Disaster Planning? Let’s Go to School

I caught Galal Kernahan on his cellphone at a South County Starbucks, so don’t think for a minute this 80-year-old guy has become a relic. For all I know, he’d put down an iPod to take my call.

We’d been phone-tagging for a few weeks, because I wanted to find out why Kernahan has a fascination with natural disasters -- a subject on lots of minds since the seemingly endless string of hurricanes and earthquakes that ravaged the Gulf Coast and far-reaching parts of the globe.

Watching the local and federal response to Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast would make anyone nervous. And Kernahan is. I’m not qualified to judge how valid his concern is, but he’s convinced Orange County officials are missing the boat on at least one crucial aspect -- not designating its numerous elementary schools as go-to centers in case of a disaster.

Rather, the system calls for high schools to be the focal points. That choice wasn’t made haphazardly, says county education Supt. Bill Habermehl. Although there are 70 high schools compared with more than 300 elementary schools, they’re larger buildings with big gymnasiums and large parking lots and, in general, are better equipped to handle the job.

Kernahan respectfully disagrees with the conclusion. He’s convinced that elementary schools, by virtue of being the closest connectors to neighborhoods and families, are the better places to go.

I’m offering Kernahan’s dissenting view for a couple of reasons. First, he served many years ago as a regional administrator for what then was the California Disaster Office. Second, the Katrina response and potential terrorism make this a subject that can’t possibly suffer from going over old ground.

Kernahan’s emergency preparedness tenure began during the Cold War. He became convinced that bureaucracies were so top-down in their thinking that relief didn’t come as quickly as it should.

That the very same problem dogged the response to Katrina only reinforced his fears.

“The whole subject [of disaster preparedness] never left me,” Kernahan says. He went to workshops and became intimately familiar with elementary school operations after a lengthy tenure as a consultant to the California Teachers Assn. Two or three years ago, he met with county officials and came away still thinking the response wasn’t sufficiently rooted at the neighborhood level.

Neighborhood schools, he says, “are the closest thing we have to communities.” They’re easier for people to get to, and there are more of them.

And ever since the 1933 Long Beach earthquake led to a legislative mandate, they’re among the most robust structures around.

“I’m simply saying they’re so much more practical,” Kernahan says. “If you’re going to wait for FEMA or even the state, you may wait a long time,” he says. “If we got a really big quake, where are people going to be centered in their attention? In Washington? In Sacramento? Or where their kids in the neighborhood are?”

This is the point at which Mr. Habermehl would respectfully disagree. He says the schools and county officials have a good plan and have anticipated as many contingencies as possible -- even as mundane but vital as what to do if hundreds of schoolchildren are stranded outside an uninhabitable school but still need to go to the bathroom (bring in portables or dig trenches).

Kernahan is a serious citizen, so I take his concerns seriously. He’s been involved in various social causes and in 1994 founded KinderCaminata, a program that takes kindergartners to college campuses as a way of exposing them to future possibilities.

He’s given this a lot of thought. It doesn’t make him right, but if his voice serves only to inspire local officials to give their plans the once-over, he’ll have done his civic duty.

And unfortunately, one of these days, we’ll all find out if the plan now on paper actually works.