Digital Extra: The Station Fire

The confidential study echoes findings from a separate review of the state's response to the fire at The Station nightclub.

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, July 18, 2004

BY MARK ARSENAULT, EDWARD FITZPATRICK AND TOM MOONEY
Journal Staff Writers

PROVIDENCE -- Deficiencies in the state's Emergency Management Agency, cited last week by a consultant, should have come as no surprise to the Carcieri administration, which for 10 months has kept secret another critical assessment of the state's emergency management program.

The unreleased review found that Rhode Island in 2003 met standards for emergency management accreditation in only 18 of 54 categories, based on nationally-recognized criteria.

Despite that score, the EMA's director, Maj. Gen. Reginald A. Centracchio, insists that Rhode Island stands ready to manage any crisis.

"Can we do the job right now?" Centracchio said Friday. "You bet your life we can do it right now."

The Rhode Island Assessment Report, authored by the Emergency Management Accreditation Program (EMAP), is marked "CONFIDENTIAL," and is dated September 2003. It was written after a one-week visit to Rhode Island in July 2003 by a team of emergency management professionals. The Journal obtained a copy of the 44-page EMAP assessment last week -- just days after Carcieri publicly released another study, by Titan Corp., that criticized the performance of the EMA during The Station nightclub fire.

Titan Corp. concluded that the state's emergency management system "failed to function effectively" at the February 2003 fire in West Warwick that killed 100 people -- a conclusion rejected by Centracchio.

In crisis or disaster, the EMA is charged with "protecting lives and property through mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery," according to Titan.

Like the Titan report, the confidential EMAP assessment cited deficiencies in planning -- the state failed to meet accreditation standards for any of the eight EMAP criteria related to emergency planning.

The state also met none of the six EMAP standards for "direction, control and coordination."

And the state met none of six standards for "operations and procedures."

The Rhode Island EMA has done better with "training," meeting all five EMAP standards, and in "program management," meeting four of six, according to the assessment report.

Grant C. Peterson, the Titan vice president who directed the firm's study in Rhode Island, said the confidential EMAP assessment "parallels what we pretty much found -- we just used kinder words.

"When you see 0-for-6 and 0-for-8 [in grading] for planning and command and control," Peterson said, "that is very serious stuff."

THE EMERGENCY Management Accreditation Program is a voluntary process financed through the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Defense.

The program sends teams of emergency management professionals from around the country into a state to determine if its emergency management system meets national standards.

So far, 28 states or territories have been evaluated; only Arizona, Florida and the District of Columbia have received accreditation.

"The standards are fairly new and they are rigorous," said Emily DeMers, EMAP executive director. "We consider them a fairly high bar to reach."

DeMers said each state's report was confidential; she would not comment on Rhode Island's assessment, or compare its evaluation with those of other states. Of those states so far evaluated, "most states are in the middle somewhere," she said.

Governor Carcieri said he had asked for the EMAP study. "We felt that after The Station fire, with all the homeland-security issues, we needed to start building our plan out, making sure we have as good an emergency management program as we can," he said. "So first thing is: Let's look at the accreditation standards and let's see how we stack up right now."

After seeing the finished report, "We talked about: 'OK, it didn't look so good in a number of areas, now what do we have to do?' " Carcieri said. "The idea was to take that evaluation and then go to work and start addressing the deficiencies."

He said his biggest concern was whether there were "major deficiencies that in any way might have either caused fatalities or caused greater injury" at The Station, Carcieri said. "That was not the case."

The EMAP assessment says, among a number of other recommendations, that Rhode Island needs to do more to identify potential hazards, to develop a strategy to deal with the effects of hazards that cannot be eliminated, to tune mutual-aid agreements, and to update the state's Emergency Operations Plan.

"While the State Emergency Operations Plan meets many of the requirements of the standard, its age and the fact that many of the areas are no longer current indicate that the document is not usable," EMAP stated. "The state mitigation plan is found to be noncompliant with this standard; the program lacks a coherent recovery plan as well as an all-hazards strategic plan."

EMAP found that "most areas contained within the [Emergency Operations Plan] have incorrect contact information." Also, "information regarding overall responsibility to control and manage state operations is limited to general guidance, with limited specifics regarding how that control and management will be accomplished."

EMAP was satisfied with the EMA's training programs. Training records "for state and local officials and first responders were complete and readily accessible."

Centracchio, the commanding general of the Rhode Island National Guard, said the Emergency Operations Plan plan will be updated by October. "If we went right back to EMAP in [October], you'd see significant improvements in those areas."

The EMAP completed its Rhode Island study in September 2003, as Titan Corp. began its third month of a 13-month process to evaluate the emergency response to The Station fire. Peterson said Thursday that he and his Titan team were "well along on our process before we were made aware" of the EMAP study.

Categories in which Rhode Island had the most difficulty with the EMAP criteria included key areas of emergency management, such as: planning; direction, control and coordination; operations and procedures; and logistics and facilities, Peterson said. In the key area of communications and warning, the state met two of three criteria.

"Those are the core elements you have to have in place to be able to respond, recover and manage the assets of the state" in a crisis, Peterson said in an interview. "If you don't have those five elements in the upper 80 or 90 percent [of capability], you have a problem."

Centracchio cast the EMAP assessment differently: "This is a voluntary self-assessment on a set of standards that was established by a group of emergency managers across the nation," he said. "It's called 'accreditation,' the same thing schools go through across the nation . . . to achieve a level of proficiency in meeting a standard."

The EMAP assessment is a tool "to determine what it is going to take to make us a better organization," he said.

"Having this in place, [we] can clearly devise a focused plan to identify what we don't have," Centracchio said. "That starts with identifying where the deficiencies are. Now, I use that term, 'deficiencies,' not in a derogatory way. Let's use the word 'shortcomings' to achieve accreditation. I think that's fair."

The 2003 EMAP assessment established a "baseline," Centracchio said. He hopes to invite the EMAP back in 18 months to review the state EMA for accreditation -- providing the agency gets enough resources to continue to improve, he said.

WHY WAS THE EMAP report kept secret?

"It was never kept secret," Governor Carcieri said in an interview Friday. "The lieutenant governor, if I recall, he has regular monthly briefings, and I know that report has been a subject of those. It's been available."

Not so, said Lt. Gov. Charles J. Fogarty, who chairs the 31-member Emergency Management Advisory Council, which advises the governor on emergency preparedness.

"I have seen a couple of pieces of it, but it has not been officially released," Fogarty said, "and neither I nor the council has been briefed on it or been given the report."

Fogarty said the council had asked Timothy Brown, Carcieri's former homeland-security adviser, for updates on both the Titan report and EMAP. "We have gotten, I would say, very vague statements about both, and no substantive discussion," he said.

Carcieri said: "I don't want to get into a he said/she said. My understanding is, it had been presented to that council. If I'm wrong, I'll stand corrected. It certainly shouldn't be any surprise. This has been a working document within emergency management since last fall."

While he described the 10-month-old EMAP report as "public information," Carcieri also called it "an internal working document" and "more a workbook for emergency management."

Why didn't Carcieri release the EMAP assessment, as he released the Titan report? "It was a working document," he said. "It was an internal working guideline to know the areas we needed to improve on." But, he said, "There was no intention to hide it or anything."

Centracchio on Friday argued the case for withholding the report. "I would be in much disfavor of having this report published, not for any other reason than to give fodder to potential individuals who want to do harm to us," he said.

But if the public doesn't know where the deficiencies are, how can they know that their officials are addressing them?

"Because we've said that we are," Centracchio said. "I've said this many times publicly -- we are making significant improvements to our operations. You need to trust the public officials that they are doing the job, without publicizing to the whole world where our exact, specific deficiencies are."

MANY ISSUES cited in the reports "had already been identified as problem areas, particularly communications," Fogarty said, and the EMA was already working to fix many of those problems.

For example, Centracchio said, the state now has seven hazardous material teams, seven contamination teams and a new radio network that allows the agency to notify all police and fire departments of an emergency, with the push of a button.

Last fall, Fogarty asked for a report documenting what the EMA had done since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he said. That report, which has been sent to the governor's office, has not been released publicly; it shows that "the first response capacity of the whole system has improved significantly since 9/11. We're moving in the right direction," Fogarty said.

Rhode Island is one of 20 states whose EMA falls under the jurisdiction of the local National Guard, according to the National Emergency Management Association, a professional group of emergency response officials. In most states, the EMA falls under the office of the governor or the state department of safety.

While the state had until recently had its own homeland security adviser in the governor's office, as well as the advisory committee led by Fogarty and the state EMA, Centracchio said the chain of command is clear. "In my mind, there is no doubt as to who's in charge" in an emergency, he said. "That's the governor."

Peterson, of Titan, was critical of the EMA's position under the umbrella of the National Guard, and Carcieri has talked about pulling the EMA out, and moving it from the Guard's Command Readiness Center in Cranston.

Fogarty said, "I will support any effort to strengthen EMA." But he said the agency was put under the Guard in 1996 to improve it. "Before it was under the National Guard, it was buried in the subbasement of the State House in rat-infested quarters," he said. "Since moving to the Guard, it may not be perfect, but its professionalism, morale, visibility and operational ability has improved."

Peterson contends: "The emergency management group feels a little bit like a stepchild. They are in there competing for funds. There are good people in there, but they really don't have the facilities they should have or the resources." For instance, "If you're not using emergency management software that is available on the open market, that all states have in structuring and operating in the event of an emergency," Peterson said, "then you have a problem."

CARCIERI SAID the state is already moving to upgrade its emergency equipment: it will open bids Thursday for a new mobile command unit.

"One of the big things, if I recall, was mobile communication, because we found that with The Station fire, the ability for the field command units to talk to one another was severely limited," Carcieri said. "So they have come up with a [request for proposals] for a new mobile unit which will be state of the art. So that will rectify that particular deficiency."

"In some areas, we may need to beef up the state's commitment," Carcieri said.

The state also needs more flexibility in how it uses federal grant money, the governor said. Now, 80 percent of federal money must go to local communities to build emergency response capability, leaving only 20 percent for the state.

"I think with a state like Rhode Island -- a small state -- I don't think that's necessarily the right apportionment," Carcieri said. "I've had conversations with Homeland Security, in Washington, and I'm trying to look at a little more flexibility because in our state, as we saw in West Warwick, a major incident is quickly going to overwhelm the local capacity and it's going to fall directly on the state."

So is Rhode Island ready today if something similar to The Station fire or even worse occurred?

"I think we're better prepared today, but on a scale of 1 to 10, are we a 10? No," Carcieri said. "On balance, I would say we're maybe a 7, but we're looking to get to a 10."

DIGITAL EXTRA: Recap Journal coverage of the report assessing the response to The Station nightclub fire, and look back at the fire and its aftermath, at:

http://projo.com/extra/2003/stationfire/