In any event of a significant nature, local or tribal resources are immediately pushed beyond their means. Managing human resources is the responsibility of all local and tribal professionals, including the public works professional.

An important issue to be considered when managing human resources is the possibility that employees may be victims themselves. If so, the employees will need some time to attend to their families or personal needs. Management can assist these employees by actions such as providing meals, cashing payroll when banks are closed, or providing fuel for personal vehicles when gas stations are closed.

Even if the employees were not directly impacted by the incident, personal loss and stress will take its toll. Local and tribal professionals should make crisis counseling available to any employee who requests it. Managers themselves should not shy away from counseling, as the stress level for them is significant as well.

Human resource needs may be supported through the private sector, contractors, volunteers, and mutual aid agreements with other communities.

Select the links provided to learn more about how the private sector and volunteers can provide for resource needs.

A mutual aid agreement is an agreement between jurisdictions or agencies to provide services across boundaries in the event of an emergency or major disaster.

The local or tribal community should seek mutual aid agreements with nearby communities or other tribal governments as well as communities that are 100-200 miles away. During large events, neighboring communities may be affected in a similar way, so a mutual aid agreement with a community some distance away will be beneficial to ensure availability of services or resources that are not in use already.

The conditions of the agreement can be to provide reciprocal services or direct payment for services. The costs for these services may be eligible for reimbursement. The employees of the entity providing supplemental assistance are considered as extra hires or contract labor; therefore, both regular and overtime labor are eligible.

Select the link provided to learn about the conditions under which expenses may be reimbursed.

The local or tribal community must consider whether it is able to finance the response and recovery from an incident or disaster. While Federal funding may provide reimbursement for much of the cost, it does not appear overnight. The financial team for the local or tribal government should evaluate possible funding mechanisms to support local efforts until Federal funds are made available as well as to supplement Federal funds. It is advisable to maintain a reserve fund for disaster-related cash flow purposes.

All local and tribal professionals, including the public works professional, should review the information found in the Financial Management Support Annex of the National Response Framework for additional financial management guidance.

Select the link provided to learn about the Financial Management Support Annex.

In an emergency environment, there is often the need to move quickly in the purchasing of goods and services. Therefore, procurement practices are likely to change in these situations. Where the normal procedure may be to offer for bid with a due date in 60 days or more, the need to respond will not allow for such a time table. It is advisable for the local or tribal agency to prepare an emergency procurement ordinance/procedure to address the changes. A thorough legal review of all such procedures is advised.

The use of prearranged contracts or agreements is also a key function of procurement. Prearranged agreements may be used in public works functions such as debris management, inspection services, and utility restoration.

Proper documentation is vital to effective emergency management. All local and tribal government officials should engage in the development of documentation procedures to ensure a comprehensive process.

An important part of these procedures is defining, during the planning process, what individuals and agencies will be responsible for documentation during a local or tribal event. The planning section generally has that responsibility in an organization operating under the Incident Command System (ICS) with an Emergency Operations Center (EOC).

The benefits of accurate and complete documentation include accountability, improved after-action analysis, improvement to future plans, communication with all stakeholders, reduced litigation opportunity, and justification for cost reimbursements.

Select the link provided to learn more about information to be documented and the importance of cost justification.

Gary Eaton

Some of the obstacles that we all face are limited resources, we continually have staff turnover and different availability issues with critical skills, time issues, there’s always the “there’s no time to exercise” comments that you hear, training, dollars available for training. One of the things that we’ve done here is that, about every year we shut down our aqueduct system in order to do internal inspection of the facilities to make sure that we’ve got no problems that are brewing that we’re not aware of, and so we go in and we perform a visual inspection. When we’re doing this, we activate our EOC, and we use the same emergency response forms that we would use, the same terminology, so we treat a non-emergency kind of as an emergency and use it as an opportunity to drill our people. It’s worked very well for us and when we are in an actual emergency situation we find that more people are trained up, and because they’re used to the terminology and how we normally operate, doesn’t seem to be as difficult a transition. I know it’s improved our safety and overall our communication and response time as well.

Christine Walsh

I think obstacles that public works faces are quite varied because of the complexity of public works, so in the City of Beloit, for instance, we developed our own mutual aid agreement. And then resource procurement during a flood or a winter storm, tornado – whatever type – public works is normally responsible for procuring goods. A way to overcome some of those is to have contracts set in place prior to.

Even if it is, you want cases of water for employees or you need chain saws – you know, what is it that you truly need? Those should be contracts that you work out and, and what we decided in our city was to work with our private companies in the city before we went out of the city.

You need to look at how else can you get help for your community, to get your community as quickly through the disaster and into recovery as possible.

Gregg Varner

When a disaster is coming, and if you know it’s coming like in the event of a hurricane, you start keeping records immediately. And then if it’s something that you weren’t able to plan for, like a tornado or an earthquake, keeping records and keeping logs and project reports and all that starts immediately. And the people you assign that to may very well be victims themselves, and they may not show up. So what’s really important is that you have a secondary and maybe even a tertiary appointment of who’s going to do that kind of work, record-keeping, and the like, and that they are trained. The training is critical, and then you practice that, when you do exercises.

In this lesson, you learned that the public works professional must be actively involved in the development of administrative policies and procedures for emergency management. This lesson has reviewed the issues that the public works professional must consider during policy development.