Transcripts For SFGTV LIVE Fire Commission 20160225 : vimars

SFGTV LIVE Fire Commission February 25, 2016

City of San Francisco february 24, 2016 , Fire Commission meeting please stand by. Pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of america and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. This is a reminder that under administrative code, the use of cell phones and similar sound producing Electronic Devices is prohibited during meetings. Set all pagers and cell phones and other devices to vibrate or completely off now. Today is february 24, 2016. Item no. 1, roll call. Francee covington, Ken Cleaveland, Michael Hardeman. Item no. 2 Public Comment. Members may address any matters within the commission and not on the agenda. Speakers shall address their remarks to the commission as a whole and not to individual commissioners or Department Personnel. Commissioners are not to enter into debate or discussion with a speaker. The lack of a response by the commissioners or Department Personnel does not necessarily constitute glieltd agreement with our support of statements made during Public Comment. Thank you. Any Public Comment . Public speaker my name is jason rogers at the Fire Department station 49. I have 25 years with the city of San Francisco. I come on behalf of the association in absence of captain sculley. I brought this issue to the commission in january of 2010. When it was deactivated there was no service to the city by 25 . It also violated proposition f and policy 52. About 4 years later t board of supervisors asked for an audit at the Fire Department and in that audit substantiated the violation of the policy. Fortunately a month later, the board of supervisors formulated in the ftes in captain and that grand jury report announce td policy and when proceeding with the grand jury promise it would be be placed back in the field. On behalf of the association and as well as of citizens of San Francisco, we are asking for your assistance with the administration to please re activate this unit. Thank you for your consideration. Thank you. Is there any other member of the audience that would like to make a Public Comment at this time . Seeing none, Public Comment is now closed. Item no. 3. Presentation from neighborhood Emergency Response team. Report from lieutenant Erica Arteseros, coordinator of the nert program and nert b of a board members. Thank you, i would like to start to thank by recognizing if members in the room who are trained. Please stand. [ applause ] im here tonight with members of the nert Advisory Board. The Advisory Board are volunteer citizens that live here in San Francisco and meet with me monthly to provide guidance to the program. Nert is an Emergency Response team. My name is Erica Arteseros and i came to the department in february of 1997 and the nert coordinator from 2004. I speak for the real passion of the program and what we have been able to do. The story of nert is a Safety Awareness story. Its a nonprofit that organizations Neighborhood Watch and after the earthquake in 1989, the organized members of the community advocated for and got a nert Training Program and going on 26 years later we are still having nert training. The basic training is really geared towards making sure the people have the tools they need to prepare for and to respond during an earthquake whether its to take care of themselves personally or to take care of the Greater Community. My two areas of responsibility are to make sure we have training and while that is a task in and of itself, one of the greater responsibilities is retention and readiness through the volunteers in our program. What i would like to call out is the four pilars. If i can have our powerpoint activated, that would be great. The pilar is a document that the past Advisory Board prepared to help the Greater Community understand. There was sort of a misunderstanding about what the nert program was and what it represented. The members of the Advisory Board at that time put it into context using the initials of the program. In the neighborhood. This program is very neighborhood base. We are fiercely loyal to the area we live in. So our nert program is related to our federal nert Program Community Response Team but we held onto our neighborhood. We have a neighborhood focus in our Training Program. Training volunteers by neighborhood is a multiplier to our fire station in our neighborhood. It allows the Emergency Responders that we will be ready. E is for effective. We are really focused on having effective responders and thats why its important for our volunteers. R is for the infrastructure. We want to have ready infrastructure to support additional training of residents in San Francisco and to fund adequately and support the program in a way that it can thrive and grow. T is for the team aspect. We want healthy teams in each neighborhood and that involves partnership and collaboration. I would like to invite members of our board to talk about each of those. Hello, my name is robert chulta, i got nert training in 2001. Since 1990 weve trained over 26,000 san franciscan to be self reliant in a major disaster. Over 2,000 which is an impressive number, more important what resources do we have now in an event of an emergency. To be ready and able to help the neighbors. Over the past 5 years we narrowed this down to how many people to be trained and we trained over 70,000 people and this includes some of our starter courses, some of the basic trainings and the training certification is 2 years. After 2 years we take a refresher course to renew the certification. Thats over 7,000 people. This coverage map shows the nert Neighborhood Teams. We have 62 Neighborhood Teams. How many people have approximately been trained. You will notice on the top there is a block of that neighborhood. Training is on those who work in San Francisco and those that dont live here and then life happens, some people move on so they are out of San Francisco. Thats what that area is. Thats almost 1,000 people. Nert training is available in several languages. We have a chinatown neighborhood training. We give a training in chinese and there is a team in the china town area. There is a note about communications. We have a regroup. Com. One of the problems that we have in the event of an emergency to get a hold of everybody instantaneously. Sound trees take a long time. The regroup capability where it can put out a message and will go to everybody all at once. Because of your past support weve gotten a lot of people prepared to help themselves and their families assist their neighbors and provide support for the department for the next earthquake that comes. Thats going to prepare the First Responders. We thank you for your support and hopefully you will continue. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good evening commissioners. My name is garrett, the chair of the Advisory Board. I have been trained since 2006. Im going to talk to you about the different activities the residents get involved in. We start with a 2hour workshop. We realize that in any disaster First Responders are going to be overwhelmed. Its really important that individuals get some sort of training. Basic training to at least take care of themselves. The sf ready workshop focuses on preparedness and an introduction to nert. Its offered several times throughout the city and throughout the year. It would take more involved steps, we offer the basic training which is approximately 20 hours of training. That is offered throughout the year throughout the city. Generally broken down into six classes. Taught by firefighters from San Francisco. Covering Emergency Response topics such as light search and rescue, triage, building and Damage Assessment and psychology and the Emergency Management Team Organization and management. The program also offers advanced training. Once you get that training, the certification is good for 2 years. Throughout the year there are additional drills and workshops offered to refresh and strengthen the skills that we learned. There are classes on hand Radio Communications which is so important in any disaster. Triage as well is very important. And the setting up of the staging area, a command center. As i mentioned the certification is good for 2 years. At the end of those 2 years, the individual just needs to retake class 5 and 6 and their certification is good for another 2 years. We have two citywide drills which im sure you are aware of. One to commemorate the 1906 earthquake and 1989 earthquake. That is sunday april 17th and will be in conjunction with the kickoff of the Fire Department. We are excited about that. We also do a lot of community outreach. As you know we have no shortage of street fair s, neighborhood events and there is enough Business Association groups and Business Association groups and put on workshops and we put out several of those to get the word out about training. There is also a focus on reaching out to nonenglish speaking residents, cantonese and spanish being the two big ones. There was last year a class taught in all cantonese and lieutenant headed a program that teaches preparedness training in spanish. I was an assistant helping out in that last year. We hope to do more of those. The new focus or a new focus that lieutenant is looking at is a team nert, a team population looking at the same skills as nert. That will be coming up. We talk about initiatives. In the booklet we handed out to you, its called the background er. And it focuses on initiatives and the partnerships that we have through nert as mentioned. The disaster rescue, the Police Department has the Alert Training which is auxiliary Law Enforcement Response Team. The sf puc water treatment. We have a workshop where they show us how to set up water distribution so the nert responders can help. We have that throughout the city and that will help get water to people. Then sf cart and department of Public Health, Disaster Mental Health is an important issue during a disaster. It not only has to do with victims and shocked due to stress but enables us to deal with them properly. But also a look at responders. We are the eyes and ears of the department. Its a very low risk but still stressful. We need to watch out for each other because that is one of the primary basis of the nert to help each other to get to a disaster. Thank you for your time. Good afternoon. Thank you for having me. I have been trained since 2011. I would like to talk to you about the chart for volunteer hours. This is the chart of the amount of hours your team is in your neighborhood to prepare for the next big disaster. As you can see there are almost 15,000 volunteer hours in 2015 alone. Given the number of trained nert and the normal of volunteer hours they expend, you can expect these numbers will grow in a disaster situation. Why is this important for you today . Per fema recovery policy 9525. 5. These hours are categorized as donor resources and for work resulting in a major disaster. These hours maybe credited towards the nonfederal share of grant cost under femas public assistance program. On the use of these types of hours to meet, the 25 share required at the local level is not just a theory. So already precedent is in place. In specific, sonomas and Pierce County in the nation. We already know we are preparing for the next big events but an additional bonus that we can assist in the Financial Recovery of our city. Thank you. So thats the overview of our program and really the contributions that our volunteers are making. The disaster of Mental Health implementing that as a real accomplishment as well as the genesis of the team nert program. Next up for us is to fully buildout the team nert program to have volunteered involved in that way and asked of us to help us get the broader of city and county of San Francisco to help with the nert program to help with marketing and notifying the Community Members that live and work here about our program. That concludes the presentation. Are there any questions for myself or the members of the Advisory Board . Thank you, lieutenant arteseros. First we need to call for Public Comment. Okay. Thank you. Is there any additional Public Comment . Seeing none, Public Comment is closed. I will go to my fellow commissioners beginning with vicepresident cleave land. Thank you. My question is what is your budget for nert and do you need an increase . Thank you for asking. Our budget is currently 450,000. It includes all 20 courses and the on training effort for full time salary position. Yes, we need an increase to support the daily operations of the Training Program. Thank you for asking. Have you put any sort of dollar figure on that . The position which would include the benefits etc would probably be in the area of about 80,000100,000. All right. I think its a fantastic program and we can also use nert to educate the public on causes of fires and how to prevent them so they can take this information back. The teen nert program, we need to do more of that outreach into middle schools and high schools on Fire Prevention and just nert program and the teen nert could be a benefit to that. I know that our Fire Prevention division is working with that and well be happy to work with them to extend the region on the fourth multiplier on all of those efforts. Thank you. Commissioner nakajo . Thank you. I want to recognize commissioner griffin. He was a commissioner here under mayor grand jordan during our participation. Thank you very much for your service. Lieutenant, arteseros, i always want to make sure im saying your last name correctly because you deserve highly that respect. I very much appreciate the hard work that you put in as a staff person with this nert program. Your dedication is really amazing in how much work you put within that. I particularly liked the presentation this evening. May i call you by your first name, i think it was robert, was it garrett or was it rebecca . It was really effective in terms of hearing from the nert volunteers themselves and i want to acknowledge all of you in the audience that are part of that as well because we all know if we dont have this program and nert volunteers when the next disaster occurs, this city is going to have a difficult time in managing that. I say that because a lot of us were part of the earthquake in 89. I was there at Candlestick Park watching the giants with my young son when that stadium started rocking and the lights started swaying and i can swear the stadium expanded out and i ran out to the parking lot and heard by rumor that the bay bridge had collapsed. I just wanted to go home with my son. And how i got there were the citizens from San Francisco from Candlestick Park all the way to japantown, every block, every neighborhood this sense of we have to take care of ourselves. There were folks out there directing traffic and such. Part of that was the amazing and i call it the seed for nert because part of that as well and this is a san franciscan talking. There was a lot of folks in that neighborhood looking for help in that direction at the Marina High School backyard so to speak. The birth of nert was invented. I have seen this Organization Grow from that personal experience. I just wanted to thank all of you for all of your work and the comprehension of this program. Thank you, commissioner. Thank you, commissioner nakajo. Chief white . Thank you, i want to thank you for your sentiment. I was very proud of the work that went out with the earthquake. I was the one who hand picked the lieutenant. It

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