Motivating Employees to Respond to Disaster With Confidence

Staffing and Staff Rotational Aspects of Responses to Terrorist Event

Staffing and Staff Rotational Aspects of Responses to a Pentagon Terrorist Event

During the Pentagon September 11 terrorist attack, many Arlington County Fire Department employees were caught off-guard as they were busy with their daily activities. Some were being trained while others were busy preparing for an upcoming conference organized the fire department (Eversburg, 2002).

As seen from the staffing and staff rotation responses as an element of operation tempo, several weaknesses were common among the fire personnel during the Pentagon event. However, two of the weaknesses were the Arlington County Fire Department lacked an emergency recall plan with notification devices and associated systems. Besides, they also lacked effective Standard Operation Procedure (SOP) for recalling and assembling the firefighters who were off duty (Titan Systems Corporation, 2002).

First, the lack of an emergency recall plan with notification devices and associated systems, most of the firefighters, who were away on their off-shift during the terrorist attack, did not receive an official notification of the event or any reporting instructions from the fire station. Most of them acted out of their volition when they heard about the terror attack at the Pentagon. Most of them quickly returned to their workstations, picked their personal protective equipment, and rushed to the incident site. The available reporting and recall channels to the off-duty personnel like the media were not utilized. The paging system used reliably to recall them could not have been effective enough given that most of the firefighters lacked the pagers.

Secondly, the lack of effective SOP for recalling and assembling the off-duty firefighters caused congestion on one station in the firefighting efforts. The most effective way would include instructing the personnel to each gather at their specific workstations and await further instructions, which would have enhanced equal distribution of the personnel to all the stations of need. However, the contrary happened, whereby each personnel reported to their workstations and quickly proceeded to the incident site without any operation instructions, which resulted in poor coordination in the fight against the fire and evacuation of the building (Eversburg, 2002).

The situation is not any different my local community staffing and staff rotation in terms of response to fire incidents. My local community fire station seemingly shares the weakness of the Arlington County Fire Department. In the few fire incidents encountered in the community, poor response and lack of coordinated firefighting efforts are evident.

Most of the firefighters arriving at the fire scenes show clearly that they are unprepared for the fire fighting and evacuation procedures. Perhaps, many of them receive information from the locals, or they witness the fire incidents themselves. What follows then, is an action out of emergency without reporting the incident to the fire call centre at the fire station, for proper coordination and evacuation. Consequently, confusions are usually observed and many people die or are fatally injured, and many properties are destroyed in the process (Titan Systems Corporation, 2002).