Mitigation vs. Disaster Response

It appears to be a rather common mistake made around CUSD these days. During the last Board meeting, Mr. Bergman and Mr. Carter made a great deal of the fact that CUSD would respond promptly in the event that fuel were to escape from the Kinder Morgan pipeline adjacent to SJHHS. I've previously commented on this error in Pipeline Common Sense (at para. 8), stating that actions taken after an incident are not risk mitigation. Instead, they are incident response, or disaster response.

Actual risk mitigation consists of steps taken before an incident that are designed to reduce the potential affects of known risk. So far, no mitigation whatsoever has been proposed.

Non-experts such as Mr. Bergman and Mr. Carter may be excused for this common error. However, it is disappointing to see Ms. Fitzgerald commit the same blunder. In her memo responding to Trustees, she wrote the following response to a question from Mrs. Palazzo:

As discussed during the presentation, one mitigation measure would be to have the local CUPA agency or Orange County Fire Authority contact SJHHS and the District in the event that a rupture or leak occurred from the pipeline. Since the only scenario by which product could impact the school site is if vapors and/or product got into the storm drain and traveled beneath the school site, another potential mitigation measure would be that upon notification of a break in the pipeline, one of the engineers at the high school would go to the storm drain and install straw waddles or some similar type of barrier to prevent product from entering the storm drain. A permanent berm or dike could not be located around the storm drain because it would prevent stormwater runoff from rainfall events from entering the drain and thereby cause flooding.

Obviously, a telephone call notifying the school that fuel has escaped would come some time after the occurrence. As such, this constitutes a response to an emergency situation. It is not a step taken to mitigate risk.

It is even more incredible that Ms. Fitzgerald would propose that one of the "engineers" at the high school would be sent into the area of leaking fuel to install straw waddles, presumably to absorb the fuel. Would Ms. Fitzgerald herself be willing to perform this task? Does she know a category of CUSD staff that is trained for suicide missions?

The last sentence of Ms. Fitzgerald's response appears to deal with actual risk mitigation, presumably something suggested by Mrs. Palazzo. However, in dismissing the matter, Ms. Fitzgerald is stating that the only place where fuel flow might be diverted is at the storm drains. This is a very narrow minded view of the options available.