four, and now we add protection. So a lot of emergency managers. In fact, I know some cities that have started giving a weapon to their emergency manager. And so from your side of the house, there's been a lot of media that says, hey, should firefighters armed themselves? Yes or no. And so I asked you that question before, I want to ask you that question on here. What are your thoughts about firefighters carrying a weapon?
Guest: Walt Lewis (1h 1m 20s):
As far as day to day? I don't know if that's necessarily the best option and it's relative to your region. We typically stand by and re and stage when there's a hospital event down the street. Now as an entry team going in as a rescue task force, my personal opinion. If I'm an, I'm a gun guy, so I'm comfortable with guns. My father was a police officer. So if I'm qualified on the weapon, I train with the weapon. Often I'm going to be proficient. Number three, you should see accuracy proficiency. So with that, if I am comfortable, the weapon, then I should be able to, I would want to protect myself. In theory, I would have four officers around me providing that protection. The threat has been reduced or minimized because they're secured, sequestered, killed, captured by that. But I believe if I were on the rescue task force. Now, if I were comfortable to have a weapon, my agency would allow I would to carry a weapons while I would have the option to protect myself as well. So that if one of my other protectors was injured or incapacitated, I can still provide that layer that I need to continue for protecting everybody else at my level on my team. If I'm not a gun capable person, then I wouldn't force that issue. You don't want to give somebody a weapon. That's going to be a more danger for themselves and others and create the problem. So it's a little bit more of elaborate and answered than the other day.
Host: John Scardena (1h 2m 46s):
No, I liked it though. I mean, that's kind of what it broke down to before too, right? Is if you have the training and expertise and you're you feel comfortable with it, then there's a possibility for a door opening. But if you're not like that, that was the same argument with teachers carrying a weapon. People were like, oh my gosh, you know, I think the state of Georgia, everybody, all teachers should carry a weapon. Well, I don't think everybody should carry a weapon. I don't think if you're comfortable with it. You're not there to everyday protect against the active shooter, you're there to teach. And that that's the cliche, like your weapon is you know, the pencil, right?
But there was a story a week ago in Logan, Utah, a man, a 41 year old man was trying to break through the window to grab kids inside. And as he was breaking through the window, a teacher, showed their weapon and held them there at gunpoint. And the officers came and arrested the individual pretty scary situation for the kids. But a teacher was able to control the situation. Nobody died, nobody got hurt and they controlled the situation. And the police officers praise the teacher for doing that because in their state, they're allowed to do that. They're a lot to care if they want to. And that was to me, a perfect example of training and expertise, not escalating the situation, but I go back and forth on it. Quite frankly, like I am as an emergency manager. I'm not law enforcement. I'm always behind the scenes, but I recognize that if I was wearing my FEMA shirt or if I was wearing my county's emergency manager shirt, then you know, some idiot might want to put a target on my back, you know, and to be aware of that as well. And so like, it's a complex issue. It's, it's always going to be gray for a lot of reasons, but I like what you're saying. I like, at least the door could be open to the conversation if the training and capabilities there. Okay. So that being said, that was kind of, that was the biggest tangent of the show.
Host: John Scardena (1h 5m 0s):
Let's talk about the, the final point here. The question I like to ask everybody now that we've talked about the emergency services side and the emergency management side, which again, should be a much closer relationship. In fact, Orlando sounds like they're doing a great job out of April. I don't know who you are, but great. Thanks for making us look good. Yeah. The other, sorry, what was the other name? Manny and April check check. Good job. Make things, make us look good. So the last question I'd like to ask now that you've been integrated with them very well. The next phase of emergency management, what do you think? One thing that we should change to get to that next level of emergency management?
Guest: Walt Lewis (1h 5m 44s):
Well, unfortunately money is always the big drive on everything. It's always a big challenge and we asked, and it's not about money. It's about budgeting, which is about priorities, which is about what we need to address first. And that wasn't always the big challenge if we could make things happen. And I think this requires integration where a lot of cooperation, airports, hospitals, large businesses, cities all typically require events and training drills, collaborating those efforts to integrate those operations so that you truly get a large operation, I think would give the biggest effect. You would have to develop that. So that have to be training modules up until you built it. That would require a work and forecasting and people staying consistent with the operation. Those are other challenges to face, but some of the best exercises I've been in and in the medical component, the M shock conference you went to a couple of weeks ago was a component of, that was part of it was a syndrome, a community involved disaster response exercise and did a couple of those. There was one in Connecticut that I missed out on. I've got to be a part of one in Wichita many years ago, phenomenal, phenomenal multi-day exercise, multi-agency multi involvement.
It was a impromptu terrorist scenario where the truck detonated before its target then created the fire and collapsed aspects, but also a SWAT element. And so police investigation, and then inter integrating with JTTF and FBI and bringing those elements who also need to do exercise, coordinating that whole element. They were given a piece, then the fire service, they had to do their piece water, supply water loss because of the explosion devastated the water management area. So they had to do that piece, which damaged several buildings in the hearing reminiscent of the Oklahoma city bombing. Then you had multiple buildings to be searched and structurally supported and prepared. So then you have your vendor application of cranes coming in and heavy equipment, patient management, hospitals, transport infrastructure, sustainment, large, large exercise, a lot of pieces, but it's like eating an elephant one bite at a time. It can be done. It just has to be supported and having enough, right. People I think in certain regions would be able to make that happen and just take a collective of time, have a work group, don't call it a committee. It doesn't get done, go to work groups or the work gets done. And see if you can put something that together. And that's something that could be done every three to five years on a large scale, it takes a long time of planning. But I think that truly tests an agency or region on their true capabilities and gives honest answers.
Guest: Walt Lewis (1h 8m 37s):
And unfortunately, some people don't want honest answers and it's typically an inhibitor, but if we're truly serving our community and whatever aspect and role that you serve, you should want to be able to be willing to take in those answers so that you can perform better because all our purpose, my purpose is a firefighter as a district chief, as a task force leader is to serve my community. And part of my community is my family. I purposely live in the city of Orlando. So I serve my family and I want my firefighters and everybody I work with to do their best because they're serving my family when I can. That's awesome. So if we took that approach, I think we would probably put a little bit more exercise, a little more energy into some of those things that we do. And hopefully that's maybe a little motivation for somebody that's listening to your podcast to go forth and do even better because I love what you're doing. Disaster tough. I mean, I'm a big fan at this point when, once we met, I started listening and I love the messages and I'm humbling,
Host: John Scardena (1h 9m 36s):
You know, no humble needed. You're, you're talking about all these, ah, I'm not smart enough to be an instructor, BS, you know, you don't, there's no, you know, there's cumulatively needed there. You're obviously cutting the top, top tier. Right? So I came home and I told my staff at Doberman, I said, guess wha we're going to start doing? We're going to start doing full-scale exercises that do cross training. I learned a lot. I I've been around the block and you know, I'm kind of an arrogant guy, but I've been to 30 states. I've been to, you know, disasters of every kind every size. And I have two degrees in the topic and I get to interview experts like yourself every week. And I learned a lot being out there that applies to what I do. And I was like, man, they really need to understand what we do so that the whole idea of communication and incident command and learning that authoritative piece and the different things that applies to, to, to even the tactical level. And so we need to develop skill based training and exercises that allow observation and a little bit of training in cross sector, cross sector training. And by so doing it, you're creating more, well-rounded more capable people by gaining the skills that apply to them and their specific sphere of influence.
You're just expanding that understanding. And so when you get out to a large-scale disaster, we didn't even talk about pulse nightclub. So there's definitely gonna be a poll part two. In fact, we're having Brian Davis come on here, Chief Davis, thanks to Chief Lewis is going to be talking to us about some of the incident command perspective from that. But like just understanding when you get into a large-scale disaster, because 90% of what fire police does, doesn't require a large-scale disaster. However, like if you go to a car accident, especially if there's a fatal car accident or there's a taste, there's going to be fires, there's going to be police. There's going to be the tow. There's going to be, you know, whoever DOD is going to be possibly involved with rerouting people. There are a lot of elements in emergency management and emergency coordination that have to go, they go into play and just understanding how they work. Oh, hey, I'm, I'm 45 feet away from the police officer. I literally cannot talk to him. Maybe we, maybe an emergency manager can address that issue, stuff like that. So great call out about a full-scale exercises, a lot more training, a lot more cross training and full-scale exercises. I love all those points. I just want to thank you again so much Chief Lewis for coming on the show, you obviously know your stuff. There's going to be a part two. If you allow us, there's got to be a part three and five for obviously, because you know, it's been really fun to talk to talk to you and I'm sure our listeners are going to have the same sauce. So thanks again for coming on the show.
Guest: Walt Lewis (1h 12m 36s):
Absolutely. And I'm right around 40,000 words. So I still got a few left.
Host: John Scardena (1h 12m 40s):
That's fantastic. That's awesome. I appreciate the opportunity. Absolutely. Okay. So everyone, this is what happens every week. We love it and we hated it at the same time. We love it. When you send us an email and let us know what your thoughts are, but we would really like it. If you put it on our social media to Disaster Tough podcast on Instagram government, emergency management on LinkedIn, either, or for Facebook, that kind of stuff. We love the reaching out. So we appreciate for all those who do it, don't be afraid to ask her a question publicly. A lot of other people have similar questions and that's probably the fastest way that Chief Lewis will be able to see those questions. If you send it to us publicly, a lot of other people to answer as well.
However, if you do want to work with Doberman Emergency Management, if you want to do full-scale exercises, you you've been thinking about how this place you want to become a better emergency manager or whatever. Send us an email at infoatdobermanemg.com. We'll work that there, if you liked this episode, which you should have, because it was packed, was quotes, packed with great information from Chief Lewis. If you liked that, you have to give us again, we always ask five star rating and subscribe. Let us know that she liked it, and we'll see you back next week. Thanks.