Effective Staffing

>> We certainly looked at the FEMA
models that had been in place before

and immediately felt we needed to expand upon
that; that the small teams that had worked

in other disasters were not going to be
sufficient for this when we need larger teams.

And so we developed teams to work with first
responders and these were not just folks

who were clinicians, they were
first responders themselves

and we left those first responder
counselors with some skills

that they can now use in the future.

We knew that children were a very
vulnerable group, the elderly were a group

that we were particularly concerned about
because of their fragile physical health,

this was different rather than a homogenous team
we had specialty teams-- that was different.

In the headquarters and organizationally
we mirrored that by selecting folks

who would be our statewide coordinators
to work with those specialty teams.