Emergency Official Interview

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Jan 9, 2024

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Emergency Official Interview Casey L. Hooper Grand Canyon University: EMM-301 April 20, 2020

Emergency Official Interview Deputy Saysha Cornish What is your title and role in emergency response? Sheriff Deputy with the Cleveland County Sheriff’s Department and I also work with Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical response systems in the Oklahoma Army National Guard. For my civilian job I am an emergency first responder. On the guard side I am also considered a first responder when we get activated by the Governor to help stateside or the President when we are mobilized for overseas deployments. How do you handle being a dual first responder? Who determines which position you hold is more important? Being a dual first responder requires a lot of communication and coordination between myself, my full time position as a deputy, and my obligation to the National Guard. During times of crisis ultimately, situation dictates which position is the most important for me to be on. Like this pandemic for instance, the Guard is who decided my full time position would take priority over any state activations and I would only be called out in a dire emergency for our state. What are the different forms of communication that are used in your organizations? With the military and the Sheriff’s Department we use, hand held radios, cell phones, email, paper reports. With the military we also use HF radios, TACSATs, and COMSEC filled radios as well as what we call a Blue Force Tracker (BFT) which is like a computer tracking system with built in reports and text messages. We also have a Drone in my section that goes out on occasion. What would you say are some of the constraints with using these forms of communication equipment? With the Drone requesting air time can be an issue especially if you are in an emergency situation. Using a lot of our military equipment can be kind of tricky as you have to have the correct security fills.

Cross talk can be an issue when there are multiple emergency responders using single channel plain text radios. When the big Tornado hit a few years ago our computer usage was very spotty as the power was coming up and down and our generators were being pulled to help until FEMA got fully situated out here and operational in a JOC (Joint Operations Command Center). Cell phone towers were also lagging due to the amount of activity happening all at once. Having our computers and radio channels hacked are also an issue we have ran into. These can turn into grave security concerns, fortunately for both departments I am a part of we have been able to catch and stop the situation almost immediately. What are some of the lessons learned from instances where you experienced power outages or loss of communication? With the sheriff’s department we can do manual reports as far as communications digitally go we have the hand held radios that can be used to communicate with people that are in range. We have used lessons learned from past experiences to know how many generators we need to be operational. In the Army we will set up a retrains site where we sit a rig in a position that will keep our line of sight open regardless of where we are our HF radios can continue to communicate. What are some advantages with the equipment you have? Our radios have omnidirectional antennas that can allow for long range communication. We have new hand held radio systems that have less dead spots. This allows for us to better communicate with each other and to better support the local populace. What are some of the ways to annotate your “lessons learned” with everyone in your department? We use after action reviews (AAR) to discuss the area that we should sustain and what areas we can improve on. Once we get the issues identified there are people in place to work on getting these issues resolved. What type of training do you do to ensure you are on the same page with other emergency management departments and first responders?

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We do monthly drills in our department and have set radio channels to be able to communicate with fire department personnel and other emergency responders. We also have local policies in place for training. We follow the guidelines set out by the state when it comes to emergency situations. With the military we do Field Training Exercises (FTX) where we set up all of our communications equipment and make sure they are working and can talk to each other. We also have Communications Exercises (COMMEX) to ensure our equipment can not only talk to our internal equipment but that it can talk to other organizations equipment as well. Disclaimer: These answers are in no way connected to anyone or any entity other than myself and do not reflect any stances of the Canadian County Sheriff’s Department or the Oklahoma Army National Guard Reflection: Since we are on a Safer at Home lockdown still, I chose to interview one of my part time Soldiers. I work in our Communications Department on drill weekends and some of my full time duties also include communications equipment. In this day and age communication is the cornerstone of any organization and can be the best and worst thing introduced. As Saysha mentioned we have dealt with issues in hacking and getting air time request approved as quickly as we need it approved. We have worked with FEMA on multiple issues from the Hurricane Katrina disaster where communication was almost non-existent to most recently dealing with Tornadoes that have ripped through Oklahoma. Being in the military and dealing with emergency management over the last 17 years, I have been able to witness the growth in communications. Although we still have a long way to go in how to handle things and how to perfect the systems we have, the communications field has come a long way from where it was. One thing we have learned is that we are always going to have to be vigilant when it comes to computers and radio waves as they are easily compromised. Another thing that has recently come about is Cyber Terrorism. The Air Force is branching off to establish the Space Force that is supposed to be equipped to deal with the Cyber Terrorist attacks that are made against the U.S. We have learned to quit assuming people from third world countries cannot hack into our equipment and have started to recognize the affects that they can cause.