Today: Special fire board meeting on the future of Community Crisis Management and district volunteer organizations

Posted by Peter Carpenter
a resident of Menlo Park: Park Forest
on Sep 22, 2020 at 3:48 pm
Peter Carpenter is a registered user.

This is my recommendation to the Fire Board:

Dear Fire Board,

• The economic impact of Covid 19 on those entities which rely heavily on Occupancy Taxes and sales taxes will be profound and long lasting. Those entities will have to reduce their current scope of activities and they will certainly be unable to undertake ANY new activities.

• Notwithstanding the fact that, under California law, the responsibility for emergency planning and civilian disaster preparedness rests with the cities/town the Fire District is the only entity that has the skill and resources to actually provide a meaningful response in the event of a disaster.

• I urge you to not waste your time and efforts by operating at the margins in fine tuning the existing efforts that have very little chance of ever providing a meaningful citizen-based response capability.

• Therefore, the Fire District should enter into MOU’s with Atherton, Menlo Park and East Palo Alto to become the lead agency in event of a disaster, to operate a Combined Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and to train, equip and routinely exercise a large number of citizen volunteers that can operate at the individual residence and neighborhood level.



Respectfully submitted,



Peter F. Carpenter

Menlo Park Fire Protection District

• Director (2001 – 2009)

• Director (2010 - 2012)

• Director (2013- 2018)

MPFPD CERT (2005-present)

City of Palo Alto CERT (2020)

Park Forest Plus Prepare
•Co-Founder (2020)
•Block Captain (2020)

ADAPT CERT 2010?-2018

Posted by Peter Carpenter
a resident of Menlo Park: Park Forest
on Sep 22, 2020 at 7:28 pm
Peter Carpenter is a registered user.

It was sad to listen to this call as some Board members seem to have no idea that the CMC was created by the Fire Board and its charter was set by the Fire Board.

If the CMC is not working well then the responsible party is the Fire Board.

It is difficult to understand why the Fire Board continues to get into the weeds rather than recognizing that a viable citizen volunteer entity can only exist if the Fire District, through MOU's with the cities, town and county, gains the legal authority to not only train and exercise those volunteers but ultimately to activate and direct those volunteers when a disaster occurs.