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The First Deployment: Hurricane Iniki
The history of the national Urban Search & Rescue program, part 3
By Harold Schapelhouman

Editor's Note: This article is part of a series on the history of the national USAR program. Read the previous posts:
Part 1: How It All Started
Part 2: From the Ground Up

When Hurricane Iniki, as it was named, pushed toward the Hawaiian Islands in 1992, Task Force 3 received its first actual activation as a new task force.

A Work in Progress
Task Force 3 was still very much a work in progress, like many of other the national teams of the time. Making decisions that were controversial at the time, I’d focused our limited grant funds on safety equipment, such as uniforms, helmets, gloves, eye protection and respirators, all of which was expensive, based on our overall need and ability to facilitate the team’s capabilities via technical search and rescue equipment. That move had left us short of many items not purchased by the state and with limited annual hard-match grant funding. It seemed we always had more need than we had money (and, to a lesser degree, we still do).

Chaos & Spending
California Task Force 2 (CA-TF2), Los Angeles County Fire Department, was activated along with California Task Force 3 (CA-TF3), Menlo Park Fire Protection District. Both task forces were given spending authority at the time of activation. That spending authority would become a source of system discourse in the years ahead as teams that had deployed gained advantage while those that didn’t struggled with both limited funding and having never been “invited to the party.” It created an exaggerated system of haves and have-nots that would divide the task forces and threaten the harmony of the overall system until deployments and funding increased and a rotation system was later created.

But at that moment in time, it felt to us like Christmas was coming, although it was for the worst of reasons. Hurricane Iniki arrived just prior to a holiday weekend, and by the time we got our orders, it was late Friday afternoon with businesses already closing.

It also wasn’t as if we could focus all of our energy on getting what we needed. We were assembling and processing our team members, loading equipment, securing transportation and maintaining constant contact with both the state and federal government. Simply put, it was organized chaos further complicated by a spending spree.

Hurry Up & Wait
When the call came to load the buses to make it in time to catch the aircraft, we literally left shopping carts full of equipment in aisles of stores as we called our people back, only to find out that the federal government used a process of “hurry up and wait,” something we’d become more familiar with over time. We arrived at Travis Air Force Base only to wait 14 more hours until we could actually load an aircraft, and we found out the hard way that you had to purchase your own meals.

Once on the plane, the excitement and expectations of what we’d be doing was palatable. As one of the team’s leaders, I ran down my mental preparedness list: We had done a good job of acquiring equipment, but we were still missing many of the camp and comfort items. Our shelters were primitive, and our surplus GP-medium military tents and sanitation supplies were old and tired.

We had fared better with our search and rescue equipment after receiving equipment from the state due to agreements with the NASA Ames Disaster Assistance and Response Team (DART), and Lee Rescue Products, which provided us with a rescue vehicle full of technical equipment. Both were affiliated with the team and had saved us from arriving “light” on potentially critical equipment.

From a training standpoint, the team was starting to work well together despite the number of agencies and different personalities. It had been a struggle to integrate the civilians. Although I had a lot of confidence in many of the deployed team members, we had never worked together in a crisis where one’s true strengths and weakness are revealed.
The flight was also long enough for me to contemplate tragedy, something that I felt the weight of in every subsequent deployment. What if one—or more—of our team members was injured or even killed? I carefully turned that over in my mind for some time before I felt comfortable enough to move past it.

Glorified Group of Firefighters
When we arrived in Hawaii, we unloaded our equipment and went to Barbers Point Naval Air Station, which was to be our living quarters, on the island of Oahu. It was immediately evident that the Hawaiians didn’t know what to do with what they believed was a glorified group of firefighters from the mainland who had come to help them. They, like almost everyone else at the time, had no knowledge of the national USAR program or what it was potentially capable of, and therefore saw no immediate need for our services despite significant search capability issues.

In short, our time on the island was spent waiting for orders that would never come. We were eventually asked to assist in handing out supplies, such as water or blankets, but declined the request, knowing that our agencies and civilian employers back at home would probably rather have us return to the mainland than deviate from our specified mission.

We also found ourselves in immediate hot water with the base commander. First, one of our team members went roller-blading where he shouldn’t have, and then we took a group photo in front of a historical aircraft display that was in front of the base and in the direct line of sight of the commander’s office. The undisciplined nature of our team at the time, particularly once we found out we were going home, was problematic at best. While we addressed these issues in what can only be described as a “come to Jesus meeting,” it was too little, too late.

A Hard Lesson
While the team was to fly home on a private jet, which was apparently used once by Madonna during her first World Tour, I stayed behind with another member of our team to secure passage of our equipment cache.

In the interim, we were assigned to the Los Angeles County Task Force Leader who clearly wanted nothing to do with us. But as we tagged along, we quickly gained important lessons in protocol, as Task Force 2 was clearly doing everything right. The county firefighters wore semi-dress uniforms while we had worn team shirts, shorts and flip-flops. They honored and thanked the base commander for hosting them, showering him with gifts, which he returned in kind. The press was conveniently on hand and it was clear that while these firefighters from Southern California were not needed, they were to be both praised and admired for coming to the rescue of the people of Hawaii in their hour of need.

Task Force 2 was everything we had not been. Although I never doubted our team’s creative ability or actual capability to be a successful task force within an actual disaster environment, we came up short in the areas of discipline and protocol, and we had been shown up because of it.

A Cocktail of Destruction
To add sorrow to misery, we were called to the airfield where a not-so-patient load master had opened our equipment containers, which resembled an overcrowded garden shed. In simple terms, he was shocked and let us know that he wasn’t sure how we had gotten there, but “we sure as hell were not going back the same way.”

He proceeded to berate us for our Conex containers, which included full oxygen cylinders, gasoline cans, diesel cans, air cylinders and explosive pneumatic loads, along with acetylene all mixed together in what he believed was a cocktail of potential aircraft destruction. He believed that separating and boxing the items within regulations for air flight would take up to 2 weeks to accomplish.

This of course was unfathomable, and the Hawaiian paradise never looked as bleak as it did that day. We contacted our California Office of Emergency Services liaison, Mark Ghilarducci, who had traveled with us to Hawaii. If anyone could fix it, Mark could. We arrived the next morning to a much more cordial load master who worked with us to bring our existing cache into compliance.

We emptied almost everything we had. I can still recall the whistle of air as the oxygen cylinders emptied for hours on end on the tarmac. Offering to put fuel in the flight line personnel’s private vehicles bought us some good will.

As a parting gift before closing and signing off our last container, the load master, in a moment of what can best be described as pity, threw a copy of the Air Force regulations on air shipment in the box and told us to read it cover to cover, memorize it and never ship a load on a military aircraft or any other aircraft that looked like ours did again.

The Flight Home
We flew home on a military transport with our cache and only a few other passengers on board, including three deceased soldiers who had been killed when a power line downed by the hurricane had wrapped around the axle of the vehicle they were driving, flipping it over and killing all of them.

Mark didn’t waste any time telling me how disappointed he had been with our team’s actions, some of which I was unaware of until we sat and talked. Mark never was one to waste words, but he also understood the importance of the California task forces and of Task Force 3. As the unofficial father of the California rescue teams, he both admonished and encouraged me to make it better. It was a conversation I would never forget.

Although I was proud of what we had accomplished and had to overcome to be able to deploy, we clearly had some work to do, and we would never be shown up again. We wouldn’t be able to prove that until 1994 during the Northridge Earthquake in Southern California, but similar to Hurricane Iniki, we were the bridesmaid, not the bride, as we arrived in Southland with front row seats but no work again.

All that would end the following year as we watched a chaotic scene unfold in Oklahoma City where home-grown terrorists blew up a government building, killing and injuring hundreds of people.

It’s in the Mail
But that would come in the days ahead; first I had my work cut out for me recovering from Hurricane Iniki. I arrived home with little fanfare but quickly found out that our team had been greeted at home as conquering heroes. After that, interest in the task force exploded; everyone wanted to join.

The equipment purchased before and after the deployment gave us an immediate boost, and we put together a team of firefighters that made boxes for our equipment in compliance with the Air Force’s specifications. We also sent our logistics personnel to training so they could become certified to work with military load masters.

I rode that high for many months, but soon my support, specifically from a new fire chief, began to dwindle as we waited and waited for weeks and then months for federal reimbursement for almost $1 million in salary expenses, equipment purchases and related bills. A full 9 months later, when I believed my termination was imminent, the check arrived in the mail stuck between an equipment catalogue and junk mail.

Our first deployment was finally over and we could focus on what would always become a series of both small and large steps forward through training, additional equipment acquisitions and deployments that would unite and discipline the team. These efforts would also prepare us for some of the most difficult days of our lives in Oklahoma City and New York, where we’d learn that “recovery” was the missing word and a vital part of USAR.

Harold Schapelhouman is a 28-year veteran firefighter with the Menlo Park (Calif.) Fire Protection District. At the start of 2007, he became the first internally selected fire chief in 21 years for his organization. Previously, he was the division chief in charge of special operations, which includes all district specialized preparedness efforts, the local and state water rescue program, and the local, state and National Urban Search and Rescue Program (USAR).
Schapelhouman was the task force leader in charge of California Task Force 3, one of the eight California USAR teams and one of the 28 federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS/FEMA) teams.

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