Requesting Help - Determining Needed Resources

• How  soon do you want to complete your evaluations? This and how many buildings will be evaluated (next bullet) will affect how many teams of evaluators you need. 
  • This needs to be a reasonable timeframe and should be a result of negotiations with the jurisdiction’s leadership. 
  • If the available resources are not adequate to meet the desired goal, you may need to increase the timeframe or decrease the number of buildings to be evaluated, and adjust the expectations of jurisdictional leadership and the public.  
  • Less than three weeks is probably very unrealistic unless the jurisdiction is very small. The lead for New York City’s response to Superstorm Sandy (2012) suggests a maximum of four to six weeks, but even this may be difficult to achieve depending on the available resources. 

• How many buildings do I want to have evaluated in the given timeframe? There are many options, three of which are described below with their own pros and cons:  
  • Evaluate every building in the jurisdiction. This serves the entire community but is very resource intensive. 
  • Concentrate on critical/important buildings. This option is the least resource intensive but serves only a small portion of the community.
  • Only send teams to buildings where an evaluation has been requested. In combination with evaluating critical buildings, this serves a larger portion of the community, and provides help to those who want it. The downside is that out of fear that the building will be shut down, some owners or building occupants may not want to request an evaluation, which may put building occupants at risk of physical harm. 

• Estimate how many evaluations can be performed by a BSE team in a day.  
  • The size of the event, driving distances, and complexity of the building stock in the jurisdiction will affect this estimate.
  • Most evaluations cannot be performed safely in nighttime conditions, so the length of daylight hours may affect how many evaluations each team can complete in a workday.
  • In the Nisqually Earthquake (2001), City of Seattle teams averaged 12 to 16 evaluations in an 8-hour day. In other large events in California, teams averaged up to nearly 30 evaluations per day. After Superstorm Sandy (2012), teams working with New York City averaged 40 evaluations per day.
  • Lengthening the workday to more than eight hours or the work week to more than the standard 40 hours can increase capacity but may result in greater fatigue and stress for all BSEs (staff and volunteers). In many jurisdictions, this will also trigger overtime expenses for staff, which is only eligible for partial reimbursement by FEMA and the state.

• Calculate the total number of BSE teams you need.  Base the calculations on the timeframe, number of buildings to be evaluated, and the estimate of how many evaluations can be performed by one team in a day.  

• Calculate the number of WAsafe BSEs to request.
  • Each BSE team consists of at least two evaluators, for safety purposes. 
  • Jurisdictional resources and interlocal/mutual aid agreements must be exhausted first, before requesting WAsafe BSEs. Subtract the jurisdiction’s and mutual aid BSE teams from the calculated total number of teams you need. 
  • The calculations should account for delays in requesting BSEs, dispatching them, and travel time for BSEs to arrive on site. 
  • We highly recommend performing this calculation in advance of a major disaster.  Not only will this help familiarize yourself with the process, doing so can also create a baseline or starting point for a real event.  You can create two or three scenarios based on the size of the event, the types of buildings on which you expect to focus, and any jurisdictional resources you expect to be available.  When a real event occurs, one of your practice scenarios may resemble the current situation. 
  • See the Example Calculations document that can help you see one way to perform these calculations. 

This will affect how many of each type of WAsafe evaluator you’ll be requesting.  Large or complex buildings should have teams of Type 1 or Type 2 BSEs evaluate them.

See the WAsafe BSE Types and Qualifications table for more details.

• A WAsafe On-site Leader (OSL) can help organize and manage the volunteer WAsafe BSEs. In some cases, the (OSL) may also be able to help organize all the BSE teams.  The (OSL) will be a WAsafe BSE with more field experience and/or knowledge of the WAsafe program.
• A quality manager can help review and analyze the rapid evaluation reports being returned from the field to improve consistency of the final placarding results.
• Depending on volunteer availability, WAsafe may or may not be able to provide a volunteer with the skills to fulfill these roles, but if the building official needs the help, these roles should be included in the submitted request. A request for an (OSL) or quality manager will be worked out during pre-dispatch discussions with the WAsafe Coordinator.

• This will be heavily influenced by how quickly you want to complete your evaluations (above). However, previous events have shown it could take a month or more to complete all the building safety evaluations. 
• For their own safety and mental well-being, WAsafe recommends that individual BSEs deploy for no longer than two weeks. 
• Where BSEs are needed for more than two weeks, WAsafe may be able to dispatch BSE teams to replace the teams who are returning home.