In 2010 I worked for FEMA Region V to develop, among other appendices, the ESF-8 appendix to their Catastrophic Earthquake Plan. With my years of field experience, response and planning I convinced FEMA Region V that 96 hours is unacceptable if the goal we all put number one per ICS training is truly life safety. Disaster epidemiology makes it clear, post-earthquake life safety missions last for at most 72 hours for the majority of the initial preventable morbidity and mortality.

The appendix and response philosophy I championed and FEMA Region V supported called for pre-designated and pre-allocated assets to deploy immediately upon the established triggers, without waiting for ground truth assessment. There are inherent risks with this response concept but we have good science on where to anticipate damage and casualties, gap analysis and science.

Bottom line is federal assets will be deploying essentially blind (except for pre-planning projections) and should be arriving at impacted county borders within 12 hours, at which time local response entities will have a very good idea where the biggest problems are to adjust deployment if needed. This is not a concept the FEMA HQ is keen on nor wanting to set as a precedent, but either we take new actions to change predictable past short comings or we don’t.

The bigger issue is that federal assets are too few to meet all the predictable gaps and therefore much works remains in pre-planning super EMAC agreements to ensure critical assets arrive within a therapeutically relevant time frame.