ICS-NPS.wmv    4:19    February 24, 2010     

Screen:
The National Park of American Samoa was the first federal agency to respond to the earthquake and tsunami of September 29, 2009.

Overlay:
Mike Reynolds, Superintendent, National Park of American Samoa

Reynolds:
There were five waves, the first two that were large and then they got smaller after that.  But after the fifth wave when the water receded the staff started collecting back around Pago Plaza, which is where our visitor center had been before the wave wiped it out. And because they were already dressed for the field that day, they had their radios and field equipment on. We also had many of our 24 wildland fire fighters start reporting in for duty 

(Overlay:
January 25, 2010, American Samoa)

with their field equipment on. So I had communication, and generally most people had on good footwear and things like that. So what we did is started taking assessment of how many we had and trying to track down the rest -- we have 128 people on staff in one way or another associated with the park.

Screen:
The Incident Command System (ICS) is a standardized approach to managing disasters and other incidents. It can be scaled to meet the need.

Reynolds:
It was definitely ICS and we'd all had training in ICS. I've been through a number of wildland fires and searches on the mainland, but nobody on this staff had, other than sitting through the one-day training, actually implemented it before. So basically our, our ICS was this piece of paper.

I mean we assigned, you know, logistics. We had an IC. We had our medical team and each group had a designated leader and that leader was given a hand-written list with the members of their group. We had an additional complication here with a language barrier. You know, and even some of the crew leaders like John and Andrew don't speak a whole lot of English. Joe group, Group One, went and searched from the creek all the way over to the road by the cannery in Pago Pago Park. Went down the opposite direction toward Fagaalu and they actually encountered, I believe, four of the eight bodies that we found on that trip. And they Andrew's group went up the hill in Pago.

What didn't work was we didn't have any kind of a map. I mean because the wave took everything away that we had, you know, we didn't even have a map to pull out to document where the people were going. So it was all trying to track in your head like where each group was. You know, it made sense when we deployed them basically saying like go north, you go east, you go south, you go west. And then check in every fifteen minutes and tell me where you're at. Well that didn't work after awhile because, you know, John would say, "I'm at the green house. I'm going to the yellow house and we found this or that." It literally was just what you hear at the time and trying to scribble notes, but it was coming in too fast and in multiple languages to keep up with it.

Overlay:
Pago Plaza, January 29, 2010

Our staff generally are forestry workers who spend their time up in the national park killing invasive species trees. They're pretty tough guys and they have field equipment including radios for communication, which was important. So anyway, at 11 o'clock we had a debrief. We reformed into new teams because by that time we had a lot more people. And again ICS worked really well for that. It scaled quite effectively and we made sure that the radios were deployed. By that time Anthony had acquired some bags of chips and bottled water which we, you know, distributed. People took a little break and then we went back out and sort of did debris cleanup and body searched in the afternoon til about four o'clock when we sent people home through whatever means. By then they had the road plowed open and made that a lot easier.

Screen:
www.fema.gov

http://www.fema.gov/emergency/nims/IncidentCommandSystem.shtm

Tsunami aftermath video courtesy KVZK-TV American Samoa