by Jack Lee
My class at Joint Forces Headquarters began at 1800 hours last Friday and ended Saturday night at 2330 hours (11:30 pm).
I used military time because it was a military class as the location already implied, although this time some civillians were in the group due to the nature of today’s emergency plans that mandate integrating agencies with the military in times of crisis. Thus the classes were titled as: Integrated Command Systems #300 and #400. This translates to, how people high up in government who deal with disasters will manage your survival when the worst happens, from earthquakes, raging fires, hurricanes, floods and even events like 9/11.
My two bulky work books measured nearly 2 1/2″ thick, hundreds of pages with thousands of factoids, which gave me a little insight why so many officials in New Orleans didn’t follow the federal guidelines and were so ill prepared. The amount of information you have to learn is almost overwhelming.
To make it more challenging, we went through about 80% of it in record time. And even though we had been scheduled for three days of classroom training, we used only two to get thru it all. The actual course for less experienced students is supposed to be 5 days long and even then it’s a cram course. I mentioned that so you could get some perspective when I say we moved thru it pretty fast. The speed was due in part because our class was loaded with the top managers from Homeland, Cal Fire, DoT, OES and the military and these over-achievers live, eat, sleep and breathe this stuff every day of their working lives; so we cruised through the material faster than your average class. (And having said that, you might wonder what the heck was I doing there? I’ll explain it later.)
We didn’t go through every page of the work books (maybe 20%-25% was skipped) because those areas we deliberately skipped over were covered in previous classes and this reflected again on the depth of the class. Everyone present was expected to have been through many, many OES, FEMA, MEMS, NIMS classes before this one and most were certified in (MEMS) basic Military Emergency Management System.
Once we launched into the material with the class instructor (who just went off duty as the Battle Officer for Charlie Shift in JOC, 12 hours long) the pace was relentlessly fast and never slowed for a moment. Breaks were given, but they were a strict 10 minutes long, just long enough to walk down a football field long hallway to the toilet and then right back at it again. I finally slipped into bed around midnight…it was a 15 hour work day for me, but that was not nearly as long as it was for some
We started 15 minutes early the next morning because everyone was in place and ready to go which surprise me, even coming from a military environment. I guess this would be a testament to the no-nonsense professionals in the class. These people, military and civilian, both men and women, had the best work habits I’ve ever seen! They were almost fanatical about learning, but then when you consider what the material will be used for, it was understandable, we’re talking about life and death here. Anyway, the next morning just before class was about to kick off I discovered our instructor from the previous day had just pulled an all-night shift in the JOC, but he seemed alert and ready to go, despite the fact that he had no sleep in the past 30 hours! I expected at any minute he would beg off and turn the class over to one of the assistant instructors, but he never did and the fast pace of instruction continued unabated, slide after slide went up, this class day lasted over 15 hours and sometimes it felt like it was “death by power point” so many slides, so many captions to be read…
The class as a whole didn’t want to stop the flow of instruction for a lunch break, so we took a vote, I lost and we ordered out and sat at our desks and worked while we ate. I voted no as did only 4 others…call me a slacker, but I wanted some down time away from classroom, but that never happened. When the food arrived we grabbed paper plates and loaded them with pizza and washed it all down with sodas. All the while we kept right on working, hour after hour, after hour.
At 1800 hours (6 pm) we took another vote on a diner break and this time we ordered from Subway and repeated the routine, again eating and working right at our desks. My chair was getting really uncomfortable and walking around during breaks just didn’t help much. I was suffering from TB, tire butt.
Some stalwarts didn’t want to eat because it distracted them from the course material, so they drank water or had some coffee and they just kept going, writing up operational plans for theoretical disasters, making elaborate flow charts and such. I figured it out the first day that all these Type A personalities in this class was exactly the kind of people you want to handle a disaster. Because when a disaster strikes you don’t take time out for lunch or dinner breaks, you eat on the fly, lives are on the line! You must assimilate vast amounts of information while making life and death decisions and you keep moving, adapting to changing conditions. In the really big disasters you are choreography and prioritizing the moves of an entire army of rescue workers under the worst possible conditions, so you better be one heck of a good multitasker. Eating a tuna sub in one hand while taking notes with the other and reading from power point presentations is small stuff compared to real disaster management.
13 hours and two exams later in the day I was still hanging in there, however we were finally wrapping it up and it was now 2310 hours (11:10 pm). The total number of the training hours was starting to show on our instructor and all of us, especially some of the older students like me! Fortunately it didn’t reflect on my exam score. Let’s just say I did well, but this was due in part to the fact it was an open book exam. Who couldn’t do a good in an open book? LOL Although I tried to rely mostly on my memory. Noodling thru volumes of information in my brain was far faster and less tedious than flipping through page after page in those work books or my notes looking the answer. And by this late hour I really wasn’t in the mood to do anymore research than was absolutely necessary. Besides I will never be a manager in a disaster relief effort, my only role here was to do a make up for a couple of drills I missed, but I have to say I enjoyed the class (and the competition) and I really did get a lot out of it. I just hope I never have to use it, because if ever do it will be because my unit was activated by the governor and you know that can’t be good.