Be prepared: Board looks at disaster plan

May 2, 2007
By Callie White
The Daily World

What would happen in Aberdeen’s schools if there was a tsunami incoming, or an earthquake, a fire, a hostage taking or a shooting?

Aberdeen School Board members got a look at response plans for worst-case scenarios Tuesday night.

They learned that if local emergency services couldn’t reach the schools for some reason — suppose the Chehalis River Bridge collapsed — the state has paid for schools here and everywhere across the state to be mapped in minute detail to assist out-of-area responders like the State Patrol and National Guard. If Olympia firefighters, for instance, answered an alarm, they would have information not only on finding the schools, they’d know where any hazards in those schools lie so they can avoid them.

The shooting at Virginia Tech University, in which a mentally ill gunman and 32 innocent people died, propels such plans to front pages. But the Aberdeen School District’s contingency/emergency plans have been in the making for years in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, tsunami scares, earthquakes and natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, Superintendent Marty Kay said.

Tom Laufmann, the School District’s financial director, narrated a display of Rapid Responder, an Internet-based mapping system. The pages hold all kinds of information, from aerial photos of the schools, floor plans, blueprints and a detailed list of all potential hazards. For the High School, for example, there’s a list of chemicals from the science lab, and a notation of the propane lines for the Phillips Building, which survived the fire that gutted the Weatherwax Building five years ago. There are pointers and pictures to show where to shut off utilities in all of the district’s schools.

A complete Rapid Responder profile for the new High School will be drawn up before it opens in August.

It will have the latest security measures, including 50 security cameras, most of them inside the huge three-story building, but others outside and in the parking lots. It will also have only one main unlocked entryway.

Local law enforcement will benefit from steps all the schools have taken to protect students and staff. Laufmann said all of the schools have been installing room numbers facing the street on the lower left-hand windowpanes in each class. That will help law enforcement officials surround an isolated threat and help them decide how to access school buildings from a nearby room, if necessary.

But the schools still need to be able to act independently in case the worst happens, said Anna Shanks, the district’s personnel director. That’s why each school developed its own plans — following an outline developed by the Federal Department of Homeland Security — to evacuate their facilities. The plans were drawn up with the assistance of Educational Service District 113 in Olympia.

“Even a little detail, like getting kids back to their parents, takes a lot of work when you need it to be done in a controlled way that accounts for all the kids,” Shanks told the board.

The emphasis for the committees was preparing to react to a major disaster, which could hit any and all schools rapidly.

Aberdeen schools have been conducting fire drills for more than a century, “But now you’re seeing more earthquake and tsunami drills,” Laufmann said.

At Miller Junior High School and Stevens Elementary, for example, kids are marched outdoors and up a hill, just for drill every school year, Laufmann said.

Each school has developed its own evacuation plan and rendezvous points. The schools of greatest concern are Harbor High School and A.J. West Elementary School in the low-lying west end, Superintendent Kay said before the meeting. To evacuate them due to a tsunami alert, for instance, students and staff at both schools would have to cross two busy highway corridors to get to higher ground. Depending on the location and severity of an earthquake, a tsunami could hit the west end within 20 minutes.

The schools also appointed committees of staff members to serve as first aid suppliers, search-and-rescue teams and to fulfill other essential tasks.

Some commonly-feared potential emergencies, like a pandemic flu outbreak, weren’t included in the planning process. Shanks said emergencies that don’t just affect schools on the building level are part of a separate planning process.

“Emergency planning is the sort of thing that is really boring until something happens and you aren’t prepared,” Kay said.