Sharing What Works
What does a poultry disease have in common with a forest fire? At first glance, not much. But managing an emergency event--whether it’s a forest fire or a disease outbreak--requires a lot of the same approaches and skills.

That’s why the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service turned to the Forest Service for help in combating the avian influenza outbreak that hit chicken and turkey farms in Virginia this past summer.

“When the state of Virginia asked our APHIS Veterinary Services Office for help, we, in turn, asked the Forest Service to assist us in putting its well-known ‘Incident Command System’ to work to help us manage the emergency,” explained Tom Holt, the APHIS Veterinary Services Eastern Region associate director, based in Raleigh, N.C. He served as the first Veterinary Services incident commander for the multi-agency Avian Influenza Task Force, which was under joint federal-state command. The Task Force was set up to help officials assist with early detection of the virus and destruction of flocks, plus control the spread of the virus as much as possible.

Avian flu is a highly contagious viral infection that hinders the birds’ growth and limits their capacity to lay eggs, diminishing their market value. Although this was a mild form of the disease, if left alone in commercial poultry this virus has been known to convert to a highly pathogenic, or deadly, strain, and can kill as many as 90 percent of the birds in a flock. Infected poultry are generally droopy, wheezy, hacking, unsteady and listless, and they stop eating. Birds must be destroyed and farms must be quarantined to prevent the disease from spreading. But the disease isn’t harmful to humans.

The avian flu outbreak struck six counties in Virginia between March and July. Over 4.7 million chickens and turkeys were slaughtered during the outbreak to stop the flu’s spread. It was regarded as the worst avian flu outbreak to strike the poultry industry in Virginia in recent history.

But this story isn’t about the disease; it’s about the use of FS expertise in incident management, using the Incident Command System approach, combined with the expertise of APHIS specialists and others, to combat the disease.

Ivan Cupp, a retired Forest Service fire and land officer who served as an FS liaison officer to the Task Force, said the Forest Service Incident Command System was conceived in the 1970s by a group of federal, state, and local agencies to respond to the increasingly complicated requirements for effective wildland fire protection and suppression.

“Too many multi-agency emergency responses in the past had been hampered by the lack of reliable incident information, inadequate and incompatible communications, unclear lines of authority, different emergency response organizational structures, and terminology differences between agencies,” advised FS fire ecology specialist Lindon Wiebe. “The Incident Command System structure was designed to overcome those obstacles and provide a more effective response in an emergency.”

FS’s Greg Sanders, manager of the Virginia Interagency Coordination Center, based in Charlottesville, Va., managed the ordering and tracking of FS resources assigned to the Task Force. He explained that the Incident Command System is a system used in obtaining, tracking, and managing necessary resources, including equipment, personnel, and supplies. It organizes the management of these resources into five categories: command and control, operations, planning, logistics, and finance. “This system allows many organizations to respond to any emergency,” he said.

Wiebe added that a big strength of the Incident Command System structure is that people throughout the emergency can organize and communicate with each other more quickly, effectively, and in real-time through such methods as cell phones, hand-held radios, and satellite phones.

“In addition, during our emergencies we go through a lot of supplies,” Cupp added. “We need a lot of equipment and we need everything quickly--so we had to put a system in place to make that happen.”

“The Incident Command System structure provides a single standard system that can be used by all emergency response disciplines--and that’s what happened in Virginia,” Wiebe underscored.

Numerous federal and state agencies, plus five poultry companies, were part of the Avian Influenza Task Force, including APHIS, FS, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. Over 800 people rotated through the Task Force’s headquarters in Harrisonburg, Va., and they came from more than 45 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

Using an Incident Command System structure, APHIS’s Veterinary Services Office and the state of Virginia shared oversight responsibilities of the Task Force.

According to Joseph Annelli, director of the Veterinary Services Emergency Programs for APHIS, there was general agreement that the collaboration among the federal and state agencies and the affected industries made a difficult situation work out smoothly.

“In my 33 years of experience in emergency response activities,” declared William Buisch, APHIS’s Veterinary Services Eastern Region director based in Raleigh, N.C., who reviewed Task Force operations, “that was the best organized Task Force I’ve ever seen.” •

--Madelaine Fletcher