AMU Emergency Management Public Safety

Saturday Student Stories

As you know, I teach EDM courses in the graduate program of the American Public University System. Part of each class includes a requirement for students to post and discuss stories of an EDM event that impacted their lives in a forum. I hear some pretty amazing stuff, which I learn something from in every class I teach. So with the student’s permissions, I’d like to begin sharing some of the more informative and inspiring stories that I hear in each session. These are the instructions that the students respond to:

In this forum, you will utilize the ancient educational pedagogy of storytelling to better enable yourself and your classmates to understand the content, context, and applicability of the course concepts. Storytelling has been empirically shown to be vastly superior to reading and viewing media with respect to memory retention and enabling learning at the cognitive level. Plus, it’s fun.  laugh  So, here we go: 

Give an example of a crisis you’ve been involved in, observed, or read about. How well did leadership manage and communicate during the situation? Did the organization achieve closure, and if so, how quickly and effectively? In your assessment, knowing what you know now, did they consider everything that should have been considered?

Tell the story of your incident. Every story has these elements: a hero/protagonist–your subject individual or population; an apparently insurmountable conflict–the event that drew the attention of the media; a painful and sacrificial decision that must be made-typically, surrender, flee, or fight; and based on the choice, a process that is undertaken to achieve resolution. 

Story #1: I left my Heart in San Francisco.

    It was a foggy November morning on the San Francisco Bay. A container ship called the Cosco Busan was traveling towards the Pacific Ocean, however, it did not make it. The ship was navigating through the bay, located between San Francisco and Oakland, California when it struck a support tower on the Bay Bridge. At the point of contact, the ship was punctured releasing over 53,000 gallons of intermediate fuel oil into the bay. Response teams were immediately called in from all across the United States for oil spill clean up. My husband, Brad, was among those called in to provide assistance. My husband, through 25 years of oil spill response, is an expert in this field.

     Brad, because of his knowledge base, was named Air Operations Branch Manager for the initial locations and depths of oil that was released into the Bay. After the locations were verified, Brad was then put in charge of placing teams in place throughout several different locations around the Bay area to clean up oil that had infiltrated land, including the famous Alcatraz Island. His responsibilities kept him in San Francisco for over five months.

     There was a specific problem that no one within the emergency response network had anticipated…..volunteers. This is an area that no one had accounted for. The people of California were up in arms over the damage that had been done to their beaches. Several beaches were shut down in order to be properly and thoroughly scoured and cleaned by professionals in emergency clean-up. However, up towards a thousand people were demanding to be a part of the clean-up efforts. They wanted to clean their beaches.

    Cleaning up oil on specific types of land takes proper knowledge and training. These professionals have taken specific training courses, such as the HAZ WHOPER, or forty hour courses in which they learn the proper and safest ways in which to collect and dispose of oil. Many of these volunteers were angry and upset that they were kept off the beaches and accused those professionals of intentionally keeping them away, which in fact they were for legal and liability reasons. The volunteers became very disgruntled, unruly, and were interfering greatly with the clean-up efforts. They were seeking out attention from the media, blaming the government, the emergency response teams, the clean-up crews for delayed clean-up, and “hiding” the true nature of the beaches from the public. What is a management team to do?

     The emergency management response set up a very basic, four-hour fast tracked course open to volunteers to learn the very basic, but proper ways to identify and handle any oil they would encounter on the beach. They were given one specific beach in which they were allowed to help clean, while being supervised by professionals of course. Volunteers were also involved with the wildlife aspect of the clean-up efforts. They helped clean oil soaked birds and worked tirelessly in the rehabilitation area as well. This created a solution to the volunteer issue, while also gaining a more favorable light with the media.

     Having volunteers in the time of a very serious situation such as oil spill is important. However, it is imperative to have the proper training when dealing with anything of a chemical nature. Brad was able to help in these efforts, he was able to provide his expertise to this area and tried to create a cleaner California than when he arrived.

~ Kari Barker

Story #2: Destroyed by a Bubble.

My story is one that is well known, however, when it is at your doorstep reality creates a tangible trauma that can be ignored and run from, or battled head on. There was no lava or gigantic waves involved, nor a herd of thundering wildebeests hazarding their way into my domicile. The enemy was more formidable than all of these things in the amount of power it wields, the control it exerts and the destruction it can cause. An enemy or best friend, depending on one’s state of mind and how caught up they are in its might. 

Money.

My downfall…or me re-inventing my machine as I prefer to euphemize it. 

Once upon a time in 2001, after I had moved to Portland from Tacoma a few years earlier with no direction to follow (I grew up in South Tacoma, a scary place, leaving was like Escape from New York), I had the opportunity to go to college! Yay! So, off to Portland Community College I went. My significant other is an Interior Designer, so it seemed like a great idea for me to become an architect. So, there I was, mastering the art of running AutoCad, calculating beam reactions like nobody’s business and designing fabulous buildings. I even worked construction for a summer (I have my own tool belt to prove it!). I absolutely LOVED it. So, here’s the rub, my supportive spouse worked in the new housing industry. About a half of year shy of my AA and then transition to big kid school (who knew I would be in even bigger kid school now?!) I was encouraged to take the exam and obtain my Real Estate license. The money was great, the market was climbing and I was good with people. 

Guess what? It turns out that I really did not have any idea how to go and find business, mostly because I hate selling stuff to people. I tried two different brokerages, but it turns out they actually expected me to cold call people and go knock on doors. Basically, this translated into me taking care of my kids and suddenly volunteering to be a class mom ALL of the time. Then I was hired to sell for a big builder, (the largest builder nationally) to sit on a site to sell beautiful new houses. The market was really off and running and there seemed to be free money for everyone! The first year I made $99,000 between April and December (whoop whoop! I grew up poor, remember), totally unbelievable. I was RICH, RICH, RICH!

This is where disaster began to slowly tick away and strike even though I was too blinded by green and Nordstrom’s to see it. 

I ignored my husband’s warnings that the market would not hold and was going to burst. Honey, we should be saving money and paying off our house. I said no, and bought a Mercedes ML500.

In 2005 my sales partner and I sold 38 MILLION dollars worth of real estate. I could find loans for people with a 520 credit score and almost no money down. Oh, my mortgage company can’t finance you? Don’t worry, I have someone who can call someone. I am not kidding, this is how the market was. All of the brokers and myself were in a world of sales, making money, buying things and selling more stuff to keep buying things. My largest paycheck was $29,000 after taxes, and there were no limits because another one was coming in two weeks. It turns out, I am very good at talking to people and very good at getting them to see things my way, that can be taken how you will, I was just great at sales. Perhaps not as good as I thought I was, houses were selling themselves, but I am good at listening, hence a great conversationalist. 🙂

I again ignored my husband’s warnings that I was spinning out of control and needed to save. I said no, got rid of him and bought my own $600,000 house. $629,000 to be exact. (In retrospect….really this seemed a good plan?)

You know what? He was right (although at the time I was convinced he had cursed me).  The market crashed. I closed on my house in September of 2006 and lost my job in October 2006. Yes, I bought my home from the builder I worked for. Crafty on their part. No matter what I did, there just was no where to go to make money. I was actually hired by another builder, and then another, but there wasn’t any construction going on at the sites and no traffic to sell the standing houses to. By 2008 it was done. Instead of new purchases, brokers were now discussing how to apply for food stamps and how to get their kids medical care through the state because the money we were so cavalier with was dried up. There was palpable fear when talking about finances and house payments.

In the meantime, I went from over $200,000 a year to unemployment for 5 months and then that ran out too. I actually hid in the window and watched them drive away with my Mercedes on the back of a tow. I quietly moved out of my now foreclosed home back in with my now ex-husband who took me and the kids in without comment. He actually called and told me to get over myself and come back home. Lots of pride swallowing in 2008. I had cleared out my savings, 401k, everything. There was nothing left. I remember how strange it was to watch the collapse on the news and know it was about me too only now I had also fallen victim to loss.

From the outside reader, this may seem like just a flurry of bad decisions and that I got what I deserved, and I own that. But, for those of us in the housing market at that time, we were on a high.  Buyers were literally falling from the sky with money trailing behind them. I sold seven houses in a two hour period once. Seven. 

Looking more deeply into the causes of the bubble, it was a conflux of things, greed from the banks with horrible loan packages  bound to fail. Lack of verification can have that effect. Greed from the mortgage brokers who were making just as much money as the Real Estate brokers so they were padding what they were telling clients about their loans and what an adjustable rate mortgage really means and the financial impact in 3 years when the first ARM is up. There were people that had 4 or 5 properties with these loans. I know, I sold them houses. Greed from the Real Estate brokers because they weren’t always working in the best interest of their buyer but their own pocket book. I am not lumping everyone together as horrible, my point is that it was easy. Too easy. We should have questioned why.

I actually walked away from one of my post-trauma home selling positions before they could fire me because I was talking people out of buying homes I knew they couldn’t afford. I would sit them down and say yes, you can afford the payment but lets create a budget. I would then tell them what they had to do over the next year to be able to afford their own home. At this time I was making $168 a week working for Palm Harbor Homes because it was all I was able to find. I was not Mother Theresa at this time, just reeling from my own trauma. And no, I am not taking responsibility for the entirety of the economic collapse, but I was part of it. 

Ultimately, everyone knows how this story ends. The entire economy fell out of the US. There were people losing their homes massively. Unemployment was skyrocketing. When the housing market started to dry up, it wasn’t only people in Real Estate who lost their jobs. Mortgage brokers, construction workers, electricians, insurance companies…it affected everyone in a rolling wave of financial ruin. It is amazing to me that I literally was dealing in invisible dollars. The American people paid for this three times–first financially, with cash invested to purchase the first house, secondly in the loss of their homes and thirdly with the bank bailouts that were paid for with tax dollars. Those were just the financial hits.

We have mostly recovered (remember we both were in the same industry, just different aspects), but I always wonder how many people, now homeless, were in the market in some way and gave up after the collapse? It was terrible both on all levels. I feel that beyond the bank bail outs, there was no response from the financial sector to redevelop that money into growth; the bank bailouts certainly didn’t go for that. I was VERY lucky, I was literally 2 feet from living under a bridge had my old home not been opened to my kids and I. At this point 8 years later, as a nation we still have not fully recovered, even though we still talk about it. I am not sure that we ever will. maybe we have recovered and this is just the ‘new normal’, but I don’t think so.

For me, 8 years post disaster, I decided to go back to college in 2008 and find something that I really loved to do. There, I met a new friend. Well, really I stalked her until she talked to me because she was the only other old lady in the class with me. Really, I did. They had also suffered the same losses when their construction clean-up business died a slow and agonizing death. Anyway, she worked at an assisted living community and I was fortunate enough be hired to pass meds while I was in college. It brought me back to reality (my mom is a CNA so I grew up around the elderly) and to what is important to me and what I can do to help. It was actually the best job I have ever had, and it paid a whopping $10.00 an hour starting. Don’t worry, I was given two raises and was up to $11.21 an hour when I left – secretly I would have still done it for $10. 😀

I am still not a saint, but I was given some definite takeaways from the entire situation, to say the very least.

~ Naomi Boers 

There is a theme here, even though these are very different stories. It’s a theme we explore occasionally here at EDM Digest, and that’s the theme of heroes. It’s a theme we should never stop covering, because with all the negative issues going on in society and our world today, only heroes are going to ultimately pull us through.

The first story is one that perpetually pops up–when a collective disaster occurs that will impact a wide swath of society or the environment, then heroes will come out of the woodwork and surge to the front in an effort to make it right again. Just as they are heroes, so are the individuals that train, organize, and assign them to where they can do the most good. Do you have a story in which you could have been a hero in a circumstance, but your contribution was blocked by bureaucracy, inertia, lack of leadership, or whatever? I don’t think that kind of story is all that uncommon.

The second story is mostly about integrity. Integrity can be washed away by greed, as we see every day in the news. Yet, despite significant personal hardship, and after undergoing a steep learning curve about housing and bubbles, our hero evolved to where she was willing to sacrifice a profession to save unwary customers from destroying their financial lives. How far does your own hero integrity extend? Are you willing to defy your leadership to do what’s right? Are you willing to sacrifice your profession to do what’s right? You may be called on to answer that question on a moment’s notice with no preparation. Have your answer ready.

I hope you have enjoyed today’s stories. My intent is to present a few of the most impactful and thought-provoking stories that I see every other Saturday when I’m on duty. Enjoy your weekend! GO (fill in your team here)!!!

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