Portland in an emergency, TOPOFF4-style

I love Portland.

The first thing I was assigned to do, after arriving at Portland International Raceway (PIR) for the emergency exercise with other volunteers from The Salvation Army on Wednesday:

Separating paper from aluminum and recycling the #10 cans used in preparing meals for the workers. As I commented to the woman supervising, “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and we’re still recycling.” That’s my Portland.

In writing this post, I’m aware that the exercise is a Department of Homeland Security thing, and heaven forbid the terrorists would read Amanda Fritz’s blog and learn of security weaknesses. I’m writing this secure in the knowledge that observing a new way to get super-hot mashed potatoes out of the plastic bag they were boiled in, is unlikely to cause a National Security breach. In other words, being a peripheral volunteer, I didn’t learn anything important that could be shared even under torture. So go read someone else’s blog, please, terrorists.

Here’s the scene: It’s Wednesday afternoon – chilly and rainy. Several elderly volunteers and a couple my age/younger signed in, got photo ID cards, and received instructions, off site. We were shuttled to PIR from The Salvation Army’s Moore Street community center on N. Killingsworth (I’ve never been able to find out why it’s called Moore Street, when it’s on Moore Avenue). A police car at the entrance to PIR eyeballed the driver and waved the bus in. As we walked from the bus to the enormous tent, a cloudburst of torrential rain soaked us within seconds. The support tents were at the opposite end of PIR from the mock disaster scene, with the fake Steel Bridge and blown-up bus parts. A collaborative team led by Southern Baptist Convention disaster relief staff/volunteers, assisted by The Salvation Army and Red Cross, prepared meals for all participants on and off site. I was unaware of the extent of disaster work done by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) – most news reports cover the other two agencies only. The yellow-shirted SBC folks I worked with mostly came down from the state of Washington for the event, providing thousands of meals over the weeklong exercise.

So, recycling at a disaster scene in the pouring rain seemed odd at first. But squashing the cans made the volume of waste less, and perhaps in a real emergency, doing the routine would feel comforting. Regardless, after 21 years of volunteering here in Portland, I know that my job as a grunt worker is to do as I’m told. Attacking the big cans brought back fond memories of cooking for 250 people at the children’s camp where I met my husband, anyway. After completing that task as fast and well as it could be done (I take pride in my volunteer stuff no matter how insignificant 🙂, I moved back inside the main tent and worked the food service line, dishing out peas/carrots for a couple of hours as droves of workers came through. Four hours after arrival, I was on my way home again.

The thought crossed my mind that if a nuclear bomb really had been detonated a few hundred yards away, calling volunteers to provide meals close by might not be the best plan. But again, worker bees don’t get to provide feedback. Someone from the TOPOFF4 planning team did interview me at the end of my shift, but the conversation went like this:

Interviewer: “How could the exercise have been improved?”

Me: “Well, as a citizen, I was expecting there would be more information to the general public about what to do in an emergency.”

Interviewer: “We don’t want them to do anything, people coming to the site in an emergency can be a big problem in crowd management”

Me: “It would have been helpful to have some simulated radio broadcasts saying that. As a citizen, I didn’t feel involved in or educated by this exercise until I came here to volunteer.”

Interviewer: “The public has been very involved. We’ve been doing outreach for months.”

Me: “My perception is that I haven’t heard much about what citizens would be asked to do in a real emergency.”

Interviewer: “There has been lots of information given out about that.”

At this point, I realized my lips were moving but apparently no sound was being heard. I was relieved to read Letters to the Editor yesterday, making similar comments that it would have been helpful for all citizens to have been more involved. I’m told the real point of the exercise is to have Top Officials (hence the name) talk with each other. As Scott Moore said on Dave Lister’s radio show yesterday, seems like that could have been accomplished more efficiently in a hotel.

It’s a shame this was a Homeland Security exercise, rather than Emergency Management. I believe Portland is at far greater risk for a catastrophic earthquake than being hit by a nuclear bomb in a terrorist attack, and it would have been better for the entire region to have had an opportunity to run a Major Earthquake drill. Instead, relatively few people were involved, and much of the scenario didn’t make sense. See Scott Moore’s article, Duck and Cover, for more information.