The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Leading a Public Safety Response | BTS37

Episode Date: September 16, 2019

My pal Rob is back and we share how to work the "leg" of the Planning "P" for special event planning and incident response.Writeup at https://kevtalkspod.com/bts-ep37-coordinating-initial-response-with-robinitial-response-is-critical-perspective-from-rob/

Please silence your cell phones, hold all sidebar conversations to a minimum, and we'll get started with Between the Slides in 3, 2, 1. Welcome to Between the Slides, episode 37A. I'm your host, Kevin Pinnell. Thanks for coming back. I'm also joined by my good friend and episode 28 co-host and returning co-host, Rob Rowley. How are you, sir? Very well. Good to be here. How are you, sir? Very well. Good to be here. How

are you tonight? Awesome. Good. Good to have you back. So this episode is episode 37A of a two-part series. This one is called Have a Leg to Stand On. And why is it called that? Because we are going to focus on the leg or the straight line part of the planing P. And for those of you that are not maybe in the incident management world, particularly the all hazards management world, picture just a block letter P and the long straight line that goes from the bottom of the line that you wrote in school up to just the circular part of the P is the leg. If you're in incident management, you should be very familiar with that. If you're not, we have some resources for you. So episodes two through five of this show cover anywhere from the NIMS or National Incident Management System 700

through the Incident Command System 300, where certainly we touch a bit on the planning P. Today, though, we're going to have a deep dive, and we're really going to have a deep dive that compares how do you work the leg, at least, in this episode for incidents, and then how do you change that a bit because they're not exactly the same for pre-planned events and we'll go back and forth and definitely dive into that episode six goes into o-305 so that kind of one week boot camp summary so that'll also talk about process episode 21 planning section chief course definitely is a plan chiefs out there you all already know you got to know this planning p but hopefully we have some tidbits. If you all have some, please definitely let us know kp.bts at podcast.com or podcast at gmail.com between the slides.com. There's feedback forms there as well. Also on this episode, I want to give a shout out to

Christy McDevitt, who's in Washington state with the U S forest service for reaching out to us, to me and really helping inspire kind of the show and difference between incidents and events. Had some good questions about public health, which is where I, the core of where I learned my incident management from before getting into kind of public safety proper. But that's a great thing. So thank you, Christy, for reaching out. We'll be in touch for sure again.

Another resource is episode 24 to kind of get up to speed incident management principles and practical application, which my friend Rob and I helped put together with some of our other colleagues and teach a one day course a few times to public health folks over 100 of them over 100 social service folks taught it to private health care. joined me and shared his journey from Spotsylvania. This was on episode 28, so if you haven't listened, please learn more about Rob. He's a great guy, great background. From Spotsylvania fire to now being a situation unit leader, planning section chief, PIO. He's got a bunch of different things on an all-hazards incident management team, regional team.

So that was a great episode. Rob, so what have you been up to since we talked last? Well, I tell you, as you know, working with local government, the tempo never slows down in the Metro Richmond area with the preplanned events. So still helping manage plenty of preplanned events around here, which I think will be very pertinent for the conversation tonight. Fortunately also Central Virginia has had a little bit of work trying to assist the Commonwealth in filling out requests for incident management teams up and down the East Coast with the hurricane Dorian. Fortunately as you know that storm ended up not being quite as bad as it could have been so the the majority of the work that the incident management teams have been doing on the East Coast is basically just maintaining some enhanced readiness.

But, you know, we're still trying to manage our preplanned events and capitalize on those preplanned events as well as training exercises to make sure that we're maintaining the skill sets for our folks to maintain or to manage no notice emergencies cool and as we've talked about we probably did on episode 28 But I know I've mentioned and we offline have certainly talked about us in our circle of plans folks and everybody else Pre-planned events happen more often fortunately than most big incidents that incident management teams have to go to or even smaller ones so a great opportunity but there's a difference between when you know something's coming and when you have no idea or even if you have short notice like what we'll talk about

missing persons or floods or something like that and so that's what really we'll dive into so rob can you take us to that first block in the bottom of the leg of the pea, that foundation that's going to get us started? How do we get started in this process, whether it's an event or an incident? Let's focus, I guess, first maybe on an incident. Yeah, that sounds good, starting with incidents. So it starts kind of how everything starts across America every day when someone picks up the phone and calls 911. But the reason we move from that bottom incident there up into the notification of an incident management team is because, you know, someone calls 911 and 99 point, I don't know, 99.98% of the time, when someone calls 911, cop cars show up and do cop car things and fire trucks show up and do fire truck things and ambulances show up and do ambulance things.

And usually that's enough. That takes care of the problem. But very rarely, but it happens where first responders come across something that is, you know, it's too big. It is too complicated. It is too dangerous. It is too complicated, it is too dangerous, it is too politically charged, it's got complex logistical needs, whatever it is. But for some reason, it's something that is just outside of the scope of our usual 911 response. And so they pick up the phone and call for an incident

management team. And like everyone else, incident management teams, our size call for an incident management team. And, you know, like everyone else, incident management teams, our size up of an incident begins with that notification. You know, we'll start to collect information about the incident as we respond. And of course, you know, nowadays, I'm not going to say it's easier than ever to gain intelligence, but it's easier than ever to gain information. You know, of course, a very important distinction there. But, you know, we move, so we move from the incident to the notification and response of an incident management team. As we start to work our way up the leg of that planning P, and we get to what I kind of consider to be the first big actionable block there, which is that response and assessment.

So the incident management team responds. And like I said, we're doing what we can to gain situational awareness the entire time that we're responding. And even when we first arrive on the scene, I think a lot of folks that may not know any better think that an incident management team shows up and the first thing that we do is start to pull out ICS forms and wall charts and stuff like that and begin to fill out forms and write on paper and all that kind of stuff. And that's really just for most occasions, that's just not

the case. You know, quite often one of the things that we can first do to help out that on-scene incident command is to prop them up with support in areas such as planning and logistics and really help prop up and support the incident command that's already on scene. So to that, let's jump back a block or two. So we're in that incident mode, right? So something's happened. The first responders, they know what to do on the street, right? But some stuff is just not in their warehouse.

Not everybody can have everything in their warehouse, that kind of stuff. What's an example of kind of an escalation? Can you walk us through? So something happens, your first in engine company will go with that, and it's too much, like clearly you're like, this isn't a single house fire, this isn't a car accident, this is big,

or clearly someone's called and a missing person is probably, something that happens a lot, people see Amber Alerts or missing person alerts, those kind of things often. Sure. More more often, or even, you know, take it to the extreme to the, you know, horrible thing that we've all had to train for active shooter events. So when the incident happens, because there's capability for some places, and I know where you are, and where I was as well of a local incident management team. So there's the resources there on the street. Do they go through the 911 center, the public safety access point, the PSAP,

to then request incident management team resources at that point? Right. So that's a good question. So a lot of that will depend on the locality. So you mentioned about discussing an example. So I'll go with an example that we had here in central Virginia of a marina that caught on fire. Right. So, you know, first of all, just a bunch of boats floating, burning into the rivers, you know, kind of unusual for almost any jurisdiction, much less one where you end up utilizing resources from three different local governments, the Coast Guard, various Coast Guard ship, Coast Guard aircraft, Metro fixed wing air assets, all this kind of stuff.

So you've got people working on two sides of a river. You've got resources working on the water. So obviously a lot of potential hazards and then also a lot of challenges for everything from communications to resource tracking and all that kind of stuff, right? So certainly something that could benefit from some extra capabilities, the kind of capabilities that an incident management team brings. And so for us, it was simply an ask from the on-scene resources up through our Office of Emergency Management to coordinate the response of the local incident management team. Right. So then, so then, and, and, and actually that was, that was really handled by let's,

let's call it our type four incident management team. Right. So, and, and for folks that aren't ingrained, so, so the, the higher the number, so to speak of the type, really the smaller the incident or event when you get to a type one, that's a, that's a world trade. That's a Katrina. That's, you, the big huge things that take a lot of a lot of people a lot of time, a lot of stuff to really basically summarize it. But yeah, so and and that's something that I recommend for localities that have the capacity or building it is have your local IMT. And then I'm sure we'll get into this, you'll find actually a lot of the same folks will end up filling the

regional IMT. But if you can build that local capacity, like Rob's talking about, like he is, you know, you have instant assets. They can help scale up really anything, again, because we're all hazards, and support the folks on the ground and make the situation better for sure. Indeed, indeed. So, yeah, so, again, sticking. So, yeah. So, again, sticking with the the Marina fire. So the incident itself happened. Right. So and again, as usual, someone picked up a phone called 9-1-1. Fire trucks showed up, started doing fire truck things. Cop car showed up, started doing cop car things.

You know, ambulances showed up, started doing ambulance things. And then, you know, yes, because of the, you know, because of the challenges we've already mentioned with multiple jurisdictions and air assets and working on the river, you know, they figured out pretty quickly that, hey, this is going to be, you know, beyond our usual scope. Ask for the incident management team. And so, you know, after the notification, incident management resources responded out. But again, you know, incident, we talk about that response and assessment. When incident management folks arrived, they didn't just pull out, you know, ICS forms and wall charts and start filling them out.

Really, the first thing that they did was started to prop up that on-scene command, right? So what does that look like? Well, that's your folks in the planning section who, you know, are used to doing resource unit and situation unit type work, helping that on-scene unified command, you know, really finally get a handle on what resources are involved in the incident. You know, which as you can imagine, that's difficult when you're trying to work across various jurisdictions and work across an actual physical boundary like a river. And so in class, and kind of the whole impetus for this is like, we're going to talk about

what you may not get on a slide, depending on your instructor, right? Or the discussions, you know, between the slides, if you will. So in reality, how often do you see nice breaks where, hey, there's an incident, let's pause a little bit. Hey, let's let you know, let's pause a little bit. Hey, let's do an assessment. Let's pause until the next block. Like, what's the time sequence that you're talking about, as far as how much time you actually have to process this information and try and get these resources and communicate and all those kind of things? That's a great point. That's why I made it, to be honest with you.

Yeah. You know, we look at the visual, the very nice graphic representation that they give us for the planning P. And it really, you know, makes it look like there's these nice, very distinct phases where you move from one thing and, okay, now that's done. We move on to the next thing and, okay, now that's done. And you and I both know that's just really just not how it works. You know, so for example, especially in our environment and especially with the local incidents where we may not be packing up an entire Type 3 IMT

and rolling out the door as one nice package and then arriving on scene as one nice package. We don't always do that. And so sometimes you get the first couple of folks that show up and begin to do some situational awareness and some propping up of the already existing incident command structure and then maybe they call in for the second wave. Or, Kevin, you know as well as I do,

sometimes we've had to respond with a short team right and and figure out well what really is going on and what really does the authority having jurisdiction what do they need that we can provide so we don't get every position in every box every time we go out the door? No, definitely not. That's very surprising. No, no, no, very much definitely not. And so we talk about our first responders, our brothers and sisters in blue and red and green and yellow and every other profession. Everyone's represented, let's just say.

Exactly. If you've worn cargo pants or talked on the radio cargo pants the more pockets the better um but you know we talk about the number of folks in public safety that aren't really intimately aware with what incident management teams are and what they do well goodness imagine the number of civilian mayors and county managers and county administrators who know who know nothing about incident management teams either right right and so they have they have a an event an incident or disaster or whatever and someone offers up hey would you like an incident management team to help you out?

And they go, a what? Right? So they don't even know what to ask for. So I think you and I both have been on events and incidents where we have seen, you know, again, that forward or that short team land in a locality and do what they can, and part of it is trying to educate the local authority having jurisdiction and try to kind of coach out of them exactly what it is that our incident management team should plan on coming to do for them. Yeah, totally. And I think that's,

so I think to that also, just like, you know, we're going to focus on incident management, but of course, you know, bridging project management, just good team management, I'll say. But even though, obviously, the planning piece and all has an incident management tool, is when you do go out the door, you do need to send folks that have done a few things and are competent, if not already credentialed, but more so are they competent. And I say that because there's plenty of folks that are very competent that may not have a task book signed off that can do the job just fine. And folks that have a task book signed off that can't show up anywhere and do the job just fine. And that's just ground truth. Everybody's seen it. So to that, though, you do need to have at least one or two folks that are very, very familiar with the process.

And honestly, typically, I'm not just being biased, but typically it's plans, folks, because that's our job, right? Know the whole process, help support and get people through the process. And that's a big deal. And a couple examples I'll share that are similar. And one of these we were together on too, Big Fire, right? A few blocks of a couple of warehouses next there. And it show up and piecemeal what you can help with and make a tangible difference. And I've mentioned some of those in other episodes too, with, you know, Porta Johns and pizza, you know, if that makes their day better, cause they've been up all night, then, then you don't necessarily win, but you made someone's life a lot better. That was having

the longest shift maybe that they've ever had or whatever, and help them get accountability, right? Just, just help somebody write an org chart and get their cards together. And that's opportunities, I think, where we you and I, particularly and other folks that are that are moving up or have this mentors can bring other folks that are still coming up and still work closely with them say, Oh, you know what, you are familiar. And we had a mutual friend of ours, Andy, that I know is good to go doing resource stuff and cards. And that's what this, you know, these folks needed. And so it's like, hey, you do that, we'll, you know, work on plans, and we'll break up sit. And again, the no ego, no silo, because when you get

three or four folks, and we're all credentialed, and you know, and we can all do the job, when you throw your egos, you know, the garbage silos, we haven't really had. And we all just go, you know what, what do you want to do? Because that's the best way to do it. If you get folks jockeying for position on a real incident, because they want to get something signed, or just because their ego, that's going to be a problem. So I think we've been very fortunate. And I would I would submit to everybody listen, try and do the same thing, right? If you're sending folks out the door, make sure that they get along so that they're not getting along in front of other folks. Cause you know, that's, that's no good. And that the other example, um, so I had, uh, Ben Gomes who we both know,

um, on episode 29 and the focus really was on helping public safety folks and his journey, you know, with suicide and helping folks now, but we also talked about the trooper Deeremeyer shooting. And so his perspective from the 911 center, right? I mean, the audible he got audio from that was, you know, overwhelming. And so my thing is the dynamics of it. So we saw folks going and another supervisor and I jumped in an SUV and went, asked where the command post was. So we kind of self-deployed with kind of the supervisor's discretion to work in the system and then ask what the command post was. And the dynamic of, hey, there's an incident that immediately, so we're ready, you know, we're getting stuff, we're gloved up,

we're ready to go help, and, you know, this was one of our own folks that we knew was hurt plus some other folks injured, go and thinking, okay, we're gloving up, we're getting ready to go, we're going to go stage, we're going to do whatever, and it immediately transitioned by the time we got there, which most incidents, and it wasn't an active shooter, folks thought it was, but transitioned immediately into, okay, now all the patients are gone. We have tons of civilians, tons of public safety folks.

Now what? And fortunately, another friend of ours, Mike Snodder, was there. He was on, I think seven, I got to get my episodes right. Um, we were talking about law enforcement and ICS, but so, and he and I talked and it was like, all right, let's just try and get something going to do the process. Well, it was an ugly process. And you know what we said, get clipboards. Let's just try and figure out who's here. Um, and we'll get into this a bit more when we get into the other parts of the, of the leg. But when you start your foundation, often it is ugly for incidents,

and it is messy, and that's fine. Absolutely, absolutely. And I tell you, so you talked about that, Kevin. The last example that I would throw out there specifically for this is, you know, we deployed with the Type 3 team out to the western part of the state for those floods. And the floods were, it was flash flooding secondary to just a, it wasn't even a tropical system, if memory serves me correctly. It was just, we had a very wet year. And we had a lot of rain out in West Virginia and the western part of Virginia.

And that little town, you know what I'm talking about, had flooded. I don't know if there's any reimbursement outstanding for them or not. Southwest Virginia, we'll say. Yeah, exactly. I don't know if they still have open related to this. I'm not going to name any names. But we knew it was bad when the team was ramping up for deployment, and the word came back to us that they had had several swift water rescues from flash

flooding, and that they had already had one firefighter that was drowned, who was resuscitated, thankfully, but they had had a firefighter that was drowned, right? So, you know, so sounds pretty terrible. And we are obviously, you know, gearing up, can't wait to get out there and see what we can do to help out. But it was, as flash flooding often does, you know, the worst of it didn't last very long. And by the time we got there, the flooding, there was still a lot of flooding, but any life safety issues had been addressed. Um, but what we, the value that we really brought was when we showed up and, uh, went to the county level supervision and just offered ourself to be of service

however we could. And, you know, they really didn't know what they wanted to do with us but but you know we we went very humbly and sold ourselves and basically basically we kind of bought ourselves the right to kind of hang out for a couple of hours and just kind of look around and really gather some situational awareness. And what we began to figure out, you know, just as someone coming in from the outside that was not personally involved that could maintain that 30,000-foot view, we began to figure out that what they didn't have was a good system for tracking their progress on damage assessments or for compiling information related

to damage assessments and then we also figured out that they had national guard resources that were doing a pretty good job keeping track of themselves but there were a lot of red cross volunteers out there that were not being tracked well at all. And that caused concern on two fronts. Number one, just from the safety perspective, that there were all these volunteers running around that weren't accounted for, weren't being tracked, all that kind of stuff. But then also, obviously, it brought up the concern about, hey, these are volunteer hours that show value that can be tracked

and can basically be used as that locality builds kind of its final expense report, if you will, for the incident. And so just by simply, one, being modest, but being forward-leaning, getting good situational awareness, maintaining positive relationships, we were able to, frankly, figure out work that needed to be done that the home agency wasn't even aware needed to be done. And secondly, I don't know if they would have even thought that that's work we could have done for them. And so what started off as a deployment that seemed like there's not going to be much for us to do by the time we get there ended up being a very active, very productive deployment for the team. Yeah, absolutely. And it's also another example of there was a short team that was not us that was working there the night before. and so they really got you know some of our great leadership from the team and folks from the local area that were on the team or on the on the on the

Southwest team actually and so they really helped set that tone for hey here's what we can do is what's going on their assessment ended up being a little different as we found out then then what the locality or what folks thought they needed or said they needed and so so, you know, taking it back incident-wise, there's something's going to happen somewhere, folks, right? And if you've lived at all, you've seen that. So the incidents happen notification-wise. So kind of dipping back into those.

So incident management team-wise, so everyone can call 911 for emergencies, right? That's a notification method that immediately gets you to somebody that's going to show up in some kind of vehicle that goes woo woo and has lights. How those folks escalate, right, is back through the 911 center. Incident management teams, you know, some folks may still have pagers, cell phones, text groups, you know, website activations. There's all these different technical ways to do it. Phone calls, go figure, actually talking to other folks. Usually kind of a quick brief, a spin up. Here's the mission or potential mission, particularly if you're a state asset or partnered with the state. If you're local, it's all going to go through essentially, I would say

the majority I think is accurate. It's going go through an M1 center and then you'll just send people because most of the agencies hopefully are linked somehow that way in the same locality and regional will do a call out. And so when you do get to that, folks that have the go bag and check it with the significant others at home and the work and kind of get out there. And that's the other thing I think that folks need to think about and consider too, whether if you've been in the game for a bit, you know this, we both know this. If you're thinking about or getting into it is part of your notification is making sure that at home you're good to go and at work you're good to go. Because usually if you're from a locality and you're a local and regional incident management team, this is not your full-time job and you do it because you're passionate about it and you want to do it and you're often paid extra in smiles.

There is some compensation models out there, right? But it depends on who you are. So I would say that's something, too, to really think about is don't just think about how are are you going to be notified but how are you going to replicate that and make that ripple throughout your family your friends your whoever you know needs to know outside of work and then certainly with work like can you go you know do you have permission to go do you have to get some special permission do you have to backfill which you know that's something you can definitely speak to way more than me I my whole time I think was a salaried person on various types of work, but I wasn't doing shift work like a lot of folks on teams. So how did you all handle that? Was it really looked at with

what's the workload of the system? Can we afford to send these folks in a mix of kind of whose turn is it to get some exposure? Right. Right. So when you talk about, and you touched on it very briefly, but, you know, obviously with your type four teams that are going to be, you know, more so managed at the locality level, you know, I mean, I guess, gosh, they can, in theory, you know, the locality can set that up however they want. You know, the system that is probably more important, the one that you and I are used to, is with our Type 3 team. And this is all of Virginia now.

All four of our Type 3 teams in the Commonwealth now are kind of Virginia State assets, right? So, you know, any, any jurisdiction within the Commonwealth, you know, Orange County, you know, through the usual emergency management channels by going from whatever within their jurisdiction to their local office of emergency management can then go to the state office of emergency management, who can then reach out to the program managers for any one of the four type three teams in the Commonwealth and request assistance for that locality. And then, you know, would be reluctant to even go down the rabbit hole of when we talk about EMAC or state-to-state requests, right? And those can get pretty – I mean, I don't want to use the word complicated, but –

It's pretty accurate, though. Yeah, you know, it can, right? As far as what the team will agree to, and then, of course, the trickle down from there is that that's all based on what the participating agencies will agree to right so so for example and to get back to your question about how we handle staffing right this this is where i'm going with that when we get these requests that go state to state some of the requesting states may or may not offer a jurisdiction portal to portal, which basically means that if Rob Rowley is going to go with Central Virginia from Virginia to North Carolina or Georgia or whatever to help them with their problem, that they're going to pay for me from the moment I leave to the moment I get back. Let me just say that portal to portal, I can only speak for the stuff that I'm used to hearing,

which is stuff here on the East Coast, but portal to portal is not really something that many requesting states are willing to offer. They really want to just pay for hours worked. So then the next question that comes up is backfill. So if my sponsoring agency sends me out of the door and because of me being gone, they've got to hire someone on overtime to fill the position. And this is really common on the fire side, right? Because the fire and EMS side, because, you know, some – and it depends on the agency, but some of our law enforcement partners are willing to go a couple of shifts with maybe one or two fewer officers on the street and not have it be too big of a deal. You know, of course, that's assuming they've got enough officers to start with. But then on the fire and EMS side, you know, it takes a minimum number of people to staff a fire truck and an ambulance. You know, we don't just, we can't just take a three-person

engine and say, nope, we're just going to run it as a two-person engine. That just doesn't work. So then the sponsoring agency may or may not have to hire overtime to let me go somewhere. And then if that happens, that's that backfill. So depending on the stipulations of an EMAC request or a state to state request, the requesting state may say, you know what, we'll pay for Rob portal to portal. And yes, we'll go ahead and pay for backfilling his position also. That's really just not the case what we're seeing more often is um pay just for hours worked and no backfill so

gotcha and emac uh folks is emergency management assistance compact so it's a national hey we need some help line essentially essentially. Yeah. And so all that ends up happening is with those stipulations of not paying portal to portal and not paying for backfill, that just means that the sponsoring agencies have some decisions to make about sending somebody away for a deployment. You know, they've just got to decide, you know, first of all, do we need to backfill this person's position? So is it even an issue? You know, maybe we're interested enough in getting some of our folks out of the door to get the experience and bring those experiences back home that maybe they're willing to eat certain costs. And to that end, there really is. I mean, it's completely up to the agency.

I mean, in theory, if Georgia calls up your employer and says, hey, we want to use Kevin, and we're going to pay him in cotton candy and hugs, if they agree to it, well, then, hey, there you go. Right. Pay you in smiles. Right. So have you found from your counterparts, because you've taught this stuff in many states, have you found that that's

a pretty standard model for IMT members that deploy outside of their typical area? Right. Yes. I would say especially, so again, I preface this, folks, by saying that in this arena, as far as the administrative stuff, most of my experience is at the type three level. But yeah, I know, like you said, I've literally taught in a bunch of different states across the country. And from what I hear, most times at that type three level, right, that's the kind of stuff they're running into is they'll only get reimbursed for hours worked. And it's mixed results on whether or not folks will pay for backfill. You know, I don't know if that's dependent on how bad someone needs you or if that tends to be a trend that's state by state. I couldn't tell you, honestly.

In fact, I would be very curious to hear if any of the listeners have any feedback on that. Yeah, totally. So tweentheslides.com, let us know. At Penel KG, Twitter and the Instas, nice little plug there. So, yeah, so let's just keep rolling with incidents. Then maybe we'll come back and paint the event brush over the same process so we can compare and contrast. Kind of hard to go back and forth.

So we've responded. We're gathering our own intel, our own assessment, and it is mostly, I will say, not exactly what's reported to us, whether it's been a few hours or it's immediate, which is like any, that's just like a regular 911 call to LSA. It's always a little bit different than what we're told. So what's the next step? So we've responded. We're doing our assessment.

Again, that can involve, hey, our assessment is we would really like to help you track these folks that you're sending out to take snacks somewhere or account for all these folks that have been fighting this fire for all night long or whatever it is. Part of our assessment is assessing how we can help, not just what's going on. And I know you and I focus a lot about sit unit stuff in, you know, episode 28 when you were on before. So we've done a lot of that. Let's say we're getting a handle on what's happening. And again, we're doing this real time plus looking for the future.

And we've responded. So we're there or on the way. And part of that response is making your phone calls. And I talked about this in a medical unit one, you know, part of it is calling ahead and where's the ER and you know, how far is it and whatever position you're doing, doing that, you know, part of your response isn't just when you're there or eyes on it's that's ahead of time. So the next thing the agency administrators brief, what about that? What's that involved in for an incident?

What does that really look like practically? Yeah, so it may be, depending on the size and complexity of the incident, it may be something as simple. So, for example, let's go back to that marina on fire, right? Something as simple as it's fairly obvious why you're here to help me deal with this marina fire. And so it may be an in brief from just anyone who represents the authority having jurisdiction that is able to tell you and your team what part of their problem it is they want you to solve. So it's five or six of us roll up at a marina fire, and the fire official who's in charge says, I want you to help me develop a plan for the next operational period for fire suppression and booming operations to contain oil on the water, right?

It could be, with certain incidents of a smaller scale, it could be fairly straightforward. The opposite end of the spectrum is if we're talking about going somewhere where there's a, you know, a very large problem, such as a hurricane landfall or something like that, you know, and you may have, you may be one of four, five, six, ten, twelve, however many incident management teams that are going to be working for, let's just go with a state, a state or even a local jurisdiction for that matter. And so, you know, it may not be as obvious on the drive up what it is that you're going to do. You know, you're responding where there's been a hurricane until you get there and find out that, oh, what we need you here for is to do cataloging and inventory of donations, right? Or something like that, or helping us manage staffing for shelters or pods, something like that. So how often, so we're familiar with it, other folks that have taken incident command system courses are, I hope so. So there's a planning P video, right? And the

agency administrator's brief, it's very well put together. There's a room set aside. You actually have administrators of whole agencies or high-level leaders. How often for an incident, like a pretty quick response incident, have you found that you are in front of that administrator? And you mentioned there's two examples. So kind of one incident we're going to, and then one that's even bigger where there's multiple teams. Would you say the majority of the time you actually get FaceTime with an agency administrator who's actually the agency administrator?

Yeah. So just thinking through some of our examples, the floods out in the west, the large fire a little bit south of the metro region and whatnot, I'm going to guess, what, half and half, you think? Half of the time we get kind of some direction from someone who certainly is a local official, but maybe someone more along the lines of a fire battalion chief or a police captain or something like that, not necessarily the county administrator or the mayor. But to that, I would even say I think several of those discussions

that we've had with county administrators and mayors and so forth, even those have been fairly vague, right? As far as again, let's talk again about that fire. Several blocks burned up down in a little city south of Metro Richmond. And even there, you know, we did get some FaceTime with the city mayor.

But, you know, but certainly nothing specific as far as, you know as very specific roles and responsibilities, just more general instruction of we want to keep this area free of traffic for a while. We want to make sure that we're helping out with doing stuff with the media and stuff like that. Not very often does it look like the agency administrator briefing that you see on the Planning P video. Right. Yeah.

I mean, on the side of an SUV, behind it, in a mobile command center, right on the sidewalk, whatever, for sure. It definitely is, though, if you have the battalion chief that's in charge of everybody in the scene, I mean, they are the agency administrator, right? They don't have to be the one that's the department director, the mayor, the whatever. And so I think that's kind of a dynamic role, meaning dynamic because it could be folks of different levels, not just the person that's in charge. And I'm sure we're touching that a lot more when we break down the event side of the house. But for the incident, you don't have time to wait for them.

It's a luxury, I think, if they're there. And it probably depends on the exposure and the size and whether they do show up and their engagement, right, as a leader. But, you know, your administrator, I think, to me is so who's there that's in charge that can speak to what you can help with, give you parameters for what to do and not do, and really what they need. And I think part of that, too, is us helping them figure out what they need. Like you made a great point earlier that most folks have no idea what an incident management

team can do for them. So they don't know how to, they don't know the ask because they don't know what to ask for. And rightfully so. I mean, you know, I, unless they came up through the same ways that, you know, we and other folks did in incident management, they're not going to be familiar with it. Yeah. Nor should they. I mean, that's our job is to help them figure out what we can help them with.

You bring up a great point that, you know, of course, for the agency. That's true. You're on a roll. The agency administrator's briefing, obviously the person from the incident management team that's going to be going to this is the team's incident commander. Quite often, we don't even use that verbiage of incident commander because quite often we're not expecting to really – we like the term of team leader, just because it's a much softer verbiage, right, when we're trying to get the team embedded at an incident in a locality. But, you know, so our team leader goes into this meeting with whoever it is from the home jurisdiction that has the authority to act as the agency administrator. And it is definitely, you know, obviously we have a very sympathetic ear for the folks who are having problems in their hometown. And yes, there is that

component of educating them the world can do. But, you know, some of it is just that very soft salesmanship and there's nothing nefarious about it it's just that we uh interacting with these folks in a way that we can we can put them at ease and make them feel comfortable allowing us to help them have a better day is that a good way to put it i guess yeah i think so um yeah i think that's a great thing. I mean, it's, it's, again, very similar to, you know, when your plans when your project manager when you're anybody that's that goes somewhere to help others, and you have a leader, and they have this resource that they know is helpful, but not how to apply it. Great totally fine let us help you figure out you know let us help you right exactly let us figure that out um so it definitely should happen you know

touching base i think fine you know and some of that can blend particularly so when you don't have as clean of one so when you're not met by the mayor the manager or the department director of whatever thing you're going to help with um you're met by the more boots on the ground person, the battalion chief or, you know, whatever responder, the EMS captain, you know, whatever. It's a mass casualty or something like that. That agency administrator's brief for what you're there to help for can kind of blend into and it's I know it's what we're going to get into next, the incident or event brief. So how do you how do you separate those and what's that transition and what are we really looking for between the agency administrator's brief, what do we really want from them and need from them, and what are we looking for in the incident brief?

So I would argue that in the planning P graphic, that that box right there for the incident briefing and most of the graphics that you'll see will say incident briefing and it'll reference the ICS 201 form. Right. I really argue that that box is kind of smeared all across the two boxes beneath it. And by that, what I mean is, what it looks like is, you know, bad happens, people call 911, 911 shows up, they figure out they need help, they request an incident management team. Incident management team begins to gather some situational awareness on the weight of the incident. And then when they arrive, they really begin to gain good situational awareness as they prop up the current command structure. So folks that are good at doing resource work, they start to assist the current incident command with gaining complete accountability

for resources. Folks that are going to do any situation work, help the current command by helping them gain better situational awareness. And it's nothing glorified. It could be as simple as helping them draw out the first map they've had time to create about the incident, right? and so all the while that the team lead is trying to get a hold of and get some face time with that agency administrator to get that agency administrator brief, the rest of your team is out there propping up the current incident command,

and all the while they're gaining situational awareness, and so by the time you get ready for that incident brief, where it talks about the incident brief or the 201, you know, usually what we're seeing is the reason that they're calling us for help is that they don't have time to do everything that needs to get done. And so that 201 is not being presented to the team by the current incident command. The team is helping the current incident command, the team is helping the current incident command

create the 201, right? And that's actually, I would say, the most common truth of everything we've discussed so far is that really it's the incident management team that provides the bandwidth or provides the support that is needed to do all of those planning functions to help them finally get their arms around the incident, especially when it comes to resource accountability and situational awareness. Yeah, totally. And I know there's some departments, I think, including yours and others, that are pretty proactive. And EMS captain I work with that's now in Tennessee, big on in the units having that 201. I actually used it on that on that shooting I mentioned, you know, it was ugly, it was incomplete, but it was something to jot down. But to that point, the I totally agree with you. And in fact, up the leg of the P and,

and, you know, kind of a side note, the initial response, the whole leg is kind of labeled that which I actually think isn't necessarily true. I think once you hit the initial response, the whole leg is kind of labeled that, which I actually think isn't necessarily true. I think once you hit the initial response and assessment, the third box up, we already covered, I think you're, you're kind of done with that initial response because you're there. And then I think I agree with you. You're really in, you know, briefing both getting in and creating your own, you know, cause part of that is, is you're going to make your own brief and, and, brief and or helping them make the brief. So, yeah, it's interesting how even with the revision or even now that it's still kind of labeled that way and then practice, you know, you're really both assessing and getting

and giving briefs constantly. Really, it's a, you know, an ongoing process for sure. And yeah, that 201 is great with what kind of work do they have? If they have one, what resources do you have that you've tracked? If you've tracked any, did you take any notes, even though it's on a piece of paper of, you know, things you've done already? What do you expect to happen? What are you trying to focus on? What are safety issues? So it's a really truncated incident action action plan really. Probably kind of explosion of what can you just capture that's in these. It's helpful and if you happen to have it and you have someone that doesn't need to be working on something else that's more critical because like you mentioned, paperwork is not

critical when you're trying to save structures and property or people obviously. But it's nice to have. And yeah, it's interesting in the kind of updated version that it's not there or less emphasis, which I think is both. It's neither good nor bad, I guess I'll say. I don't want to say it's bad. I think it just is. Sure.

Maybe it's representative of reality. It happens sometimes. It doesn't happen sometimes. Encouraged. Well, and, Kevin, you've been around. You and I have taught several classes together. And so you'll probably agree with me that anyone who's taken one of my classes probably gets sick of hearing this. you know, 911 is going to be in the middle of fighting fires, saving lives, and containing hazmat, and we're going to roll up in a van and jump out and start hanging up a 215 and pulling out 204s and filling those out. That's just not how it works. And so I talk about when we talk

about plans, that there's a reason that the two most common units that are stood up in the planning section are the resource unit and the situation unit, right? Because before you can move an incident from the reactive phase into the proactive phase, there's two things you got to know and you've got to know them pretty well. And that's number one, what is going on or what is the situation? And number two, you got to know, well, who do I have to fix the problem or what are my resources? Right. And so, so yeah, so it's, it's, it's, it's nice that it's kind of double duty that when we get there and we start propping up that on-scene incident command as we wrap our hands around what the current situation is and help the current incident commander better understand the current situation, number one, they can make better decisions in the now. And that's also the information that we're going to use to drive

our planning process. And then as we prop up that current incident command and help them get a better, more complete grasp on their current resources, again, it allows that current incident commander to operate more safely. But also, it's more of the information that we're going to need to start driving that proactive planning process. Yeah, totally. And to that point, I mean, so the examples of, you know, the flooding, well, how much is flooded? Where is it?

Who's impacted? What's the demographics here? Where are your people so that if they go off the side of the road, we know at least someone was out there? Or the fire example, what if that whole building collapses? Do you know those five people that are over there? You know, shootings. Do we know who these 50-something people are that are in kit that are ready to help that are here? What if another bad guy does come in here with a truck?

Like, you know, what is all this stuff that happens? And so there's tangible street-level right now benefit, not just or in addition to, not just, but in addition to. That sets the foundation. One, it lets folks know. If you send someone around to check on them, that sends a message too that also helps things ongoing. Hey, want to make sure? And for a fire, I think almost only fire that I know of has accountability tags.

So even on day-to-day calls, there's a great accountability system that happens on the board, whether it's hanging tags or Velcro or something like that. Whereas we also need to loop in our other partners, because remember, it's all of our accountability, not just my badge and my patch. And the situation I don't I'm not just worried about who's there from health, I'm worried about who's there from all of our teammates. And so as we've gone up this leg of the P, this is all of our incident. We need to notify all of our partners. We are all responding and assessing. And with the incident management team, it's a little bit different because the hat you're wearing,

unless they need technical expertise from what your job is, is the hat of the task book or the position you're wearing in the incident command system or on the incident management team, which is also another mindset, I think, in that notification and that response piece is remember as a responder, and hopefully by the time you get out, but again, old habits, it's true, old habits are hard. Unless you're asked to be an expert in your field, you're there to be kind of a pure, so to speak, incident management practitioner. You know, that doesn't mean that when we get there, which again is another assessment, get their piece that,

oh, they only really want to talk to a law enforcement officer because that's what this issue is. It's a missing person or something else. Sure. Mike's either one of the two that have very well, you know, filled that role, both in role, both in being good at incident management, but also happen to be law enforcement, that's also going to help you shore up for later on because they can sell the system for you

if the folks don't believe in it or don't know, or it's the same discipline. So all the reasons that you relate to folks that have shared stories in just everyday life, like, oh, I used to live in Arizona. Oh, me too. You know, oh, we're both cops and I relate to you better. I get it.

It makes sense. And so, again, checking egos and we circle back to it. But, yeah, so, you know, part of that assessment, too, is who's best suited to be that, you know, team lead both practically and then who are we going to relate with. And, you know, we get that agency administrators brief and for the incident brief, and that 201, we really want to know what's happening. That's really ground truth, what's going on, because it's going to leverage us for the next big meeting. And so what's the next step that we're looking to take kind of when we finish, so to speak, this leg of the P before we get into that kind of operations O of the planning P on the next episode. So what are we looking to do before we kind of step off into the operationally focused stuff, Rob? Yep. So the last thing we have to do is basically

take all the pieces and parts that we have and put them together so that our unified command can take the direction they got from the agency administrator, right, so the direction they got from the fire has helped them gather and come up with our good, smart, uh, actionable objectives. And I'm, I'm sure that we,

uh, in fact, I'm ashamed. I've Kevin, I've listened to every single one of your podcasts. And I, I know for a fact you've covered smart objectives, but I could not tell you which one it is.

I would, I'm going to say all of them. Because in addition to, I mean, almost all of them, not like the jiu-jitsu ones and all that, which I'm surprised we haven't talked about yet. Considering, Rob, what happened for you in jiu-jitsu today? Sidebar. Got my first white belt stripe.

Boom. Which still has me very nervous, but we'll come back to that. Awesome. Yeah, so I definitely talked about smart objectives a lot, both because they apply in incident management, they're in project management, both in books and practicality. So again, there's specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, or time oriented. And there's some variations slightly in some of those acronyms, but basically that's kind of, I think the well-known, the other thing is there, you know, that foundation foundational four, it was, you know, the big

three that one of our great, you know, Bill, one of our great mentors talked about, you know, objectives or chart and resources. And then I, you know, tacked on and not like, you know, he didn't already know about it or us a communication to kind of meld all those together. So definitely smart objectives have been a key, a cornerstone to a lot of things. So any of the episodes with foundational four, um, you know, that, that is the second one, or that's the first one of those, sorry. Um, and then, you know, obviously in the planning P process, we're going to, we're going to get into that, um, after we have a good handle and figure out what we need to get to. So, uh, project managers, if, if there's

any still here, cause we're going on an hour of some incident management-focused stuff, we know that smart objectives in the project management world are just as important because we want to know what we're trying to do together as a project team. And the same applies if we're in the field in a flooded area, on the scene of a shooting, a fire, whether it's near the docks or in a city or, you know, either one. And so, so unified command meeting. So day-to-day calls, that's pretty regular, right? We've said the term back of the SUV. That happens a lot, right? So if you're at a call or a pre-stage, we know a storm's rolling in the locality, like police and fire, hopefully in a lot of places, but I know in, in the locality like police and fire hopefully in a lot of places but i know in

in the region that we've worked together in and in your locality in particular are often really parked next to each other with the green light on one of them that says there's command posts and we're working together um unified command what are for an incident um and again ground truth again and if you look at after action reports having a real unified command in some of these things like mass shootings, other big storms we talked about, do not always happen. Which, you know, we've talked about this before on training and things, and I'm sure we'll get into other episodes as well, speaks to the partnership that didn't happen maybe before that event. And I know there's factors, emotional, adrenaline, all that kind of stuff, safety, all these different factors in there, but it's a huge factor. So on an incident, how have you, Rob, helped either pull together Unified Command or how have you seen it already work pretty well when you've showed up?

Yeah, so I've got to admit, if it's day-to-day work, I'm extremely spoiled in that our police and fire resources have a pretty, a fairly long history of understanding and embracing the needs and the benefits of unified command. And, you know, day to day, what does this look like? Again, you know, most of the time, it's the fairly routine stuff, right? So it's where firefighters are still doing firefighter kind of things, right? And they just need police officers to do normal kind of police officer things around them doing their firefighter things. Or conversely, it's police officers doing usual police officer kind of things. And maybe they just need a couple of firefighters to come do some firefighter things around them.

And so really, that unified command is pretty easy. It's a great conduit for communication between the two disciplines quite often is what it's mostly used for. But where it really, really shines is when you start getting these folks together and you have the uncommon tasks, right? So the stuff that we don't do every day where all the disciplines are maybe getting outside of their comfort zone and you're really putting your heads together as you're figuring out okay what needs to be done and who here has the best probability of taking their round peg and banging it into this triangle hole right zombies like zombies uh you know everything everything from zombie apocalypse to maybe it's the uh oh gosh i wish i could tell you the storm uh where we had a dam a dam overtopping and we're actually working up a plan to do an evacuation for a very prescribed area that was within the flood inundation area for this dam, assuming if the dam had given way and there were some concerns for it,

we actually developed a contingency plan using a unified command approach. And what we came up with was basically we were going to have a law enforcement officer, I think actually a lieutenant, supervising four different groups. Were those groups all law enforcement or a different discipline? Exactly. So they were mixed. And so that was what we were coming up with was we were trying to figure out what kind of resources to use, how to utilize them,

with the intention of we identified that the need was going to be actual door-to-door evacuation. And so each group was going to have several task forces, and each task force was going to be one fire truck, and don't quote me on the numbers, but I think it was four law enforcement officers. The idea being that the four law enforcement officers and some of the personnel from the fire truck could do the door-to-door notifications because it was dark, it was after hours. And the fire truck was there so that it could use its scene lights to help illuminate the yards as the folks were walking from door to door. And then also they could be there with PFDs and ropes if, you know, if for some reason floodwaters began to come down the street or what have you, right? And so then there was an entirely separate group that was going to be specialized resources.

And this was everything from ambulances that could come in and help with removal of people that maybe were non-ambulatory, as well as swift water rescue resources in case any of the responders actually ended up in the water. So stuff like that is where we really get to see the unified command concept just really, really shine. It's got its obvious uses where there's competing priorities and stuff like that, but where I think unified command

really, really shines is when you have a problem for which there isn't necessarily a, you know, there's not a square peg for a square hole, right? But we're trying to be creative and use our folks and use our resources creatively. That's where I think Unified

Command really, really pays huge dividends. That's a good example of the dam because Unified Command waxes and wanes on who should be kind of the lead Unified Commander. So to your point, your great example, when it's dark and folks aren't expecting

you, you should probably have law enforcement that has weapons. And evacuations typically and those things are law enforcement. They're the leads in those because they have the authority to either, if there's a mandatory evacuation or something like that, be out there on the point. But obviously an engine, big vehicles are great resources to move a lot more folks than one car. And then going back to fire for the medic ones that have a medical issue. So they're going to coordinate that large mass movement of homebound or bedbound or whatever they are, patients, people. And then if you think back, okay, it's a dam, right?

So that's a public works thing. If it's a local one, who knows who owns it. And so now we're solving the immediate problem by moving people out of the way, but then we have to actually solve the problem so it doesn't keep happening from works. So when you get into the solutions with Unified Command of how do we stop this thing, sandbag it, rebuild it, whatever they do with all the great cool machines they have, then you're going to have a public works leading, you know, like that. And so I think that's a good thing too, where in this phase, I think for an incident, you're coming up and there's going to be immediately or should be typically one discipline, so to speak, that is the lead. And this is where I think I would say and jump in that who the unified commander is,

is discipline specific. This isn't wearing your generic, so to speak, incident commander hat like in class. This is where police are in charge because it's security and safety and evacuation. Fires are in charge now because we're doing patient care. Public works is in charge now because that's their expertise. Unified command, absolutely, both authority-wise and expertise-wise should be led that way. Yeah, and obviously you've got to have certain, you've got to have expertise in certain

fields at certain levels. And so definitely not disagreeing with you, but we actually even had the discussion when we were working on the contingency plan. And what we talked about was the fact that we felt like we had the subject matter expertise built in at the boots on the ground, the task force unit leader, and the division or group supervisor leader level, right? And so really above that in operations, you know, I don't mean to trivialize it, but in operations there wasn't as much of that kind of expertise as there was, okay, this group needs resources from that group or, you know, tracking progress for, you know, group one working in division one or group two working

in division two. So I'm totally with you on having, you know, the need for that subject matter expertise, but not disqualifying the idea that you can have that subject matter expertise built in almost anywhere within your work chart so that, honestly, I would have felt comfortable with, gosh, somebody from public health. I know, forsooth, right? But somebody from public health basically being the person just held the radio and relayed radio traffic. So you're, which is why, though, I always put the message of what

happens if you activate the emergency button, how to reset it, not everybody, which is true. But yeah, to your point, it totally makes sense. Totally agree. So and again, I think that's the dynamic nature of event or incident. But an incident is, you know, if you already have typically the first folks you have that have at least more exposure to this are police and fire right at EMS, depending on where you are, if they're not combined already. And so it makes sense to use those leadership capabilities and say, hey, experts, why don't you go with our folks? You tell us what to do, if that's okay with you, that kind of thing. So it sounds like a great opportunity to have those subject matter experts out with your people so that they could solve the problems there. And then maybe for bigger decisions or different ones, then you can bring in the unified commander. But yeah, I mean, I think that's the good thing is there's – I'm not going to say that there aren't wrong answers because there are, honestly. I mean, there totally are.

There's bad decisions caused by different factors. There's – sometimes it's just not the right thing to do. I know folks in courses have heard like there's no wrong answers. But yes, there are sometimes. Actually, I should apologize. I probably overmade my point. For example, and this is nothing against anybody in public health, but that's probably a bad example of what I just said. For example, with managing the resources for those evacuations in front of a flood, that's a bit extreme.

But you don't have to be a switchwater technician, right, to be operations for that incident. That's more like it. Oh, yeah, yeah. I totally agree with you because, honestly, if you're at the operations level where you actually have a section not, you know, where you have like three people and you're still very tactically focused, then yeah, I totally agree with you. Because then really you're what do you need, where do you need it. Right, exactly.

And I totally get that point. I think to me what really I'm talking about is the dynamic nature of this whole process, even though just going up the leg of it, is you don't have to just have, you know, the three chiefs together or the four, or know, the three chiefs together or the forecast or whatever for the unified command. So if there's a couple folks that are unified that agree, plus there's subject matter experts, and honestly, some subject matter experts want to get eyes on things because they need to, I think probably a balance, which, you know, we've helped folks with is, is when you do get someone that should be in command that wants to

be in the field. But they do have the authority, they do have the knowledge, and they should be paired up with other leaders. But again, you know, this, this isn't a magic answer for every incident working up the leg, because there isn't one. So I'm totally on board with being dynamic. And, and, you know, there's probably infinite scenarios from folks out there listening that have done things their way. You know, to me, the kind of wrong thing or heading down the wrong road, wrong answer really is if you are a leader, if you should be in a position where, you know, you've loved being in the field all the time, but you really need to step back and stay strategic, that's where that is a bad call. You know, and that's a tough balance because, you know, lead from the front, those kind

of things, let people see you, all that kind of stuff. But sometimes you can do more for folks not being in the front because we need your leadership for the whole thing, not as much, you know, in every tactical area. So, well, hopefully, hopefully we get some emails from uh from folks uh who want to share their stories and hopefully i don't just get uh hate email from people who are going to scold me for putting someone from uh pub health in charge of an evacuation uh the only thing i would add to all that though kevin and i know you and i are on the same page with this is um you know so i i kind of talked about how that unified command can really, really, you know, get used to it and build those relationships with your partnering agencies when it is the, you know, hey, we're just at a normal apartment fire

or whatever, and law enforcement is doing some traffic control for us or something of that sort, you know, use those incidents to make that kind of unified command approach the standard practice. You know, don't wait, and the first time you back your SUV up to somebody else's SUV is when something, you know, is really going sideways, and you've got to be really creative, you know, get those reps in first. Yeah, and, you know, I spoke to after-action reports. They're sometimes hard to take, hard to read, and they're ugly,

but there's more than one of them, so there's no one finger pointed at any one of them from school shootings, and that has happened multiple times. That's the extreme example, but sometimes, honestly, folks that have been resistant is one of the examples, and I think I mentioned this before, particularly the active shooter episode I did and in training we did. It's more than forms.

It's more than this. What if one of your people gets shot and we don't know where they are, right? Boil it down to the worst, most simple thing. And one, because it's happened. Uh, and, and because, you know, if that doesn't motivate you, um, to work this process well, to communicate well, to work together, um, then, then I don't, I don't really know what else would. That's always kind of my go-to, you know. But, yeah, so I think covered the leg pretty well. Anything you want to add?

So when we're working up to this point, you know, we're getting ready to jump off kind of into operations. What advice do you have for folks that have gotten through this much of their incident response and, you know, for an incident? And then we'll jump into events. We might have to break this one off in another episode. We're already an hour. Yeah. We're at an hour and 23. But so, you know, is there any additional advice or guidance that you would give folks? You know, the only thing that I would add is we go to incidents to win. We don't go to fight fair. So cheat. So I can't emphasize enough, you know, have have training aids that work for you or, you know, have resources, manuals, guides, just things like that.

Things like that. Have those things that work for you, and don't be afraid to use them. Nice. That's pretty solid. I think we're being dynamic, just like we said, throughout this process, and I think we're going to have an A, B, and C episode. I dig it. There's so much to talk about. So hopefully, folks, we provided value.

Rob, thanks again for coming back. We'll see you in the next couple episodes for sure. Sounds good. And for anybody listening, thanks again. Betweentheslides.com, at PenelKG on the Twitters and the Instas. Well, I'm 45. I don't know why I talk like that. But yeah, on the social media.

Facebook, we have Between the Slides page. On Betweentheslides.com, we've got the latest episodes. You can listen from there. We actually have almost half now folks listening from a browser rather than like their iPhone or Stitcher or something, which is pretty neat. So thanks again, Christy McDevitt from Washington State Forest Service. From other folks, we've had folks reach out from India, from someone that's a DJ, just thought, hey, this is kind of neat. So pretty, pretty cool. Really appreciate it. We hope that we are helping folks like us that are coming up or already in the game and the incident

management game. And, you know, this, this helps give a perspective that maybe folks don't have or shares one that folks do that just don't happen to be podcasting about it. So feel free to reach out, uh, email like Rob suggested at kp.bts.podcast at gmail.com or just go to between the slides.com and all the contact stuff is there, um, for Rob and myself. Thank you very much. Everybody out there. Stay safe. Everybody serving, uh, here and myself. Thank you very much. Everybody out there, stay safe.

Everybody serving here and abroad. Godspeed to you all. See ya.