Patrick McGinn is one of the busiest at The Salvation Army because of his multiple roles with the VOAD, overseeing feeding missions, and directing response staff within Northern California and Nevada disasters.
Expert emergency manager, Patrick McGinn serves as the Regional Disaster Services Director at The Salvation Army for all of Northern California and Nevada. He talks about his response experiences and shares lessons learned on emergency training exercises. Patrick also served the elite National Incident Management Assistance Team (N-IMAT West) for FEMA with our host, John Scardena.
Patrick is truly a well rounded emergency manager with both planning and operational experience. With his current role with The Salvation Army, he has developed axioms that push emergency managers to have a one-team, one-fight mentality.
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Host: John Scardena (0s):
You've just entered the Disaster Tough Podcast, the place for emergency managers, first responders and humanitarians who want to get the job done. Stories, lessons and tips are provided by field experts. This show is owned and operated by professional emergency managers at Doberman Emergency Management. We apply disaster tough logic by protecting life, property, and business continuity through planning, mitigation, and training. Check us out at dobermanemg.com or click on the show notes.
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Host: John Scardena (1m 33s):
Welcome back to the show everybody, it’s your host John Scardena. I am so excited for this episode, the repeat offender for coming onto the show, Patrick McGuinn, one of my best friends here and I served on the national team. Have you heard the previous episodes? We have a lot of experience working together and he has moved on to great things himself, working at the Salvation Army as a director there. He's going to be talking about that for Northern California and Nevada and emergency operations today, we're going to be talking about PSPS, public safety power shutoff plans, and some other fun topics for the day. Patrick, welcome to the show.
Guest: Patrick McGinn (2m 22s):
It's great to be here again.
Host: John Scardena (2m 25s):
Again, I feel like Oprah, you get another show with Pat, you get another show with Pat. It's always fun to catch up with you on the show, man. I'm really grateful that you're able to make the time. I understand that Salvation Army is doing a ton of stuff with fire season, starting to ramp up here, you know summertime, trying to get everything together. We have a unique southern issue in California as noted in the intro public safety power shutoff. You've been involved in that. I've been involved with that at Doberman. So just kick us off, man. Can you just give us what you've been working on with Salvation Army and kind of like what you see moving forward?
Guest: Patrick McGinn (3m 7s):
Yeah, sure. So, fire kind of updates their stats comparing last year to this year and already this year, we've had 700 more fires compared to last year at the same time and more than a hundred thousand acres or more than 130,000 acres more burned compared to last year around this time. So, we're screwed, Cole Cook is drier than it has been in a long time and there's new fires every day. Every day there's new fires. I know because I keep a map that shows me when all the fires were that were in the last 24 hours. So, it's been ramping up and luckily because of last season, because it was so chaotic and Salvation Army received so much funding or you know, donated funds that we've been able to buy enough supplies.
After doing after actions and determining how we can do things better, buying supplies that meet those new needs. So, we've delivered those out to all of our local offices in pretty much every medium to large sized city in California. So, we're prepared already in that way for our local groups to respond. But also, we've had two responses. We're averaging, we're going to average, I think probably two responses a month. So, we'd had like the salt fire and the lava fire up in, no there was not a volcanic eruption of and 50th county north of Redding. Then this week, and last week we had the Beckwourth complex fire that in Lassen county. So, we've been feeding at a shelter and Susan bill.
Host: John Scardena (4m 49s):
Okay. So, you've already been.
Guest: Patrick McGinn (4m 51s):
With the help of Southern Baptist.
Host: John Scardena (4m 53s):
Okay, that's awesome. You know, talking about collaboration by the way, which is a huge part of the experience, right. Pulling in all these seven resources, people parsing that out, salvation army, for example, working with Southern Baptist, that's amazing. We've already had 700, you said 700 more fires this year. You know, by the time this airs, there'll be probably a hundred more, right? So, it's just amazing that it's just so dry here in California, dry on the west coast, that trend is going to continue. I keep on kind of making like this like dark joke of like, well, eventually we're not going to have any more fires because everything will have burned right. But for a while though, you got a job at hand you've been focusing on. Well, we both have been focusing on PSPS for a while now. Doberman is just wrapping up a contract with a Tribal Nation on the coast that we feel very honored and lucky to work with them. They reached out to us for PSPS. So, we've been involved really heavily in that process. We've worked with a couple of universities now, but in terms of your perspective and PSPS, just for our audience sake, because we have a lot of people who are not in California, obviously. Can you explain what PSPS (public safet power shutoff plans) are, where they kind of came from, and then maybe you and I can just talk about the applicable information that can be applied across the country, right? Like Texas, for example, that just had a major power shut off.
Guest: Patrick McGinn (6m 39s):
Sure, So PG&E (Pacific gas and electric) has been responsible for several huge fires in California. And because of that, they have been now for the last year or two since campfire, I believe in 2018. So starting in 2019, they started doing what they call public safety, power shutoffs, which means that when there's red flag warnings or when there's dry vegetation, low moisture, possibly high winds and really hot temperatures, that there's a highest likelihood that there's going to be a fire. So, there's a red flag warning in a certain area of California, PG&E if they work in that area, they work in most of Northern and Central California, they will turn off the power to that neighborhood or to that portion of the city or the county could be wide swath across, you know, dozens of miles or it could just be centralized to certain neighborhoods. When we were on the federal team and even at the state level, their first priority when disasters happen is getting the power back on.
That's the thing that causes the most amount of trouble for people in their everyday life. Well, with PSPS public safety power shut off, that's how we'll refer to it from now on that is happening without a disaster happening. So, they're creating disasters by trying to mitigate starting bigger fires. So, we can just turn off the power to this neighborhood here that hopefully when the winds come through and our lines, you know, slapped together and create sparks, that it won't create sparks because the power won't be on. So, they're trying to avoid starting another fire because they almost went bankrupt the last time from all the lawsuits that they got.
Host: John Scardena (8m 37s):
Huge bailout, it was pretty messed up. But part of the problem is that their systems are just so outdated too, right? Like they're really outdated systems.
Guest: Patrick McGinn (8m 49s):
We only have a few companies, power companies, utility companies that are providing mass power. PG&E is one of them, California Editing is another one in Southern California and they also do public safety power shutoff. They just don't call them that. But they've been doing that for a little while now, but what we found is that it causes the biggest problems and this should be obvious, but for those who have access and functional needs, people with disabilities, and people who have medical needs, like they can't sleep without certain machines. They can't, they're on dialysis. They need a charger, they need whatever it is for whatever medical device that they need to live or they needed to charge their computer so they can communicate with others so that they can talk so that they can move around.
So this past week I was on a call with 2-1-1, which is social, a number you can call in California and maybe in other states as well, if you can call, they can connect you to social services. So, it was the meeting with them and a meeting with a group from PG&E to talk about how we can, how they can fund local community organizations to potentially provide people with hotel rooms when there's a PSPS, only people with access and functional needs. There's another big issue with food when that happens.
Guest: Patrick McGinn (10m 21s):
So Kincade fire, 2019 at Santa Rosa, there was a like 200,000 people evacuated in Santa Rosa, but also there was PSPS. So, everybody has food and it was for five days. So, everybody food in their refrigerator or freezer went bad. That's something that affects everybody. The PSPS kind of levels, it doesn't matter. You're just like disasters. It doesn't matter your class or your income or anything kind of levels the playing field for people. But for AFN, specifically people with access and functional needs, we're now in the planning process of figuring out, okay, when that happens, can we get them a hotel room?
One big part of the conversation that I brought up was, well, that's a Band-Aid. Putting them in a hotel room is Band-Aid and that costs a lot of money over time. They're going to keep doing PSPS for the next five to ten years. At least maybe they'll just keep doing it, yeah. So, I brought up the idea of, well, the good mitigation strategy, why don't we look at getting these people a generator, they run, you know, a thousand dollars, the ones that we usually get for people. Well, why don't we get them a generator and teach them how to use it that way they don't have to leave their home. When you remove someone from their home, it's already a stressful environment if they have to evacuate, but if they have to leave, they don't even have to evacuate, they have to leave because their power is off and you're an able-bodied person, that's still, you know… Did I grab everything from home kind of stressful? Well now you can't fully take care of yourself on your own. You rely on other people and it's a much scarier, stressful environment. You have to go to a hotel. I just don't think it's the best solution, but it's something that we want to be part of. So, we're talking about being part of that and getting reimbursed by those by PG&E or by the, by the sub grantee for how to do that. But yeah, I'm hoping that they got me in contact with a group that focuses on alternative energy sources to keep people at home, whether that's giving them extra battery packs, whether that's giving them cell phone chargers or those big blocks that can plug a USB into and charge anything.
It doesn't last forever, but I've got one that has like four cell phone charges on it, which is awesome. But maybe, you know teaching. Yeah, I mean, not giving the purchasing generators for people, because if we really are thinking about it, if it's a thousand dollars and they had a PSPS in their area and it was over the course of a couple of years, it was over 10 days. With the average cost of a hotel being $125, well, within a couple of years, you know.
Host: John Scardena (13m 8s):
Like even with discounts, a lot of people aren’t even aware the discounts that they can get. So like hotels right now are just insane because of COVID right. The cleaning fees and everything else. You're talking like maybe you'll hit that thousand dollars max in just a couple of days, the motel eight, there was, a friend called me a motel eight and motel six. They were both charging $450 a night. My friend was like, so what we did, we usually went to Walmart. We bought a tent and some air mattresses and our family just slept on basically on the ground because we did not expect the motel eight to charge us $450 for the one night for one room.
So, there's stuff like that too going on where there's other constraints that are happening because of COVID. And because of other things you talked about, yeah. You talked about training people, right and that was highlighted for us for two reasons. Hurricane Laura, the number one killer in that disaster was people using their generators inside of their home. So, creating fumes and therefore, I think there was a heat desk just called S caused by that. So, what we did is when we went to our contract and we said, hey, you have to buy these generators.
We looked at the scope, we looked at the size and we're like, hey, let's make sure we give you training on this too. So like making sure that you can keep fuel inside of some generators, but you sat there during the lines, you have to put stabilizer there, where do you store them? Can we put them in a permanent location outside of the home? So, just that training piece is so important, even on something like, hey, go buy this smaller generator. That's going to help you have one appliance or be able to charge your wheelchair or whatever, to be able to hook that up for people is a process in itself.
Guest: Patrick McGinn (15m 12s):
Oh yeah, absolutely. It has to be a whole campaign with preparedness procedures on how to work it and to go to those communities and talk directly to those people, not providing them with a pamphlet that says, here's how you do it. Actually going places and instructing people how to do that. The model that we're doing all of this off of is my counterpart, the disaster services director down in Southern California, named Nick knew when he did this in San Diego already. So, we're trying to mirror the success story of San Diego, where he was providing hotel rooms for people during PSPS events last year in San Diego, because that worked well. They're going to upward. We're going to try at other places as well and see how that works. But I've gotten calls from the California department of social services just last year asking, hey, we've got people up near where the campfire was up in Butte County and people with medical disabilities, they need medical devices. They need power. What can you provide? It's like, well, when do you need this by tomorrow? There's no planning for this, we were not ready for this. However, the approach and they were just struggling in the moment, reaching out to whoever they could, because this is causing a really big issue for those people.
So where in evacuation, a fire is a huge deal and it's a disaster. It's the worst case scenario for everybody losing the power for people who rely on the power to live every day, that is catastrophic. There should be inflation for those people for PSPS. It's a serious issue. So right now, yeah, there's lots of community efforts to try to figure this out and try to plan for it and we put them in hotels. When we put them in hotels, can other organizations provide them with other social services that they may need? Are there organizations that donate medical equipment? And there are, let's reach out to those, let's reach out to crisis counseling or mental health services or emotional spiritual care and kind of get, it's starting to like build the puzzle together, putting it together. So, it's not just Salvation Army. It's not just 2-1-1. It's not just the PG&E. It can be lots of different organizations to help cater to these people. But it's something that I know that struggle with as well.
Host: John Scardena (17m 41s):
Yeah. Highlighting a lot of things to the point earlier in the show about how can this apply to other emergencies around the country, we got a rude awakening in Texas, it wasn't manmade, like intentionally turn it off, but it was man-made cost, right. Without fuel the long story long, they didn't have power for huge swaths of Texas for a long period of time during a winter event, which they were unprepared. So, they had like this dual thread of like hey, it's cold plus you don't have power. What are we going to do? That's when I was like, okay it's not like a public safety power shut off, but there is a power outage.
What do you do when extended power outages as you and I both know hurricanes caused them, tornadoes caused them. There’re so many things that cause power outages, like the grid is actually truly vulnerable. I was reading a report about you know, there hasn't really been any thought process into the mitigation of manmade threat to power in the US like you can literally walk up to a substation and put your hand on it, basically you can. There's just so many vulnerabilities around it. There's the man-made caused, intentional, some unintentional, there's acts of nature and so on. We had to deal with power outages all the time and that's not necessarily like this. People don't think of a power outage as like the doomsday event, but you're right for people who rely on that insulin or other medications that have to be kept cold. Yeah. That is lifesaving COVID tests, or, you know, the vaccination, the vaccines, they have to be kept in minus 70, minus 80 freezers. There’s even lab research that I had to deal with in DC. I worked for a campus that if they lost all the research from a lack of power, then that's pretty much gone.
Goodbye cancer research in the US, so lots of reasons why we should focus on power outages. I would argue comparing that to like a hurricane or something else. It's fairly straightforward of what you need to do to mitigate that. A generator is one thing I'll give you another one before you might want to jump in is if you are dealing with that research side or trying to keep things cold, especially from the emergency management perspective, MOU (memorandum of understandings) for dry ice, keeping things cold for a really long period of time. What would you suggest to those emergency managers outside of California? You've already started to hit on it, but like, what are some of those planning constraints that you have to think about and how do you start mitigating the threat of a power outage?
Guest: Patrick McGinn (20m 40s):
Okay so two things, I guess this is more for like city/county sitting in county emergency managers, but it's a whole community. Whole community doesn't just refer to the whole community response where it's your private sector, public sector and your nonprofit. It also is responding to the whole community, including those people who are marginalized. Those people who have disabilities minority and the minority demographics in the population. How are you planning for people who maybe they're not English speakers, but aside from that, the price from planning for those people, you don't need to be the expert on that either. Often people emergency managers think, oh, I need to know everything about every demographic. No, you don't. There’re organizations out there that do. You need to reach out to them and find out where they're at. If you need to include that in your planning, if you don't, I would still suggest reaching out to whole community partners to solve issues that you alone cannot solve. So, another thing you're not expected, and the county emergency manager, city emergency manager, to solve all the issues, you're expected to know the people who can solve the issues. You're expected to coordinate those people and facilitate those meetings to come up. They come to solution. So, reach out to your local VOAD and reach out to the power company and reach out to find out where the grants are at and reach out to those.
You don't know who could help you. Maybe it's Salvation Army, maybe it's Southern Baptist. Maybe it's Red Cross. Maybe it's the Mennonites at LDS, whoever it's going to be, it's going to be a group effort. So, you don't need to be the expert. You just need to find the experts and start having those discussions, because those people would be happy to have those discussions with you.
Host: John Scardena (22m 24s):
The emergency management expert is a somebody who is an expert in understanding how the spider web is interconnected, right? That's where I find like the most competent emergency managers. When they're able to say, I took all this time in the planning of a disaster to say, who could be anybody who could touch this disaster? So by the time you turn it on it, you're not trying to figure that out, but you're literally calling Patrick McGuinn at the Salvation Army like, hey, I know exactly what you do, and I need some help here and you already had that relationship. We always say its relationships. So really what it is, is understanding the spider web, understanding how everything's interconnected.
You said this mic drop moment. It's going to be the quote for the show. So, I'm calling that out right now, but he said the whole community equals responding to the whole community. I threw the equals in there for you, but that’s true. We think so much about the whole community of response or the whole community of the people we work with, but it truly is about the people and when you start, I've been doing this thing at Doberman quite a bit. We've hired, we've had this really great year. We've hired quite a bit of people and they come up with projects. So, they want to work on different things. I keep on finding myself, asking the same question, what is the outcome that you want?
It's amazing to see the thought process change of like, how they think they should accomplish their goal or their project. Because lots of people think like, oh, I started a race thinking like, you know, when I hear the gun go off, but if I want to be the last, if I want to be last, or if I want to be first at the finish line, thank you. That's the word I was thinking about. That I want to think of the finish. You got to think of the finish line first, right? It's like fast and furious is a fun moment, fast and furious when he always goes too soon. Then he hits his novice after, right? Because he's seeking to the finish line as part of his objective. That’s a big plan planning tip there, responding to the whole community.
You focus a lot more on that with Salvation Army. In FEMA, your whole job was basically figuring out like what the disaster was in the scope of the disaster and when things can turn on and all this stuff, and you start looking at lifelines and everything, especially there at the end. But now you focus much more on the local and you brought this up last time. I thought that was really interesting, you're talking about what catastrophic disasters are and for the people who are impacted, they always are catastrophic disasters. You brought that up again today of like, hey, a power outage might not seem like a big deal, but it is for people when they're on that lifesaving side of it, right. Or that the life sustainment side of power. To your final thoughts, maybe, because we're going to be wrapping up here soon of what would your advice be to emergency managers across the country who have only worked in either local or only worked in federal or state, large scope versus localized. What is the gap? Do you think is between the strategic level and that I would call what you do tactical level? Is there something that here's a miss between the two that we could do better on?
Guest: Patrick McGinn (25m 49s):
I think there's a behavior that can be adopted from both that benefits both. I like what Joe Delamere has said in his show about when they were becoming more innovative of how to connect the supply chain. When they ran out of certain materials companies that traditionally make those materials couldn't make anymore. So, the behavior that everybody runs into including emergency managers is, well, I'm going to do it this way because it's always been done this way and I'm comfortable doing it this way. This is the way the government's always done it. But when I say whole community, whole community is not the way things have been done, but not in a very coordinated manner when you're trying to think of solutions to how's our local government going to pay for salt trucks when it snows every seven years.
Well, if it happens every seven years, you don't pay for salt trucks because you don't have storage. You can't afford it. What you do is you reach out to the salt truck company and you make a deal and you sign a contract and you work it out with them. That's the power of whole community. That's the power of well, we didn't ever do it this way before, but okay. We can make it work. They're willing to work with us on this. That's how you create innovative solutions to help people in unique problems, yeah.
Host: John Scardena (27m 9s):
I liked that too. I liked the idea of the salt truck company because if you try to do that in the moment, it will be exponentially more expensive for you to do that and it will be, it will be ugly and it'll be messy. It'll be stupid. They'll walk away like, oh, I got the job done. You'll pat yourself on the back and you'll be like taking a shower and half your hair's falling out. Right? It will be super stressful. It's like, hey, once every seven years, or it's going to be a long time before we have a snow venue, put that MOU in place. All you have to do is, I'm going to pull up my handy-dandy cell phone here, hey, enact the MOU and enact a memorandum of understanding here, contract on, you know, oh cool, great done. You can move on to higher priorities, which is getting to people who need the lifesaving help, right. So, I think that's a great call-out we're going to have you back on the show because we always have you back on the show. Woo. Yeah, do you have any closing remarks or thoughts that you've been thinking about lately that you would like to share with our audience?
Guest: Patrick McGinn (28m 23s):
Yeah maybe just one. You don't have to do it alone, whatever you're trying to do, whether you're trying to write a plan, whether you're trying to come up with actual sustainable solutions or response solutions, recovery, whatever it may be. You're not alone. You’re part of the community, whether you are with a business with government, with nonprofit, philanthropic, your part of a larger community of people that also want to help their community. So just keep that in mind every day.
Host: John Scardena (28m 52s):
I think that's a great call-out and Patrick's not allowed to do this cause he's with Salvation Army, but I can do it for myself. So, don't do it alone, work with Doberman Emergency Management. If you're an emergency manager trying to get something done and you have a gap that you've identified, or you need to know where your gaps are, that’s a great, that was an easy segue, easy pitch into Doberman. You can reach out to us at info@dobermanemg.com there.
But the whole perspective of things. This was a great episode talking about the whole community, talking about PSPS (public safety power shut off), and really like power shutoffs in general of the constraints that emergency managers have to think about pulling in the experts from where they are, wherever they come in, get those contracts in place before disaster happens. You made a lot of call-outs there. You also made a lot of call-outs about hearing about the individual and the individual needs. You know, starting from the outcome, what is the outcome you want? You want those people to be taken care of so you call that out. You also called out training and helping people and actually going to them, not just coming in on pamphlet, which is a hundred percent endorsed. So great call-outs, it's always a pleasure to talk to you, Patrick. Thanks again for coming on the show.
Guest: Patrick McGinn (29m 53s):
It's an honor to be here.
Host: John Scardena (29m 55s):
Good, so if you liked this episode from Patrick and myself, Patrick McGuinn with Salvation Army. You got to give us that five-star rating, you got to subscribe. We want to see you next week and if you have questions, you can reach out to Patrick and a couple of different ways. You can contact us on LinkedIn at Doberman Emergency Management. You can contact us on Facebook or our Instagram, kind of Twitter with Disaster Tough Podcast. I say kind of Twitter, because we don't really use it, but if you want to use it, hey, might as well reach out to us. We'll pass it on to Patrick, we can see it and we'll see you next week, bye.