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[Watch Officer Bess]

1. Watch officers to assist with keeping our Online EOC updated. No regular work shifts required, but as they have time available, watch team members update the online EOC with reliable info from radio nets, State Department or FEMA bulletins (we give you sites to check) and other reliable sources. If you're familiar with Planning Section ICS duties, this would be similar to the Situation Unit staff.

2. Moderators/facilitators for conference calls. Currently, we're running a multiagency coordination call at 3PM EST daily, but may soon need additional calls or facilitators for followup calls. The moderator sets up the conference call by dialing into the conference bridge, starts/stops recordings and acts as a gatekeeper for discussions, and sees that all followup action items get identified to our Ops and Planning Chiefs.

3. Planning Section help. Currently, we've been running a 24 hour Incident Period. That planning cycle is overwhelming and we plan to go to a 7 day planning cycle in the next few days. As we make that transition, we will need two or three people to take responsibility for portions of our Incident Action Plan (IAP). We'll have a couple of conference calls during the week, the Planning Section Chief will consolidate inputs from our planners, coordinate them with the Ops Chief then get approval from our IC. We hope to break out the duties enough so that each individual planner would have no more than 2 hours of work to be done over a 3 day planning window.

4. Agency liaison. As organizations request assistance from DERA, we would like to assign them a single point of contact for liaison. This can be a rather demanding job if you get assigned a very active organization, or a very boring job if they make initial contact with us then don't need anything after all. For the active organizations, we'd like to have three liason officers, available in a regular 8-hour shift rotation.

5. Logistics Support Specialists. We expect this function to spool up in about 10 days as our partner agencies exhaust their disaster reserve stocks and ask us for help in locating donated or loaned supplies and equipment. Depending on the requests we receive, we anticipate needing several people who would make contact with suppliers and transportation companies, catalog what they have available/how to get it, then either put them in touch with our partner needing the support, or having our Logistics Section Chief make direct arrangements.

6. Communications Operations and Coordination Task Force specialists. We and our partners have been operating ad-hoc, but we need to find a way to assist our partners with interoperability issues, both in OCONUS and in the islands. This is such an overwhelming task that we don't yet have a strategy worked out, but over the next two weeks it's predictable that commercial circuits out of the AOR will likely go to gridlock. If we can start planning backup and work-around systems for our partners, their missions will be less affected by the gridlock. Initial thoughts are: BGAN system- Working beyond reliable capacity now, many dropped calls, poor audio and video quality. We need to help partners learn to use less voice/video and more short data transmissions. IRIDIUM-Near total gridlock now. GLOBALSTAR-Nearly inoperable. Hughes VSAT- Leased channels near capacity. Some reserve capacity exists. As DOD and FEMA MERS deploy large earth stations to Haiti, all reserve capacity will be used. HF Voice and Data-Very much underutilized right now. We believe that the greatest help we can provide our partners is to work with existing nets such as SATERN, Sail-Mail Association, Winlink.org, and others to plan an efficient backup system-of-systems. This job will require good interpersonal skills as well as technical knowledge of radio and data systems.

All work would be done from home at this time.

If none of the above jobs looks like it would suit you, please let me know ideas you have for supporting the effort.

Our online EOC is at: www.disasters.org/eoc You can get a fairly good idea what we're doing there, but things are moving so fast we haven't been keeping the site as current as we should. You can look at most information without logging in. Our watch officers are given log-in passwords so they can post new material or edit anything there.


Watch Officer Bess

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