by Tony Ghazel
It is clear that we live in a beautiful place and that we love to be involved in our community. Last week proved to me that we also live in an area that is fragile and vulnerable technologically. We have become dependent on technology for medical needs, to do commerce, study, communicate with loved ones, shop and be entertained.
An additional component of this technology is emergency medical and disaster response, and the use of other life saving devices that need to communicate over telephone wires. We found ourselves unable to call 911 in an emergency, and unable to communicate with the other islands or the mainland. Our cell phones couldn’t call landlines, some cell phones didn’t work at all, our landlines couldn’t call the mainland, and so on. This all happened because an underwater cable was severed and cut us off.
I am so grateful for all the efforts of the different agencies that are tasked with life threatening response, and other emergency respondents, particularly OIFR staff and volunteers under the leadership of Chief O’Brien. I am also happy that we saw cooperation between OPALCO and CenturyLink to work through the need to share infrastructure so that these critical services could be restored. Of course, there are hundreds of others involved in different capacities who made this disaster less of a disaster.
The events of last week also made me realize that we are not well prepared. This is a wake up call for our communities and county. I suggest that, after the dust settles and we have communication fully restored, we gather all the participants and stakeholders and come up with a plan to insure that we can meet this challenge in the future in a more beneficial and seamless manner.
It is time that emergency responders, emergency management personnel, Internet service providers, communications providers, county departments, county council, libraries and schools convene and work out a plan of what needs to be accomplished if we find ourselves in such an emergency in the future. These things will happen again. The event could be an accident, or it could be inflicted by somebody to cause us harm, but it will happen.
So let us build upon the lessons that we’ve learned, and work as a community to make disasters such as this less painful. Communication is critical.
Tony P Ghazel is a private businessman and a member of the Orcas Island School District Board.
Tony,
Well said. May it be so.
spot on, Tony. Boy Scout motto, right?
Yet again, we need to step up and assume better control of things that are crucial to island life.
In the Deer Harbor Plan Review Committee meeting yesterday the situation regarding the phone outages was reviewed and all seven members agreed that surely this event would alert our residents to just how lucky we are to be a part of the lifestyle of Orcas Island and environs and at the same time be put on notice about, as Tony points out, how fragile many of the things are that we enjoy and use most. For the past year, DHPRC has worked with closely with Orcas Fire to establish some guidelines and instruction about what to do in case of a major earthquake that required an escape route for residents in the area. In the exercise to test the communication between people who might need help and people who could respond, the one nearly unworkable aspect of the planning was the communication – and that was before the cable was severed.
Why weren’t our emergency services people prepared? It would seem that spending nearly TWO MILLION dollars per year (1/2 on administration salaries and benefits!) while running less than 2 calls per day, they might find the time to be ready for an incident such as this instead of the mad scramble that took place.