wildfire. 66 These agencies have their own reasons for conducting the work but often it involves their primary roles and responsibilities: • Fire agencies perform quick and dirty damage assessments under the Situational Unit Leader/ Field Observers to initiate assistance funding and declaration of disaster work often followed by more extensive assessments. • Building and safety staff evaluate the safety of remaining structures or partially damaged structures. • Environmental public health departments may perform assessments of hazardous materials, water treatment facilities or private wells, regulated food service or retail market facilities, solid waste capacities, mass feeding and housing locations, animal control or the many other aspects of environmental public health regulatory programs. • Red Cross may make assessments for the purpose of allowing the public to initiate assistance grants and relief funding. • Air quality monitoring assessments. • Private companies to assess damage/destruction to their facilities impacted and what will become necessary for their own recovery.
For a larger medical facility, an evacuation is a sig - nificant decision and wildfire command staff must weigh alternatives. In the past, hospitals tended towards sheltering in place but since Hurricane Katrina, evacuations must be considered given the disaster and the ability to function and provide ser - vices after it occurs. In a fast-moving wildfire, the time to prepare and to make decisions may be mini - mal and require immediate evacuation or defaulting to sheltering in place. Facility management must be in communication with fire and police command to determine if evac - uation is even an option, given the dynamics of the wildfire. When wildfire behavior indicates a higher level of concern and due consideration of imple - menting evacuation plans, hospital and facility staff must decide and then move quickly to begin and carry out an evacuation. Resources
• Hospital Evacuation Checklist CHA • Hospital Evacuation Checklist DHHS Damage Assessment
One key area for many agencies to participate in is the assessment of the damage to ascer- tain workload potential, resource needs, fund - ing mechanisms, and whether a local entity will require outside resources. For state resources, this might also be a function of how many fires may be occurring throughout the state, the size and scope of those wildfires, the resources being commit - ted, and the potential of not being able to support more operational commitments. Recent wildfires have seen a multitude of agencies and entities performing some type of visual dam - age assessment work following the passage of a
With all the different assessment work being performed, there may be opportunities to share information or ask for certain assessments to be consolidated. For example, with appropriate train - ing, damage assessments can also key in on locat - ing damaged wells and collecting information that might be useful for environmental public health entities. Another example is to select staff who are trained in performing damage assessments to also perform hazardous materials assessments.
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