Officials discuss disaster relief

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, October 27, 2005

TACOMA – An eruption of Mount Rainier, a major earthquake on the Seattle fault, a bird-flu pandemic that kills thousands every week – any of those three scenarios could quickly overwhelm local agencies, making clear that emergency efforts need a steadier stream of public money, officials said Thursday.

“We are woefully understaffed, and we need to start by making some hard decisions to increase that staffing,” Pierce County’s emergency manager, Steve Bailey, told state lawmakers at a special hearing.

Washington’s emergency agencies have sought a stable source of state money for years but still rely on federal money for most of their responsibilities, officials said.

The state Military Department, which oversees the state Emergency Management Division, gets less than 4 percent of its budget from the state, agency head Maj. Gen. Timothy Lowenberg said.

That almost total reliance on federal money extends to the local level.

“The locals are doing a fairly good job of paying for their emergency management in the larger jurisdictions,” state emergency director Jim Mullen said. “But it’s difficult … to initiate a new program right now if you don’t have robust resources.”

Sen. Jim Kastama, D-Puyallup, said he will sponsor legislation in the 2006 Legislature to create a statewide program for emergency management funding. His plan is modeled on a program in Florida that draws money from small fees on home and commercial property insurance.

“It will be controversial, but it is a small price to pay for some stability in emergency management funding,” Kastama said after the meeting.

“We need to become more self-sufficient as a state. All emergencies are local emergencies first,” he said during a panel discussion early in the day.

Thursday’s panel also included officials from Seattle, King County, the American Red Cross and the state Health Department. They described how different agencies would respond to major disaster scenarios, including a shallow magnitude-6.7 quake in downtown Seattle and a Rainier eruption that triggers a massive mudflow.

Some panelists, however, said a bird flu pandemic would be the most frightening.

Dr. Jeffrey Duchin, King County’s communicable disease chief, said such an outbreak could kill thousands of people and send tens of thousands in search of medical care each week. Such numbers would overwhelm emergency responders, communications systems and hospitals, while illness and quarantine concerns could rapidly diminish the work force for other crucial services.

And in a global outbreak, help from outside the state would presumably be scant, King County emergency manager Eric Holdeman said. “There isn’t any national or international help coming – it’s what local capacity you have,” he said.

Public education is key to preparing state residents for major disasters, officials said.

Bailey said government should encourage the public to be prepared for periods of self-sufficiency during a major catastrophe. In meetings with the public, officials have found many people with a distorted expectation of government response, Bailey said.

“They expect that within a half-hour of a disaster, someone’s going to show up on their doorstep with a hot meal, with a check for $500 and all the goodwill we can muster,” he said. “And that’s not going to happen.”