HLTH 6300 Week 10 Response After-Action Review Example

After-Action Review of the April Mill River Flood Response: What Held, What Failed and What the Record Supports Changing

Student Name

Walden University

HLTH 6300: Disaster Response and Recovery

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

After-Action Review of the April Mill River Flood Response: What Held, What Failed and What the Record Supports Changing

Scope and Method

This review evaluates the county's response to the April Mill River flood from the flood warning through the end of sheltering. It follows the structure of the national exercise and evaluation program, which judges performance against objectives, records strengths and areas for improvement, identifies root causes and assigns corrective actions to organizations (Federal Emergency Management Agency, 2020). Each finding is stated against an objective that existed in the county's emergency operations plan before the flood, not against hindsight. The evidence comes from the emergency operations center log, situation reports, call records, shelter registrations and interviews with agency leads. The review names systems and functions and does not assign fault to individuals. Its setting, like the rest of this term's work, is an invented county.

Objectives and Results

Table 1 sets out the six objectives the plan contained and how the response performed against each.

Table 1

Response Objectives From the County Plan and Results (Composite County)

What Held

Early activation and declaration. The emergency operations center activated three hours after the flood warning, before any road had closed, and the afternoon emergency declaration let the county close roads and spend quickly ahead of the crest. Sheltering. The shelter opened well ahead of the objective, staffed by the Red Cross with county support. Long-term care evacuation. All 96 nursing home residents were moved without injury. The regional health care coalition located receiving beds within hours, reflecting the coordination that national health care preparedness guidance expects of coalitions (Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, 2016). Mutual aid. Swift water teams from neighboring counties arrived within three hours of the request.

What Failed

Public information. The objective of coordinated messages within one hour was not met. For about 21 hours, the county, the city and the wastewater utility issued messages separately, and the city's incorrect statement that tap water was unsafe went uncorrected until the joint information center opened. Resource tracking. Public works requested pumps directly from contractors, outside the emergency operations center's tracking, producing a duplicate order and an idle crew. Shelter accounting. Two church shelters opened informally and did not report to mass care for two days. Registry contact. Nine residents on the medical needs registry were not reached by Day 4; four had outdated phone numbers.

Root Causes

The failures share a pattern: related work happened outside the function responsible for it. The joint information system existed in the plan but had no activation trigger, so it waited for a decision no one was assigned to make. Public works had standing authority to call contractors in routine operations and no rule requiring emergency requests to be logged. The churches had no agreement with the county and no way of knowing they should report. The medical needs registry had not been updated in fourteen months. National incident management guidance stresses common processes for public information and resource management precisely because work done outside them is invisible to coordinators (Federal Emergency Management Agency, 2017).

The Nursing Home Margin

The nursing home evacuation met its objective, but by about forty minutes. The evacuation order came at 02:00, after a revised crest forecast, because the facility's plan tied evacuation to a forecast threshold that the earlier forecast had not reached. Had the revised forecast come two hours later, residents would have been moved through floodwater or sheltered in place on an upper floor without power. The record supports changing the trigger from a single forecast threshold to a combination of forecast and road conditions, and starting transport arrangements at the earlier threshold so that a later order can be executed faster. Treating the success as complete would miss the near miss inside it.

Corrective Actions

Table 2 lists corrective actions.

Table 2

Improvement Plan

What the Record Does Not Support

The record does not support some changes proposed after the flood, and the review says so because unsupported changes can crowd out the ones that matter. A call to order mandatory evacuation of the river neighborhoods on Day 1 is not supported: the forecast then did not justify it, and the voluntary advisory produced no deaths in homes. A proposal to replace the Red Cross as shelter operator is not supported by any shelter performance finding. The one death, a driver on a flooded road, occurred on a road that had been closed with barricades; the record supports reviewing barricade placement but not a conclusion about the driver's decision.

References

Federal Emergency Management Agency. (2017). National Incident Management System (3rd ed.).

Federal Emergency Management Agency. (2020). Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP).

Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. (2016). 2017-2022 health care preparedness and response capabilities. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.