By EVAN BLACKWELL
Jarrett Devine was working for the Federal Emergency Management Agency on September 11, 2001, and helped to coordinate the federal response to that disaster from the FEMA office in Massachusetts. Now he's in Rhode Island, developing an Emergency Response Plan for the City of Warwick.
When Rhode Island received a federal grant to improve their emergency preparedness, 70 percent of the grant was designated for individual towns and cities. Devine has just recently completed the Emergency Response Plans for East Providence, Burrillville and Lincoln.
“Now I can focus all my attention on Warwick, which is a bigger challenge,” said Devine.
The city has funded the project with a federal grant. He hopes the plan will be implemented by the start of next year.
“Is Warwick a target for an international terrorist attack? Probably not, said Devine. “But you can have a domestic terrorist incident, something on a smaller scale, incidents where someone would target those that offend them. Terrorism, by definition, is making a political statement, and political statements tend to be national.”
“The city does have its share of potential target locations,” he went on. “Obviously, we have the airport, something that is nationally known, and there are other targets as well.
He doesn't name them for an obvious reason
“A lot of this information is sensitive,” he said.
Nevertheless, all emergency operation procedures are required by law to be part of public record, according to Devine. In order to protect sensitive information, then, Devine and his colleagues manage the information they put into the public record. In other words, sections of the Emergency Response Plan reference sensitive information that remains off the public record.
Warwick already has an emergency operation procedure, he explained, one that is approximately 300 pages long, but it is dated. Mostly, it took what Devine described as an all-hazard approach, outlining a plan that covers natural disasters such as hurricanes in much the same way as any other emergency, such as terrorism.
“There are quite a few differences in the means in which you respond,” said Devine, but, he added, “You don't want to re-invent the wheel. After all, Warwick still has 39 miles of coastline that are susceptible to hurricanes.”
Warwick's original plan, which he rewrote, also had a very strong civil defense emphasis, with several references to fallout shelters and air raid sirens. Devine updated the plan with a 70-page addendum addressing terrorism issues and how to deal with specific types of threats.
FEMA has five classifications for terrorist incidents: biological, nuclear, incendiary, chemical and explosive (abbreviated as BNICE). Devine's addendum discusses in detail how the city can best prepare itself to deal with potential disasters of all kinds.
“They need to know what that organization is going to look like before [an emergency] occurs,” he said. “You don't want people sitting at a table discussing what to do when that occurs.”
Devine was hired by the city this summer, but he is no stranger to Rhode Island. He attended the University of Rhode Island for a year, after which he was employed as a full-time firefighter in East Providence at the age of 21. His experience as a firefighter familiarized him with emergency situations. He eventually went to Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey and earned a degree in emergency disaster management. From there, he interned at FEMA and was eventually hired as a reservist.
Before relocating his efforts to Rhode Island, where he resides now, Devine spent a month in Guam in the wake of a typhoon where winds of 248 mph were recorded, followed by six weeks in Virginia after Hurricane Isabel. After 9/11, he helped coordinate the emergency response from the FEMA office in Massachusetts as the urban search and rescue branch chief, because the FEMA office in New York was still recovering from the attacks.
When drafting the plan, Devine said he was feeling the pressure of complacency because in the northeast, “we historically have not been impacted by disaster.”
To combat this sense of complacency, the mayor is considering the creation of a permanent position to deal with emergency response issues, said Devine. Up until recently, Devine's superior, Burke Sarno, held the closest thing to a permanent position. The director of public works, who stepped down from his position Friday, doubled as the director of emergency management.
Devine also had some advice for Warwick residents. “The most important thing,” he said, “is that each resident, no matter what type of incident, has got to be self-sufficient during the first 72 hours [of a crisis]. It takes time to beef up security to respond to everyone's needs.”