A big thank you to the Keller 1st ward for sharing their ward plan. The key to any ward plan is that it is customized to your congregation and will be used.
Disclaimer
Might as well say it up-front: this plan is only a support
to your individual family disaster plan – that’s all it ever can be. And the stake plan is likewise only a support
to this one. Your family plan is king –
have one.
Face it, most disasters are upon you before you can organize
a very effective community action, and are quixotic enough (I offer the average
tornado as example) that acting upon on-the-spot decisions will be what saves
your lives. After the fact, the ward and
stake (and so on up to church headquarters) do indeed kick in big-time for
recovery efforts. So do the civil
authorities at county, state and federal level.
For the first few minutes (perhaps hours) you are utterly on your
own. Your ability to see to your family,
and then to volunteer to help people and families who were not as lucky
as you, is what preparedness is about.
Yes, that includes the bishopric and quorum/RS presidencies: own family
first.
Introduction
Modern prophets have said…but wait, since you’re reading
this plan, you’re probably already beyond being admonished. You want to know what’s goin’ down. This is it – or at least, the best we can do.
One caveat: this plan-A is oriented toward a disaster with
both identifiable beginning and end – which allows for clean-up and a period of
normal living before the next disaster comes along. If this clean-up period is denied us (because
one disaster blends into the next), we will modify as we go, to plan-B, C…etc.,
to cope with that. Your inventiveness will at that juncture become of far more
worth than this document. Consider doing
this:
Adapt
Improvise
Overcome
General
Bishops are instructed that they preside over everyone (LDS
and non-LDS) who lives within the boundaries of the respective wards. In practice, helping all our neighbors at the
level that we take for granted helping active ward members may stretch us so
thin we’re ineffective at helping anybody.
This is not to say “don’t” – only “figure out what wisely means,
and follow that.”
Similarly, home- and visiting-teaching pairs are often
assigned to families with whom there is a perceived spiritual “fit”, with
little weight placed on physical proximity.
If the streets are closed to vehicles, it may be virtually impossible to
check on one’s assigned families, whereas a member who lives much closer could
do so without great difficulty. More on
that below.
Before
the Disaster
Assignments
These (including their respective secretaries) are,
practically speaking, the ward’s “first responders” for disaster
coping/recovery work
Bishopric
High
Priests group presidency
Elders
quorum presidency
Relief
Society presidency
Each of this “sweet 16” is a primary “go-to” person for some
aspect (listed below) of the ward’s disaster-response capacity. Each is also a back-up “go-to”, in case the
primary person is unavailable (we’re all busy, and many of our men travel out
of state regularly) or is incapacitated by the disaster. These pre-assignments don’t mean that every
jot and tittle is nailed down, but they allow individuals to specialize a bit
(and thus be better at what they do) and it saves more thrashing around than
you’d think, in the initial organizing interval.
Position Held
|
Primary assignment
|
Back-up assignment
|
Bishop
|
|
|
1st
Counselor
|
|
|
2nd Counselor
|
|
|
Executive
Secretary
|
|
|
High Priest Group Leader
|
|
|
1st
Counselor
|
|
|
2nd
Counselor
|
|
|
Secretary
|
|
|
Elders Quorum President
|
|
|
1st
Counselor
|
|
|
2nd
Counselor
|
|
|
Secretary
|
|
|
Relief Society President
|
|
|
1st
Counselor
|
|
|
2nd
Counselor
|
|
|
Secretary
|
|
|
Communication
The ward will implement a phone (both landline and cellular)
calling tree. Someone answering a phone
at least demonstrates that a warning message can be transmitted
near-real-time. E-mail is reliable, but
may be days too slow – and not everyone has it.
We at stake level are also investigating an automated
dialing system, such that a synthesized voice message can be put into a
telephone server and delivered in rapid (more parallel than serial) fashion to
a body of telephone numbers belonging to the ward members. The Arlington
and Lewisville
stakes already have such systems in place.
We are watching to see how well the system works in shake-down.
The stake president desires that one (or more, if motivation
and time-available allows…) of the four people in each of the above
presidencies (in each ward) have the ability to communicate with the other
groups, in the event (not so unlikely, actually…) that the telephones quit
working. This ability means that the
person is a licensed amateur radio operator and owns a battery-powered
hand-held VHF/UHF transmitter-receiver (slightly larger than a cell
phone). Bishop Tennant has done this. Other radio equipment
can be used for shorter-range emergency communication, but amateur radio seems
to be the only thing that will reach clear across Keller 1st ward in
an urban radio-propagation situation.
Self-help
The ward is split into fifteen geographic chunks (one for
each of the above officers except for the bishop, who is a rover/coordinator),
each of which contains a cluster of LDS domiciles. These chunks come alive only in case of
disaster that impairs communication and transportation. They are not to serve decreased
social/spiritual interaction with those who live across the ward from you, and
cooperation, not competition, is the only acceptable stance.
During the Disaster
Communication
(to be written)
After the Disaster
Communication
(to be written)
Self-help
In case the telephones go down and the streets are closed by
debris or by first-responder roadblocks, the heads-of-families within each
chunk are responsible to physically check on the welfare of the other family
units in their chunk and to report their condition. Appendix B lists the information in which the
bishop is officially interested (for the stake president will want it, for
probable relay to Area and Headquarters Priesthood Authorities). Appendix C has a map of the ward showing all
the chunks. Home Teachers and Visiting
Teachers will be reported to, and involved in the victim families’ recovery as
quickly as feasible – but the down-the-block neighbor is the first-responder in
many cases, out of sheer proximity. When
a new family moves into a chunk, the existing families will make them aware of
this intra-ward upon-disaster structure and make sure they have a copy of this
plan.
Outside help
Church
(to be written)
Civil
(to be written)
Appendix A –
recommended personal behavior in a disaster
Strangely, the best course of action in an oncoming disaster
is not so different from best-practice in daily between-disasters living. Davey Crockett said it well 150+ years ago: Be
sure you’re right, then go ahead.
Apply that dictum, customized to disaster-related behavior.
It’s been reliably found that when you’re really stressed
(the adrenalin kicks in) here’s what happens to you:
- your
cognitive ability goes out the window – you operate at about the level of
a lizard, for the duration. Reflex
action takes over from high-level reasoning.
- you
get tunnel vision, and sensory shutdown – later, you will not recall
hearing things that were loud and plain to anyone near you who isn’t
stressed like you
- you
become very risk-adverse – you simply refuse to try anything novel (read:
you haven’t done it before, let alone practiced it while not stressed) –
and BTW, just having thought about doing it doesn’t cut it – having
done it is required before you’re willing to do it while stressed.
The good news is that much of being sure you’re right can
happen before the disaster hits, leaving the “going ahead” part for the
disaster itself. That pre-disaster determination (should you choose to
implement your planning/execution that way – and I strongly recommend
that you do) simplifies much. The US Marine Corps acknowledges all this with their
pithy 5-P’s aphorism:
Prior
Planning/Practice
Prevents
Pitifully-poor
Performance
And since a Leatherneck does the job he’s paid for while
under stress, the Marines should know.
The actions you should take, without regard to the kind of
disaster, compose a very short list.
Example: if local flash flooding is imminent, it makes sense to get to
high ground and stay there awhile. If
it’s a tornado and severe lightning storm instead, only a suicide-wannabe would
choose to stand up on that hilltop yonder.
So:
- find
out what kind of disaster you’re dealing with (human first-responders,
TV/radio, direct observation, hearsay, in that order of reliability); the
information will shape your actions.
- assess
your chances of gathering your family to one location (at home) – or other
(away from home) that you’ve figured out, or one/some of them to some
other known-to-you family’s gathering place, and
- do the
best you can to bring about that gathering. People fight off the negative effects of
stress more effectively when they’re together and calming one another.
And…it’s OK to be frightened during the disaster. As Ernest Gann (noted airline pilot and
author) once said, “fright galvanizes to action – fear paralyzes.” And it’s that paralyzing “fear itself” that
Franklin Roosevelt once claimed is the only thing we have to fear.
Appendix B –
welfare information wanted by headquarters leadership
(the parts that chunk
reports can help provide, in bold)
- Number
of members injured/killed
- Damage
to church buildings or property
- Damage
to members’ homes
- Safety
of full-time missionaries
- Needed
equipment or supplies
- Requests
to use building by outsiders
- Plans
for members to help clean up
- Number
of people evacuated, flooded, burned out
- Stakes,
wards, area covered by disaster
Appendix C –
Keller 1st Ward map, showing 15 [geographic] chunks
Five other ward members are also licensed,
and four of them
Laird Taylor (me)
Monica Flores
Vaughn Schmitt
David Grant
are
so-equipped, and can be called upon as a radio “shadow” for one of the
sweet-16. But I’m also stake Emergency
Communications Specialist, so in a stake-wide disaster I have to serve the
stake presidency first.
