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Hurricane Helene: A Tale of Two Health Systems
Deanna Mool, Chief Legal Officer, UNC Health Appalachian, and Tom Shanahan, Chief Legal Officer, UNC Health, discuss the impact of Hurricane Helene on their respective health systems in 2024 and offer tips on how to respond to a natural disaster from a legal perspective. They recount their experiences on the ground during and after the storm, including maintaining proper communication, procuring and dispersing essential aid and supplies, providing community and staff support, coordinating grant applications, working with FEMA, and more. They also share lessons learned and how to deal with the next natural disaster.
Watch this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORB8h70-EJY
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Welcome to this AHLA podcast. Today, Tom Shanahan and I are going
SPEAKER_03:to discuss the our experience during Hurricane Helene and how a directly impacted healthcare facility paired up and was helped by a distant healthcare facility that wasn't involved in this particular hurricane. So my name is Deanna Mool and I'm the Chief Legal Officer for Appalachian Regional Healthcare System, which is now UNC Health Appalachian, and we are a managed entity by the UNC Healthcare System.
SPEAKER_00:And I'm Tom Shanahan. I'm chief legal officer for the University of North Carolina healthcare system known as UNC Health. And we're a statewide health system. So we have medical center in Chapel Hill and various hospitals throughout the state, some that we own, but some that we manage. And so Deanna and I get to work together quite a bit as a result of that relationship.
SPEAKER_03:So we wanted to talk to you about Hurricane Helene and how, from a legal perspective, you can actually help your client and your team in responding to some type of natural disaster, whether it be a hurricane or tornado or flooding. This was a unique experience. quick occurring event that we didn't have a lot of time to prepare for. And we learned a lot on the back end and we were hoping that that experience could be helpful to all of you. Just to set the stage, UNC Health Appalachian is located in Watauga and Avery counties and some services given in Ashe counties, which is the Northwest corner of North Carolina and butts up against Tennessee. and was not the worst affected area in Hurricane Helene. Certainly our partners at Pardee and Blue Ridge were more affected by Hurricane Helene because they were close to the Asheville area, but we are a smaller rural isolated mountain community. And so it was a unique challenge in getting supplies in and those types of issues. we wanted to start off maybe talking about during the storm and then kind of go chronologically at what happened after the storm and what we've learned from that experience. So I'll give you my perspective during the storm first, and then Tom will let you talk about what you have, what you were doing actually during the storm. So
SPEAKER_00:just watching it all unfold
SPEAKER_03:on TV. Yeah. During the storm, you know, it was really interesting because a lot of one thing that we probably should do in the future is keep more staff on site, right? Some of us were at home near the hospital, but not on site. And the hospital basically became an island in Watauga County and in Avery County, where there was flooding all around, the roads were impassable, and very few vehicles were getting through for about probably a 12 hour period. We certainly lost power. We lost potable water. We were on generator power until we found out that the generator wasn't sized quite big enough at one of our campuses. And so some of the HVAC wasn't working. And so it became a you know, patients first, staff first mantra to just kind of get through the storm. And as soon as we could get through on the roads, all of our leadership was in at the hospital and we were immediately starting to respond. So we were probably 12 hours into the storm before we were really looking at what's next. And then as quickly as the waters came up, they also subsided and the devastation was just left after that.
SPEAKER_00:is this started to unfold. I mean, you're taking me back now and I'm remembering more and more, but so yeah, we have colleagues and teammates and partners throughout Western North Carolina, but including in Hendersonville, the Asheville region, Burke County, Caldwell County. And so we were starting to receive reports in from Appalachian and the colleagues from around those other areas and just an incredible impact. Something like, I'm trying to remember, it was like 30, 30 inches or more of rain over a 24-hour period at that point in late September. The impacts you're talking about, loss of power, loss of access, obviously, to electronic medical record and anything associated with normal operations, one by one came down. And it was from the perspective of those of us in the Triangle and in Chapel Hill, there was a period where there was just very little communication. We weren't able to get through. You all weren't able to get through. And so in the center of the state, we didn't have nearly that kind of impact, but work had already started, obviously, in the... at our offices at UNC Health with our team members there starting to figure out what resources are gonna be needed. What do we need to pull together? What assistance do we need to offer?
SPEAKER_03:And the thing, I mean, to me, Tom, the thing that was interesting was that it hit, right? And it wasn't like everything happened at once. We lost power and then we found out we didn't have water and then our communications went down. So it's like, you're slowly becoming this island. And it was it was just interesting then to try and come and say, OK, how are we going to put these pieces back together one by one? Right. We also had the entrance to our hospital in Avery County. Half the road collapsed. And so we really had to watch traffic coming in and out of there. But keep in mind that the cell towers were down. The Internet went down. And so it was very isolating there. at each of our campuses and I'm sure that again I think Western North Carolina had this much worse than we did and so I don't I don't want to overstate what we experienced because it wasn't the devastation that they experienced. As we started putting our plan back together, we realized we were working with local county administrators to figure out what roads were open, how we could get between our two facilities to bring supplies in, how we could help the community. And what became very interesting is like my first task was get a contract in place to run a bigger generator, right? That was the immediate need that Avery County needed. Well, we found the generator. Then we had to figure out, we had to work with local law enforcement to figure out how to get the generator to the campus and get the fuel to the campus because no gas stations were pumping gas. There was no, No electricity. They couldn't pump gas. And so we were trucking in gas. And when you have roads collapsing, you can't bring a big semi in. You're using smaller trucks. And so everything became an issue. How do we get food? How do we get clean linens? And The interesting thing that came up was people didn't have prescriptions. Right. And so we were getting two and three day prescriptions, relabeling out of out of the stock at the hospital to the community because we didn't really have a choice. Oxygen. There seems to be a lot of people in our area on oxygen. We ended up know we would have we had oxygen tents where people could come and just get oxygen once a couple of days were up because they were running out of oxygen and didn't have power at home and it was hot right it was like 80 degrees and very humid and so it wasn't like a blizzard it was it was the opposite of that um so tom can you maybe tell us how you um helped us get get those supplies in because we probably didn't see all the work that you guys did behind the scenes.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So as it started to unfold, actually, and, you know, so we'll approach this in part as lawyers, right? So there was a little bit of infrastructure that we paid attention to almost immediately from a, you know, from a legal standpoint, but really from an emergency operations standpoint. And, you know, Deanna, you and I worked on this a little bit together, but we put a series of internal contracts in place, internal agreements in place. And really what that was to do two things it was to leverage all of the operations of the system of the unc healthcare system so any part of it could assist any other part of it so whether you were a managed hospital in eastern north carolina if you wanted to send staff or if you had staff available that you could send to unc health appalachian we wanted to make sure we had the underlying infrastructure in place so you could do it, we could track the charges, we could manage the employees, and frankly, set ourselves up to be able to do appropriate reimbursement afterwards and address all those things that you don't want to slow you down in an emergency like liability and malpractice coverage and supervision and all of those things. So we did a lot of that on the front end, and honestly, this was something where the work we had done during COVID actually provided a lot of the templates and a lot of the go-bys. We were able to repurpose a lot of very similar agreements, at least from a legal and financial operations standpoint, just coming out of COVID, and including making the assumption that eventually there would be you know, submission for reimbursement to FEMA. We needed to have things that were auditable and in place. So all these things that we don't want our frontline staff thinking at all about, we don't want them to worry about this at all. There was some of that going on in the background. We at the center of the state started mobilizing in a number of different areas. So I would think of this and, you know, probably five or six buckets, really. But the first is there was a belief and an assumption that a lot of emergency staffing would be needed at the hospitals in the western part of the state. I will say we had an overwhelming response from employees. Every employee from every service area It seemed wanted to get on a bus and go to Western North Carolina. So for a little bit, we actually had to tell people, don't go. Don't don't go out there immediately. And it was a good problem to have, but actually one that could have gotten out of hand very quickly if we hadn't been able to work with our partners, you know, with our hospitals. You know, Deanna, with your team, even to say, tell us what you need and then we'll help you get it. And I'll be interested now, you and I haven't necessarily talked about this, but I'll be interested to hear what you have to say about, you know, did you ever face difficulties? And I'm going to say, look, really, I understand 20 people want to come here, but what we need is a pharmacist from midnight until whenever. So anyway, we put in place something to manage all that.
SPEAKER_03:Well, and we got, I think, really good, really fast at asking just for what we needed and then kindly saying, we can't use that right now. Because the more people you put up here, the more people we have to feed and find somewhere to sleep. And basically every hotel in town emptied, they upped their rates and we started renting rooms because we had staff that had no homes. You know, you're talking about volunteers. We had our HR folks do two things, which I thought were crucial. Reach out to everyone and find our staff. Like we knew that we had a nurse whose home had gone down the mountain and we just didn't they weren't on shift. So we didn't know if they were in it or not. Turned out they had made it to a neighbor's because they heard the house creaking and ran out the door with their pets and lost everything. Right. So we had volunteers. homeless staff because of the hurricane. And then we also had our HR office manage the volunteers. So anybody that thought they needed a volunteer or needed extra staffing, we set up an HR war room separate from incident command where people could just go and say, I'm going to need this, this, and this for next shift, or I'm going to, you know, we need, we had, we had to have volunteers help in our cafeteria because we were feeding fema and national guard out of our avery campus right and so we were you know all that was coordinating we ended up with volunteers at offices at both locations and this you know i have to say this isn't like smooth it wasn't like we had this checklist and said oh we need a volunteer office right we were like okay we have to get we have to limit who's in here and and who can work there because the the management just needed to happen at a different level than the volunteers, right? You didn't need volunteers sitting in on your, your daily briefings.
SPEAKER_02:The
SPEAKER_03:other thing that UNC helped system-wide helped us very much with is we, once we got the internet back in a couple of days and we were able, we couldn't reach our Avery campus initially. So we were driving back and forth sometimes in squad cars, sometimes driving, on roads that were collapsing and had poles on trees over the top of them. I had one perilous journey over to our Avery campus on Monday after the hurricane hit Friday and Saturday. But I probably wouldn't repeat if I didn't have to. But getting satellite phones in place, we were very blessed in that Samaritan's Purse is near our hospital, their worldwide headquarters, and they had satellite phones. And so we started borrowing Starlinks from them And and then eventually UNC arranged for a satellite truck on our campus. The other thing that, Tom, your office was very helpful in was getting waivers for us. Right. We needed to be able to operate in our parking lot. We needed to not have to have accredited locations for the oxygen tents we needed. And so I actually, Tom, we had email the whole time. I don't. really know why, but we did. And from a technological standpoint, I don't know why, but it was great that we had it because Tom was emailing and saying, you know, okay, this waiver came through. The feds have said this. And so, because I didn't have, that wasn't my focus right then was to go find out what waivers had been put in place. I just needed help knowing what I could do. So Tom was able to, Tom's office was able to do that.
SPEAKER_00:No, and that's true. Luckily, our partners at the state were, I would say, proactive in that way, meaning that they would start coming up with, they were good partners because they would start thinking about what are areas where you might need waivers? What are things you might need help with? Where might you need to connect with a federal agency to consult on something like that? I mean, a few other areas that we thought of that we were working in, you know, you just mentioned it, but IT. So, you know, we operate a single IT system across the entire system. So our IT team, which is your IT team, you know, we all work on this. A joint one. A joint IT team, and they were on this. And it's difficult to describe the incredible work that they were able to do. They got the hospitals by and large back up and running as quickly as they could. And from our standpoint, certainly before many other services in the region were available. And you might be able to comment on this. I kept hearing that people in the community would come to the hospital parking lot so they could plug into the Wi-Fi and be able to connect with family members.
SPEAKER_03:Right. We did have, we had that going on because I think they actually stood up a cell tower in the parking lot also, but here was our problem in our Avery campuses with the road half collapsed, we had to limit the traffic coming in. So then we ended up saying, okay, we're going to have to put security at the end of the road and only let emergency vehicles through because the extra traffic was, you know, causing further degradation of the road. And so, you know, That did not go over well with the community I can share with you. But we didn't really have a choice because we had to keep the hospital open. And arranging for DOT to come to a quick inspection and make sure that the road wasn't actually going to collapse when people were on it, that use of half the road was safe. And so that really was the lifeline for that campus. And being in a more rural area and not having experienced hurricanes before, it took probably a little bit longer for our county resources to ramp up. I don't think that would happen again. But initially, we started feeding the community out of our Avery campus because it was necessary. The first responders needed somewhere. They needed air mattresses to sleep on. They needed food. We had one working oven over there, and we're feeding 100 people a day out of the kitchen. But again, as you talked about earlier, You need that contract in place that says you're required to do it and you're willing to help for later FEMA accounting purposes. And so it's interesting that everything you start doing to help the community, you're like, I need a contract now, right? And that's really not... that, you know, that's when the lawyers are looked at like, what are you talking about? We just got to get this done. I'm like, you get it done. We'll get the contract done, you know?
SPEAKER_00:And yeah. And what we try to do is make it easy, right? You know, have only what's essential in there. Explain it. It's easy to, it's easy to execute on. So.
SPEAKER_03:Right. So I guess if maybe we move on sort of to a little bit after the storm, we've kind of started talking about how we started restoring things. And we actually ended up with a WebEx that lasted, I don't know, 120 hours or something like that, because that was a way we could communicate with other campuses. UNC administration or their system office had access to that. And so that was the easiest way. Somebody was always an incident command. And I would recommend this if you have the ability to do so, to open up that way. WebEx or Teams meeting with video, just leave it on in your incident command offices. And then you can always unmute and holler and say, hey, you know, Avery Campus, we need X, do you need X, Y, and Z? Or, you know, Walmart's bringing in water. Where should we have them take it? Who could, you know, can you get five people to unload it? You know, so there were a lot of those kind of coordination that I think having that open channel made it really quick and easy to get answers to those kind of questions. So I thoroughly recommend that as an approach for your incident command, if possible. Um, The other thing that we've had to do, which made me a little bit nervous, is we kept having to increase our staff credit card limits because we were paying for hotels and buying air mattresses and all kinds of things on those cards. So we were calling our credit card company daily to say, can you increase the limit on this card or that card? They're all back down now. But those financial controls, you don't think of, you know, people want to be paid when you walk in the door. They don't want to bill you a month later a lot. of them. So now we continue, Tom, to work with FEMA on the recovery. And I think you sort of alluded earlier to the contracts we had to have in place. But I don't know if you also know that your accounting office helped us right away by reopening all the master account codes that we used during COVID to track time and all that. So maybe you can speak to that a little bit.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, actually, so the controller for UNC Health, so the team we built for COVID has actually still been working, even this many years post-COVID, because there are all of the post-COVID audits that are underway. And actually, we've just recently concluded all of those now and had gotten additional reimbursement as a result of that. So we had just by happenstance, the controller still had the team in place, still had those account codes accessible, and obviously had a lot of know-how in place already, just in terms of working with FEMA, what the expectations would be and what the documentation requirements would be. So that helped some. the state of north carolina and actually the university system we are connected to the university system so the state's university system retained a consultant while the storm was still going on and had that had that firm in place to provide to provide some of that consultation and help in the background as well so it's it's not going to answer all questions right but Because of that, we're able to anticipate the types of documentation that we would need, what expenses we're going to need to track. I remember having multiple conversations about how we were going to track personnel expenditures, for example, how that should be recorded. How do you treat an employee, like I said, at another managed entity who is coming over to the western part of the state? versus how do we treat someone employed directly by UNC Health? And these are our internal issues, but whatever your organization is, you're going to have that set of questions that you're going to have to think through. And you need somebody who's not involved in immediate storm response, who's thinking in terms of, okay, from a reimbursement and audit perspective, what is FEMA going to need to see? Or what is the federal agency or state disaster relief agency going to need to see from that standpoint?
SPEAKER_03:Well, and it was very helpful, Tom, because your office also sent, you know, we had time sheets, paper time sheets right away where we started tracking our time working on Helene versus our regular duties, which, you know, was kind of a 24-hour thing for a while. But we immediately started documenting that so that we got that paperwork in place that was done contemporaneously if we're later audited in the FEMA grant process. And so that expertise, you know, I have to admit, I would have never known to do that. do that, right? I don't know. Maybe our CFO would have, but I wouldn't have known to do that. And so having someone hand you that and say, you're going to need this for FEMA. don't bug your staff, just have everybody start filling them out was exceedingly helpful. And now we're in the grant process. So maybe we can switch to that. After the event, FEMA sets up deadlines as far as when you need to say that you've had damage. And I'm not going to be able to tell you what all these deadlines were, but they were, I think it was a I think the event was in September. I think we had six months because they extended the deadlines. So I think that our initial kind of get into the program was in April. And these are extended deadlines. The typical FEMA deadlines are shorter than that. And then by June 15th, we had to have all of our damage into the grants portal system. And so... What happens in the middle of that is FEMA actually has like a six step process to pay you back on grants. And part of it is applying. You'll know that once you start digging into this, that there's different categories of reimbursement. And so you need to track things separately for what's emergency response versus what's long-term response versus projects you do to mitigate future damage. And they all have a different category. And then there's these regulations, which I think, Tom, they affectionately call the PAPA regulations because that's the acronym, but I can't tell you what the acronym is at the moment.
SPEAKER_00:But- Everything from like, you know, I'm remembering now, debris removal, emergency measures. There's, you know, there's immediate response. That's one stream of funding versus reimbursement for post-event response. It's complicated.
SPEAKER_03:There's like, let's see. there's A through G classifications, and then there's four or six mitigation responses. And so we experienced like wind-driven rain literally coming through the brick walls. And we, I think we lost 30 patient rooms that had to be immediately remediated in Watauga. It was interesting because Avery had more outside damage, but maybe inside the hospital was not as damaged. And so We had, you know, we immediately remediated those rooms to get them back up and running. We're trying to take pictures of things for insurance and FEMA purposes of the damage. We didn't get everything. The insurance claims and the FEMA claims have taken a lot of time for our risk office, which, you know, reports to me. And we've been and we're still working on business interruption claims. know coverage trying to get some of that coverage we're down i think out of the 10 locations we had damage we're down with our insurer property insurance to two that we're still discussing now and and got our initial payment several months afterwards so this is not like an instant process right it takes time um yeah as
SPEAKER_00:you're as you're talking about this diana um I'm reminded too, I mean, early on, we had a number of issues we were discussing at least in Chapel Hill about teammates. their houses, those who had lost homes, those who homes were, were damaged. And that's a, we haven't talked much about that. And that's not a direct item of recovery for us, you know, you know, is operating our hospitals, but it's absolutely critical to, these are our friends and neighbors, you know, your friends and neighbors, and we want to be able to help. So I'm wondering if you can speak to that at all.
SPEAKER_03:Well, it was really interesting because we have an employee-to-employee fund, which we had at the time was pretty generous. But once we started, we had to buy... clothes and bedding and air mattresses and stuff just to get, we had to take care of our staff so they could take care of our patients. Right. And that the people were the first thing, right. The patients and the staff, our teammates were the first two things we had to take care of. Right. So what Tom and I are doing in the background is important in the long run, but certainly not job one, right. Job one is taking care of, of what we do and how we take care of people. We ended up buying, I think about 80 generators for our staff that, um, We had donations from the Cannon Foundation and some other foundations that are very involved in our area. Significant, wonderful contributions. And we were able to help out with Christmas gifts because people still didn't have houses. We were able to help out with generators so that they could get to work. Because the other thing that we heard a lot from the feds is that people in the mountains are... the land is important to them and they don't want to leave the land that's been in their families for generations. And so we, we tried to make it possible for them to stay and that's still happening, right? We're putting the Eric Church Foundation is putting up, I think it's 50 houses right now in Avery County to, to be more long-term housing and to allow people to get into those. But you're right. I, I do have a funny story, if you want to hear it, is that when you sent nurses up from Onslow to help us with night shift, and I don't know if you've heard about this, but when they came in, they came in on a party bus and it had a pole in the middle of it. We greeted them and we're asking them about their trip up on the party bus because the bus driver drove the party bus regularly and he was quite the character. So, you know, there's those little moments in the middle of the crisis that kind of make it memorable, I guess.
SPEAKER_00:I did hear that story. I did hear that story. And that was a bit of ingenuity that got everyone out to Watauga as quickly as they could. So
SPEAKER_03:I... We've talked, you know, we were kind of talking about FEMA. I don't know how much more, but we want to discuss that. But you, I don't know. We've also used the system office to help us do all the accounting and those grant applications. And so they're able to help us by looking at our financials, prove our business interruption loss. They've been able to, you know, we've been you know, it's so nice to have electronic cooperation when it works properly, right? So we're uploading receipts and they're putting them in the right category and getting them into the right grant application, whether it's, you know, emergency. So your receipts are gonna be categorized with FEMA as an emergency response issue or a long-term restoration or, you know, whatever category they are putting in so that you can try and get recovery. The one thing that I found interesting is we had an introductory meeting with FEMA and they indicated from the historic preservation side that we were going to need the latitude and longitude of all lost tree root balls. And I was like, I can't give you the latitude and longitude of either where we took our trash or the tree root balls that were upended during the storm because there were I don't know, 50,000, probably not necessarily all on our property. But so some of the requests you get just kind of make you laugh.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I mean, that's that's that's incredible there. I know for one of the university campuses, I think in Asheville, the Army Corps of Engineers sent an entire team. large tree crew up there because they were adept at being able to take down and move, you know, just large amounts of timber. But you're right. I mean, it was tens of thousands of trees. Right. So
SPEAKER_03:I just said, take the latitude and longitude of everything around the hospital and just say that's where they were. But evidently, waste haulers are supposed to be able to tell FEMA where they take your materials waste when you're building, you know, when you've had building damage. And I had never experienced that before, too, to need to know the latitude and longitude of the dump that we were using. So there are things in the FEMA rules that if you have some expertise around can be very helpful in these situations, I would say. Maybe let's talk about moving forward, Tom, what we would do differently.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So I think what I would say, maybe it's not so much what we would do differently, but now the opportunity. So first of all, this provided an opportunity to do after action. We've all done that. I'm sure you've done that. And it's almost, I feel like it's an ongoing conversation. So I feel like it is now informing the way we look at our daily operations right now.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So hurricane season is already upon us or soon to be upon us. Normally, we think of this as something affecting eastern North Carolina and sometimes central North Carolina. This was a good reminder that the same sorts of events, when they come up through the center of the country, can impact the western part of the state as well. So we now have large numbers of staff who think in those terms. But I mean, a few things. First of all, this called out the need to even further develop our emergency operations capacity. That means having the right leadership and the right staffing at what we think of as at the system level, meaning able to look across the state and coordinate across the state. So we're moving to adjust that and beef up our leadership structure so we can provide more support and more coordination. A lot of things went well. However, we would have liked to have been faster, more responsive. We would have liked to anticipated some of the challenges more. The challenges with water and power were very difficult. They created some major challenges I know for you and your team, Deanna, but we were concerned. that a couple of the hospitals would be down for a very long period of time and it just would not have been tolerable. So the way I think of this is it's important to do after action reviews of smaller incidents, to look to other parts of the country that are experiencing hazards and disasters and how they're responding and have a way in your organization to internalize some of those learnings I think what this has taught us as well is we almost can never do enough to build interconnection and collegiality among staff across entities because it was those relationships that people really turned to. It was, well, I know this person. Somebody at Appalachian knows this person over at Blue Ridge or this person over at Southeastern. Those are the relationships that really pay off. So what I think it means is we need to really encourage our teams in doing those informal things that help build relationships, both internally, but also with your local community, your local partners, certainly at the state level and at the national level. Those are just huge and key. We've talked a lot here about contracting. I don't know the way you think about this. I started to think about everything during this disaster response as what's an impediment? What is a roadblock that has to be removed? That's our job is to remove that roadblock. A long contracting process or a complex answer is an impediment. So we needed to provide from a legal and governance standpoint, it's incumbent on us to come up with simple, straightforward processes that are gonna meet regulatory needs going forward. That's our job is to look down the road, but make those simple, crisp, easy to understand. Do this, here's the template. You don't have to negotiate anything. That's the sort of crisp response that everybody needs. I think the final thing that I think about here You talked about incident command, incident response. It seemed to me like we almost took what we would normally do in a large hospital in terms of daily huddles and things like that, and more or less repurpose that into an incident response. And of course we were using typical hospital risk management, emergency response protocols in many ways. But at the system level, for example, we had a daily, We had a daily meeting. We had one person in charge. She made sure she spoke with the CEOs of each hospital. She was probably talking to them constantly, but by the time she came into that daily meeting at 8.30, she had already talked with all the CEOs and their teams. So there was a full report at 8.30 every morning, and not just to know what's going on, but it was, and then we need the following things. Everybody was tasked as a result of that. That worked well, but I think we learned some things from that as well about how those communications should go and then how to task everybody coming out of it. So it was clear and we had one line of communication for everybody.
SPEAKER_03:That really was key. We noticed that too. We changed our leader huddle time so that it would be before your system meeting because we figured out pretty quickly we couldn't meet at the same time and be helpful in getting what we needed from you because we were having our huddle at the same time you were having your system huddle. There's got to be some flexibility. If you like 9 o'clock, fine, but instead we're going to do it at 9.30 or 8 because that needs to happen. That kind of coordination has to happen we also identified that we are going to train a lot more folks this year in incident command and emergency operations you know we're looking towards the FEMA trainings that are still in existence and and saying identifying the right people so we have a lot of redundancy in these situations um because you know you just don't know what's going to happen next right and um and And the other thing, and I think we kind of touched on this a little bit, Tom, but that local connection to your emergency management and emergency operations folks, because if we couldn't get it from the system and we needed to go either to the state or federal government to get something, it has to go through your county emergency operations coordinator to get it done. Like we were, you know, we had a lot of choppers come in because we had to transport folks. We had you know, there was just a lot going on. They were talking to us, you know, unfortunately about things like how many body bags we should get. And so, There's a lot of two-way communication there that has to happen. And so you have to have a good relationship with that local emergency management office and their coordinators and get their cell phones ahead of time. Like this is not, you need that phone tree list or that phone list has to come out right away if you haven't already done it. I would suggest that you go get it now before something, you know, before the next tornado, hurricane, flood or blizzard.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. That's how people are going to communicate. Sell and text and people they know that those relationships are just critical.
SPEAKER_03:Right. Well, thanks for talking to me, Tom.
SPEAKER_00:I enjoyed it. Not all of it is great to relive, but I think you all did a lot of amazing work and I think we're better for it.
SPEAKER_03:We will, uh, we will be better certainly in the long run. It's going to, I mean, it's made everybody stronger. It certainly drew our team together and, um, you know, we're ready to hopefully not face another one of another challenge like that, but we will, we'll do it if we need to. Yeah,
SPEAKER_00:definitely. All right. Thanks a lot. Bye.
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