HomeMy WebLinkAboutSpeech on Ideal Working Relationships by Colonel W. J. Allen, Jr. 1968 DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY
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June 14, 1968
MEMORANDUM FOR CIVIL DEFENSE DIRECTORS
SUBJECT: Speech by Colonel W. J. Allen, Jr., of Denver, Colorado
Recently at the Mobile, Alabama meeting of the National Association
of State Civil Defense Directors we heard a presentation by an
outstanding local Civil Defense Director which we feel will be of
interest to many persons who have varying degrees of responsibility
for emergency operations planning and preparation at the County and
City level of government.
Major General Lyle Welch, State Adjutant General and Civil Defense
Director of Nebraska, was responsible for organizing a panel of
experienced people to discuss their involvement in planning for
and operations in civil disturbances. All of the speakers were
very interesting but Colonel Allen's description of his own
experience in the development of a readiness posture was, in our
opinion, particularly outstanding.
Colonel W. J. Allen, Jr., Civil Defense Director for the City of
Denver, Colorado, describes an ideal working relationship with his
Mayor as well as with the various city departments and essential
commercial and industrial organizations of his city. His articulate
but informal and "homey" descriptions leave no doubt in the listener's
(or reader's) mind that he knows what he is doing and gets it done.
A few days after hearing Colonel Allen make this presentation at Mobile,
we had the privilege of hearing his Mayor (Mayor Thomas G. Currigan)
describe the same relationship, his ultimate confidence in Colonel Allen,
and the confidence he has in the system that Colonel Allen and the
other departments of Denver have organized for all types of emergency
operations. Mayor Currigan is a member of the President's National
Advisory Committee on Civil Defense and expressed these sentiments in
a meeting of that body with Mr. Ronmi and Governor Daniel of OEP on
May 28, 1968, in Washington.
We have transcribed Colonel Allen's presentation and have reproduced
it with Colonel Allen's and Mayor Currigan's permission for the
benefit of other mayors and civil defense directors. It has inten-
tionally not been edited so that the informality and sincerity with
which Colonel Allen made his presentation might be preserved.
WIA4 eid f ell#14
John W. McConnell
Assistant Director of Civil Defense
(Plans and Operations)
COLONEL ALLEN'S SPEECH GIVEN AT NASCDD, MOBILE, ALABAMA, MAY 1968
Thank you very much, General Welch. Distinguished panelists, ladies
and gentlemen, it is indeed an honor and a privilege for a local director
of what some people refer to as a small cow town -- it's grown a bit --
to appear before such a distinguished group as this to present what
we have been doing -- our humble efforts to be sure that Denver is
ready for any kind of disaster that comes along.
To set the terms of reference as to how we in the Civil Defense Office
got into the civil disturbance planning, perhaps a few words of background
as to how we operate might help you to understand our position a little
better.
Some of the basic tenets in our operations in Denver have pretty well
established that civil defense and the city government are one and
the same thing. We have no separate organization of any kind. It's
all one organization. The Mayor is the elected head of the people,
and, as such, is the chief executive. He is solely responsible for
the safety and welfare of the people. He cannot delegate this responsi-
bility to anyone. He can delegate authority and he can delegate functions
but he can never delegate his responsibility, and he has delegated
authority to his civil defense organization to coordinate the planning
of all governmental and private organizations for disasters. Our
disaster ordinance that sets up this is a typical civil defense one
which pertains to enemy attack but they have in there a little clause
that says the functions of the office shall be in accordance with
the tenor of the times, which gives us considerable leeway to operate,
and Mayor Currigan is very great in decentralizing authority, and,
as such, he more or less gives us pretty free rein to use our imagination
and our initiative to do whatever is necessary to be sure that the
city is ready to function no matter what the cause of the disaster
or emergency could be.
Now in this term the Civil Defense Office -- a staff of four men and
two young ladies -- functions as a special staff to the Mayor, to
the other city departments, to business and industry, the community,
and to the citizens. It is our job first, as we see it, to be able
to mobilize all the resources of manpower, skills, supplies, and equipment,
in the community and to permit the Mayor to bring to bear, at the
right time, at the right place, in the right amount, a balanced force
capable of coping with whatever the emergency or disaster is.
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I guess it's because I was born tired, having been born in Mobile
and raised here and I never got over it, that we like the Mayor's idea
of decentralization of authority and functions, so we don't do anything
ourselves that we can find somebody else to do. So we spend more
time, I guess, looking for departments to assign responsibilities
to than we do doing it ourselves. We feel that we must be unencumbered
of all operating functions if we're going to function as a special
staff to the Mayor to assist him, not only by coordinating planning
overall, but in helping him to "coordinate operations whenever a disaster
occurs.
We have a mission, too, of course, of training the citizens and business
and industry in the mechanics and techniques of individual survival.
We also have the responsibility of training the members of city government --
the decision makers and policy makers - -in the mechanics of rapid
coordinated decision - making, and in this way we also are responsible
for providing for the Mayor and his cabinet -- the decision makers --
the means for them to exercise centralized control and direction of
all operations. In analyzing disturbances, in analyzing disorders,
in analyzing disasters, they're all about the same. We are convinced
that all disasters generate essentially the same results with respect
to damage to property, injury, and death to people and the need for
restoration of law and order -- all of these things that go with any
disaster that vary in degree based upon the cause of the disaster.
With this in mind, then, we in Denver, at the direction of the Mayor,
have assigned responsibility for all operating functions to the operating
departments of the city. Now their departmental functions: The
department does not have civil defense functions and ordinary functions.
It has just one set of functions. Some they do ordinarily every day
and some they only do when there's an emergency, but nevertheless
there is just one set of functions. Now all of our departments are
considered operational departments, and they run their departments
in a disaster just the same as they do in everyday life. You know
the Mayor authorizes them to do this, and then, once a week, he brings
them together in a cabinet meeting in which they brief him on what
they've been doing. They recommend policy or changes of policy, the
Mayor makes his decision, they take the decisions back, get the staff
in and give them directives to implement the Mayor's policy by issuance
of directives to the operating departments. So by bringing the Mayor
and his cabinet to the Emergency Operations Center in the event of
an emergency, we are only providing him with the means of sitting
in a continuous cabinet meeting for as long as necessary to grind
out the decisions quickly.
The Police Department operates generally from Police Headquarters
as an operating department; the Fire Department operates from Fire
Headquarters; the medical organization out of Denver General Hospital --
all as sub- EOC's.
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Now our EOC is generally divided into a policy group, which is the
Mayor and his cabinet in the same area and the operating staff in another
area so that we can protect and seal the Mayor and his cabinet from
the hurly -burly of everyday operations. We can run three shifts in
the operations area, but I only have one Mayor and I can't run him
three shifts at five days running, so we've got to give him the chance
to rest. So the policy group restricts its attention to policy decisions,
priority determinations, advance planning, and resources control --
all the routine operations. Response to requests, the issuance of
operational directives to police, fire, and other headquarters is
handled by the operations staff in another area. This has been tested
out in a number of exercises in which we have simulated earthquakes,
we've simulated tornadoes, we've simulated enemy attacks. We do this
quite frequently because we know that it is the secret of teaching
these men to function as a command post staff and to be able to arrive
at coordinated decisions much more rapidly than they normally do.
So these exercises that we run through are our means of training them
and conditioning them to function as a staff in the Headquarters.
Our biggest problem, of course, is to get them out of the habit of
wanting to run out to see -- to be right the scene -- since many
of the emergencies are the type that you can go and see right at the
spot where you can see everything. And they're in the habit of doing
that. But our job is to train and condition them to come to the Emer-
gency Operations Center where they can look at the situation map where
the whole situation is posted and be able to run the show from there
by means of communications. This has improved a great deal in the
last couple or three years. So we continue to run these exercises.
Now, of course, one of the keys to this centralized control of operations
is good communications, and in our Emergency Operations Center we have good
communications. We have communications, of course, using the NAWAS, to
the State Patrol and to NORAD. We have direct lines to five radio stations
hooked so that the Mayor can go over all five simultaneously, or, if
we have time, we have a setup where we can put the Mayor on every radio
and television station in Denver simultaneously within 15 minutes after
he has made the decision to go before the people. We tested it last
fall and we used it twice right after King's murder and it worked each
time. We have communications directly with General Moffitt, the Adjutant
General of the State, on his National Guard net. We have an inter - county
network which will cover everything 100 miles north and south and east
and west of Denver. We have communications with all city departments,
all the police frequencies, fire, medical, public works, engineering,
and, in addition, we have 21 mobile units we can keep under our direct
control so that we can plug gaps in the communications.
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We find that the EOC and its communications have many uses that were not
envisioned at first. For example, not long ago we had a man that took
several hostages and was running around the State to elude capture. Because
of our communications capability we were able to follow that thing all
over the State, but the biggest thing was that we have a hot line from
our EOC to the police dispatcher. We called him early and suggested
that he pass to us any routine police traffic -- accident investigations,
stuck traffic signals, requests for ambulances and things like that --
so they passed all that stuff during the day to us by telephone and we
handled it on our network and freed the police channel then for chase
information. At the same time, we monitored the movement of emergency
vehicles in the city and kept the police informed of any movement that
could affect the chase in any way.
We're using this now all the time. We're serving the City Government
as a street closure control center for the city. Anybody who digs a
hole in the street now has to call us because we're interested in anything
that might impede the movement of an emergency vehicle to an emergency,
and it was gradually set up that everyone who opens up a street now has
to call us and give us the place, location, and the length of time. We
notify fire, police, and medical of this impediment to emergency movement,
and then, when they close it, they call us back and close it, and we
release it. We're available to the newspapers if they want news of this
type. We don't automatically furnish it unless we are asked.
We are on the weather network for dissemination of tornado information,
and we have had exercises for earthquakes. We've had a flood and we
almost had a riot last summer but avoided it. We had a considerable
amount of unrest the days of Friday and Saturday following King's murder.
We were operational then for about 36 hours, keeping track of bands of
youngsters running around town, and, although there were a number of smaller
incidents, there was nothing serious that came out of it.
But there are other things we have done after mobilizing the city and
insuring that all of the departments have their plans and that these
plans have been tested to operate under any kind of emergency from a
two -alarm fire up. We have integrated a number of other operational
groups such as the Public Service Company, the Telephone Company, the
groups such as the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the military, the school
districts and others. We have integrated their plans with those of the
city plans. In this they are most cooperative in discussing their plans
and in their plans they all have personnel assigned to come to the Mayor's
emergency EOC in the event of a disaster. There, they represent their
departments, establish communications with the agencies, keep them informed
of what is going on in the city goveiiu►ient. They keep the city informed
of their capabilities and limitations and resources that have been lost,
and serve as technical advisors to the planning staff. So in this way
we integrate their planning. We integrate their operation. So they
essentially become operating departments of the city.
Then we must have the means of rapidly augmenting the resources available
to the department managers; to augment the equipment and staff that is
available to them. For example, if we have to put a large number of
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patients into a hospital, obviously they have to have additional staff,
and between the additional staff and additional patients, it puts a terrific
burden on the support groups such as the kitchen of the hospital, the
laundries, and so forth. So we have written agreements with some 24
organizations in the city. For example, the Colorado - Wyoming Restaurant
Association has agreed that their association headquarters will function
as a disaster headquarters for all of their members, and if the hospitals
need additional kitchen personnel, the head of Health and Hospitals telephones
them or communicates with them, tells them what they need and where.
They get out and get the cooks and the bakers and the soup kettles and
get them over to the hospitals. The Laundry Owners' Association has
given us the same thing in that industry. The morticians are lined up
in support of the Coroner. Associated building contractors, Colorado
contractors, the pest control people are also lined up.
We were operational during the flood and two or three times since that
time. It's only natural that these departments look to the Civil Defense
Office to coordinate any type of planning that has to do with disasters.
It's never any part of our function to make any decisions whatsoever.
We, as a staff agency, recommend. I never forgot one day in the Command
and General Staff School at Leavenworth, a Major Arthur Trudeaux at that
time, who subsequently was Lieutenant General Trudeaux, speaking to the
class on staff responsibility, gave a most inspiring talk and ended with
the statement, "Gentlemen, never forget you wear your star on your collar,
not on your shoulder." And this is the way we operate in the city. We
feel that if we knew enough ourselves to write a plan for the Police
Department that we should be Chief of Police, not head of Civil Defense.
We feel that our most important function is to ask questions and to kick
shins, and keep kicking them until we get the answers. To this end,
then, when things began to warm up a bit last summer, following right
along, realizing that these things were nothing more than another form
of disaster inasmuch as they generated essentially the same requirements
for services as other disasters do, we just naturally, without any forethought,
without asking the Mayor or anybody else, just continued our duties of
calling together the people that had responsibilities to be thinking
in detail of what they were going to do and how they were going to do
it. We called them together and started asking them questions. "Have
you thought of this" and "have you thought of that," "are you ready for
this" and "how are you going to do those," and pretty soon we had a fairly
decent little operational plan quickly for the summer, but when summer
passed we realized that this was not really adequate, that we really
had only scratched the surface in the planning. So we moved in then
and started designing a series of exercises that could really get us
down into details of planning, to check our basic disaster plan against
various types of civil disturbances to see if it would be operational.
Had we covered everything that could be expected under this type of circumstances
then?
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So we merely informed the Mayor's office in our usual little biweekly
briefing that we give him. About twice a week I run up and visit with
the Mayor's assistant and brief him on what we're doing. We told him
the first thing we had to do was to get a good intelligence organization;
that the intelligence bureau of the police at that time was only keeping
track of the Mafia and dope peddlers and things, and had to be expanded
into a real G2 function to cover all aspects of what was going on
in the city so that they could keep their fingers on the pulse and
we could spot trouble before it happened.
So to the best of our ability we functioned as a city G2 for several months
until a new police chief came in, and expanded his intelligence bureau
to function as a G2 organization. Then, to assist him, we designed and
put on a workshop or a seminar in which we looked at all aspects of intelligence,
of information gathering, of converting information into intelligence,
evaluation and collation of the information, and we brought together
all, not only city departments that had a direct interest in it, but
public service, telephone, and others who have an input, and from this
we assisted the police to develop a good intelligence organization that
is now functioning quite well. But, again, we just suggested to the
front office that we were doing this, and operating on the principle,
if there isn't anything in writing that says we can't do it, we do it.
We don't go ask anybody if we can. We go ahead and do it until somebody
shoots us down or tells us we can't. So far we've been able to develop
this system of taking the lead and providing the leadership to these
organizations.
Now the police department is so busy writing police plans they don't have
time to worry about what the fire department is going to do and what
the Red Cross is going to do and what the National Guard is going to
do. This is the job of somebody else to put all these together. So
we designed this series of exercises. We told the front office we were
going to do it. "God bless you. Go ahead," they said. Following the
intelligence organization we then brought in a group of the top -level
boys and, when we invited them to come, we were quite specific to say
that "if you can't come yourself, Mr. Top Man, whomever you send must
be authorized to commit your organization because final decisions will
be made at this workshop."
We got them all together and said, "All right. What are we going to
look at ?" The first thing is, "What type of civil disturbance might
we encounter ?" We came down with three of them: the sit -in, which is
designed to disrupt operations that had the potential of becoming a disorder;
a guerrilla- warfare type of operation, a hit -and -run type thing; and a
full scale riot. We developed the concepts on that and out of it became
a city policy. Basically the first phase is to eliminate the causes
of unrest by vigorous prosecutions of appropriate sociological programs,
and this is generally run out of the Mayor's Office. The second, to prevent
the outbreak of violent disturbances by anticipating trouble by using
intelligence organizations to spot trouble before it happens and then
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use timely preventive action to prevent it from occurring. Thirdly, to
halt the spread of possible inflammatory incidents through prompt and adequate
response, meaning a well trained, ready- response police squad or group
of men that are capable of moving in quickly and stomping out any incipient
incident before it has a chance to go, and then, fourthly, to be prepared
to suppress isolated or widespread violence whenever it occurs.
We brought together all of the conunand people. We brought them into
about six workshops. We put the top boys into the command workshop to
consider who's going to be in command, and what are the command relationships
with your neighbors, where are your command posts going to be, what
are your command channels of communications, what will your command
channels be for policy, for operations, and a number of questions of
this type.
Out of this workshop came the current emergency organization (see attached).
You'll notice that the Mayor and his cabinet are up top at the policy
level at the Emergency Operations Center. The various utility organizations
and National Guard are assigned a policy level liaison man to the Mayor's
staff. The Chief of Police has been designated as the Task Force Commander,
and he'll operate, if it's a minor thing, from his own headquarters.
If it's just too big for that, he comes over to the EOC. Now he has
operational control over the field crews of the utilities, the State
Patrol, the National Guard, police, sheriff, and the fire department.
He exercises operational control over those. Not command, but operational
control. And those organizations, in turn, provide operational liaison,
then, to the Chief of Police. In this way the whole thing is tied together
so that we've got unity of command. We've got the Police Chief above,
and we believe this will function very well. It has in the two or three
occasions we have tried it out.
We had another workshop going at the same time on personnel matters --
determining the possible use of volunteers, whether we could send a
civilian ambulance into an area or not. We had another group working
on tactical employment of the Guard, police, and others under these
three situations. Another workshop worked on questions pertaining entirely
to a security and identification, and the sixth workshop on legal and
jurisprudence of handling prisoners, hearing and trial procedures, bail
bonding, and so forth.
These workshops hammered out the answers to the questions and reported
back to the body as a whole. Then all of their decisions were put together
in a basic plan. We followed this by bringing in the communications
experts and getting them to design an integrated communications system
to integrate the networks of all these departments into one. We then
brought in the supply people and developed a logistical support plan
covering not only supplies of food, who's going to cook it, who's going
to buy it, and where's it going to be served, but gasoline, supply,
and maintenance of vehicles, recovery of abandoned vehicles, disposal
of bodies -- all of the other logistical subjects.
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Then we did one just on refugees in which we brought the Red Cross and
Welfare and other groups like this together to discuss who's going to
house, clothe, and feed these people and how. Then we followed with
one on how to go back into a devastated area, priority for re- entry.
When do your building inspectors and the public service crews, etc.,
enter the area? How about health inspections, removal of rubble, and
who will do it? Getting business back on its feet again, restoration
of utilities, and all of these subjects. This was all put together in
the basic plan.
We have "war- gamed" it a time or two. We've changed it a little bit because
of some of the reports of the riots in the East. Based on this basic
plan the National Guard and the police have prepared their own operational
plan to carry out the precepts of the basic plan. We will do a little
war -game or dry run in two weeks. . . just the police and ourselves,
the National Guard, and the State Patrol.
So we grew into these exercises through our work in natural disasters,
simulated enemy attacks, and general coordination of planning, and the
departments just naturally looked to us to carry on this type of coordination
and putting the plans together for them as a staff function. We tell
them. . . of course, our main mission, Mr. Police Chief, is to make you
look good, and, Mr. Fire Chief, our job is to make you look good. We
obtain the necessary answers, we provide the motivation, and then, after
we get the decisions, we write the plans for them and send them back.
But the police then take that and prepare their own operational plan
in the form that they can best understand. We try to use the existing
organization and procedures wherever it is at all feasible. We resist
any change in organization because, when a disaster hits, that's the
wrong time to use an organization you're not familiar with.
So our whole thing is based on trying to implement the old adage that
"Civil Defense is nothing but city government in action in all emergency."
It is a pleasure to have been with you this morning, and a real privilege
to present this very brief statement of what Denver's been doing. Thank
you.
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