HAZUS-MH Used to Support San Francisco Bay Area Earthquake Exercise
On November 17, 2006, California officials concluded a major, joint Federal, State, and local California statewide exercise, entitled "Golden Guardian ’06 (GG06)", following 36 hours of play focusing on a catastrophic San Francisco Bay Area earthquake. HAZUS-MH was used to support the exercise, simulating a repeat of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Key results of this scenario event:
- 500 to 600 fires in region
- 789,000 households without power
- over 1 million households without water
- 13,000 injuries requiring hospitalization
- 3,332 deaths
- 60,000 to 120,000 persons requiring short-term shelter
- 463,254 buildings damaged, of which 37,025 were a total loss
Estimates approached over $120 billion of building losses.
Federal exercise play began with the activation of the FEMA Region IX’s Regional Response Coordination Center (RRCC) in Oakland, CA at 6:30 am, approximately 75 minutes after the simulated earthquake. An actual earthquake in Japan, which occurred the morning of November 15th, delayed the exercise start by about 30 minutes as emergency management communities along the western coastline of the United States poised for a possible Tsunami. This real world event added a sense of urgency to the GG06 exercise at the federal level. Federal participation in Oakland included all 15 Emergency Support Functions (ESF). An Emergency Response Team Advanced (ERT-A) deployed immediately to the State Emergency Operations Center (SOC) facility in Sacramento where it established an Initial Operating Facility (IOF) also with full ESF representation. The ERT-A was supported by a Mobile Emergency Response Support (MERS) detachment.
GG06 reflects a major commitment by the State of California’s emergency management community, in partnership with their federal counterparts. Thirty-two state agencies participated, as did six Bay Area county emergency management and public service agencies, 40 local and regional governments, and 30 private organizations to include regional transit, water, power, hospitals and other public agencies. Local response activities were coordinated by the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (OES) Regional Emergency Operations Center (REOC) in Oakland.
A major objective for GG06 was the early establishment of a mutually agreeable unified command structure. During the exercise, joint planning was immediately initiated with a heavy emphasis to integrate the push of federal resources once the Catastrophic Incident Supplement to the National Response Plan was invoked. Although unified objectives were established early in the event via a joint strategy meeting and shared via the IAP among all Federal partners, the objectives were not shared by state officials universally throughout exercise play which caused confusion in prioritization and unity of effort.
Public interest in the exercise was enhanced by a well planned public information campaign including media outreach in which Region IX participated fully. Several San Francisco and Oakland broadcast television stations carried local interest stories on the exercise during their Wednesday noon news programs. An early afternoon press with a number of members of the Governor’s Cabinet conference was received high visibility via coverage by network affiliate camera crews. One press release in the (San Francisco) Examiner shows the Principal Federal Official, Mr. Ron Pelayo in the background during a visit to Treasure Island by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The below PowerPoint presentation is available for download. It provides the HAZUS-MH results of a repeat (in 2006) of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. (PPT 26.2MB, TXT 3KB)
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PowerPointLast Modified: Tuesday, 16-Oct-2007 15:16:16 EDT
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