CONTENTS
Calendar
Of Events..........................................Page 1
From the CDR's Desk:.......................................Page 2
CA4 Member of the Year...................................Page 2
CALENDAR OF EVENTS:
DMAT CA-4 Team
Meeting
Wed. , February 23, 2005
18:00 hours
I. TROPICAL
MEDICINE IN ANGOLA, AFRICA
WITH "DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS"
Speaker: Sylvia Martinez , RN
II. MISSION TO HAITI: THE HAITI MEDICAL RELIEF TEAM
Speaker: Bob Downey, Chief Lab Tech
DMAT CA-4 Ops
Center
8830-G
Rehco Road, San Diego, CA 92121.
****
One of the
nation's foremost experts on homeland security, Stephen Flynn, a senior
fellow at the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, will speak at the
University of California, San Diego on Monday, February 28, beginning at 4:30
p.m. Flynn, a retired Coast Guard commander, is the author of the new book
"America the Vulnerable," which points out shortcomings in the country's
homeland security and outlines an alternative bold plan. The talk, sponsored
by the Institute for International, Comparative and Area Studies is free and
open to the public and will be presented at The Weaver Center on the UCSD
campus. For directions, or further information, contact Leslie Kamps, (858)
822 5297
Tri-Service Combat Stress Conference: April 23-28, 2005 (Sat
thru Thursday) , San Luis Rey Officer's Club, Camp Pendleton, CA
BATREX 2005 Exercise- Joint Training Exercise with SD US&R Task Force-8.
To be held somewhere in SD County. May or June 2005, Final Date To Be
Announced : Planning to begin soon, members wishing to be involved in
helping to plan this training should submit their names
From the CDR's Desk:
* Rough and Ready 2005: DMAT SAN DIEGO CA-4 was one of the planning
agencies and participant organizations in Rough and Ready 2005, held at the
Joint Forces Training Base at Los Alamitos.
50 members of CA-4 participated in an unusual exercise. It was unusual
because... it rained. And it didn't JUST rain, it poured. ("It never rains in
California, it pours,,,,,"). For a summary of how it went, and further
opportunity to comment on it, please come to our next team meeting on
February 23rd.
*The team meeting in March will
NOT be held at our DMAT Ops Center. Rather it will be at the Firehouse Museum,
downtown. It will be a dinner, with speakers from each of the following
units: DMAT San Diego CA-4, the San Diego Urban Search and Rescue Task Force
TF-8 and the SD MMST. In a different kind of format, this will be a dinner
meeting + Open bar. There will be a charge of $15. per team member. DMAT CA-4
members will only pay $10,00 and our DMAT will pay the difference, to keep the
expense down. It will be held jointly with the members of the USAR,DMAT and
the MMST. . What a great way to network with members of the other disaster
response units in the City. Should be fun as long as no one overdoes the Open
Bar.
*We have taken assignment of
three trucks of FEMA.[ Two 24 foot trucks and a 22 foot reefer.
(Refrigeration unit) Imagine, no more having to worry about finding rental
trucks for a deployment.!! ( unless of course they break down, which has been
occurring with some regularity with some of the trucks in their new fleet.).
Many thanks to our new team of drivers, for driving them down from Rough and
Ready, and starting the regular maintenance and record keeping associated with
these Federal vehicles, particularly Dave Holland, Ed Snyder, Guy Venuti,
Scott Norton, Kevin Spuhler and Jack Thoreson. They have already been
taken in for their first oil changes. Thank you, Dave and Ed.
*We continue to experience
discontinuities in FEMA policy. After paying our rent on our warehouse for 8
months, (albeit always late),they have now stopped paying rent on our
warehouse as of January 1, 2005, and have sent a contract to our landlord
asking for a contract to take over our lease, FOR 6 MONTHS. Our landlord has
deferred signing the document, for good reason: they already have a good
lease on our property, which is a 4 year lease, which began September 1, 2003,
and so they of course do not want to negate a long term lease in favor of a
short term one, with an organization ( FEMA) that has not paid rent on time.
In addition, there appears to be a problem in signing a lease on a property
for which they already have a lease!!! They have called us, however, to ask us
what we want to do. In the meantime, our rent is not being paid. I plan to
meet with our attorney to discuss the document that was sent to our landlord,
a copy of which was received this month. We may be in a position where we will
either need to pay our rent for the foreseeable future, or plan on getting
FEMA to pay the rent for 6 months , after which we can anticipate being
ejected from our warehouse and having our cache moved to a west coast FEMA
warehouse, possible even in the San Francisco area...which will not allow us
to keep our batteries charged on our radios or defibrillators. At the current
burn rate of our team funds, we can afford to pay our rent , which is
obligatory if FEMA doesn't pay, through one to one and a half years. This of
course would then deplete our budget entirely. This is one of the reasons we
are not spending team funds to send more team members to the annual Meeting
of NDMs, in Orlando, since we need to maintain funds for our own "rainy days"
ahead. The FEMA position is tht such leases need to be under the General
Services Administration, thus effectively "nationalizing" our team. Our
position is that the lease is currently held by our 501(c)3, and when FEMA
"took over" from DHHS, they were tasked with supporting the NDMS, and hence
the DMATs, (this is how it was worked out with DHHS), and not destroying it.
Thus they should be supporting us by paying our rent, not taking away our
4-year lease, at favorable market rates, and replacing it with a 6-month lease
which gives them the option of eliminating our own Ops Center and reversing
the team's progress over the last dozen years. In previous "engagements" with
other teams, I understand there are at least 3 teams that have been
ejected/evicted from their warehouses, and forced to have their cache placed
into FEMA regional warehouses, including CA-6. As I have been saying all
along, FEMA is destroying the teams, all the while telling us how they
"support us." The limited options we have will be discussed at the team
meeting on February 23rd.
* Kudos to Susana Leung, just back from India on a tsunami relief
mission.
*A Very Large Thank You to team member Bill Gephart, currently on
active duty with the United States Army. I have just received in the mail a US
flag which he had flown over the US Air Base in Bagram, Afghanistan on July
4th, 2003. This flag will be displayed at our DMAT Operations Center.
DMAT San Diego CA-4 * February 2005 Newsletter