Collaboration in the Mountains

A terrorism incident at an athletic event, a 60-car crash, a ski area accident with numerous casualties, a swiftly moving urban interface wildfire—each of these sounds like a bad day with long-term consequences on the local government, businesses, and entire community.

How these types of incidents are handled will impact the credibility of emergency services within the community. In communities that are dependent upon tourism, a poorly handled emergency incident may negatively impact future visitation and the economy. In the mountain community of Vail, Colorado, emergency leaders took proactive steps to hold exercises for each of these types of incidents to prepare the municipal staff and community for these types of catastrophes. The exercises involved other stakeholders too, including the business community, which proved to be valuable for building the emergency management capacity of the entire region. Conducting these types of exercises is done in some communities, usually with the hope that the practiced incident will never occur in reality. In Vail, these exercises were critical, as each of these types of incidents happened soon after the town exercised the response of police, fire, EMS, other government services, and the private sector.

Collaboration and coordination of this nature is not extraordinary in small cities and towns around the world. Like many smaller communities, Vail’s capabilities are limited due to community size and funding.

Vail Emergency Planning Committee:
Participating Agencies
Vail Police Department
Vail Fire and Emergency Services
Vail Public Works
Vail Town Manager’s Office
Vail Public Safety Communications Center
Vail Resorts, Inc.
Vail Health Hospital
Eagle County Emergency Management
Eagle County Sheriff’s Office
Avon Police Department
U.S. Forest Service
Eagle River Water and Sanitation District
Holy Cross Energy

The Town of Vail recognized that first responders such as the police and fire personnel would need to partner with a broad group of stakeholders to be successful in handling a potentially catastrophic incident, so a multidiscipline emergency planning committee of the willing was formed to plan response and to exercise those planned capabilities. Twenty years of this group’s work had significant outcomes to better prepare the Vail community for the worst day. This group included representatives of the local government, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), Vail Resorts (ski/summer recreation area) operations, the area hospital, the water and sanitation district, and the electrical utility company, as well as a major landholder in the area. Regular meetings addressed emergency response plans that often required aligning overlapping expectations of each other’s plans, Incident Command System (ICS) implementation, communications capability, equipment, and capital needs. While these meetings were important, the most important efforts centered around planning exercises ranging from tabletop exercises to full-scale drills.

Outcomes

Training was conducted for personnel from each agency to support exercises including basic incident command, event planning, and event security thru the National Rural Domestic Preparedness Consortium The training and exercises underscored the need for additional guidance for securing mountain resort communities, so the State of Colorado Critical Infrastructure Team came to Vail and did an assessment of the work of the planning committee and evaluated the efforts of the Vail Ski Mountain. This work resulted in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security forming a working group with other ski/ride areas to develop a Protective Measures Guide for Mountain Resorts.1

This group’s work had a number of outcomes beyond planning and preparedness:

    • defensible space mitigation efforts and aerial firefighting funding in a partnership between Vail Resorts, USFS, and Vail Fire for all on-mountain facilities including a critical communications site
    • regular security planning meetings for planned large-scale events among involved parties and biweekly operations meetings between Town of Vail operations staff and Vail Resorts personnel
    • a uniformed officer presence on the ski area and a shared lost-and-found system that helps Vail guests and residents be reunited with lost items
    • preparedness videos on evacuations and crime prevention to educate Vail visitors on ski equipment thefts
    • responsible liquor service training for alcohol servers from Vail Resorts and other liquor license establishments in the valley
    • standardized bag check policy and procedures at large events
    • Community Awareness Program Training for community members and volunteers to recognize and report suspicious activity
    • established protocols for fiscally conservative overtime schedules

A particularly important off-shoot of this Vail planning committee was the participation of members in the forming and continued service of the Northwest Colorado All-Hazards Incident Management Team (NWCOIMT). This regional team of trained incident management personnel support the ten counties of Northwest Colorado in response to and recovery from critical incidents using the ICS principles and supporting other local government’s response efforts at no cost to the hosting agency.2

Participation of Vail committee members in the NWCOIMT has increased their capacity to respond to complex incidents in a collaborative fashion and has fostered relationships that have proved essential in emerging critical incidents such as wildland fires; social unrest; planned events, like professional cycling and ski races; flooding; and nontraditional public health responses like COVID-19 supply distribution, testing centers, and mass vaccination clinics, as well as the compromise of a municipal water system. These NWCOIMT members learned many skills that they have brought back to their home agencies to train others to provide a good experience base to help their agencies handle the “big one.” As Neil Colclough, a former Royal Marine and security manager for Vail Resorts, put it,

This wasn’t limited to one or two exercises per year, which meant that real, solid relationships could be formed and drawn upon when needed. It also gave us great visibility into the ongoing challenges that each other faced and how collaboration could mitigate them.3

Three team members have also attended the Naval Post Graduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security to further improve their leadership skills and ability to respond to incidents in their communities.

Successful Execution

The culmination of this extensive planning, training, and exercising was the successful hosting of the 2015 FIS Alpine World Skiing Championships, a 21-day epic international event, which is one-step below the Olympics for alpine skiing. This event had more than 500 athletes participating from more than 68 countries—and several high-profile dignitaries in attendance as guests—in a challenging winter mountain environment across multiple geographically separated venues. The response to this event required a four-year planning process involving more than 100 local, county, state, and federal agencies; 160 traditional response agencies, private entities, and infrastructure providers; 1,098 responders; 40,904 total tracked hours for responders; and training for more than 2,000 community members on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s If You See Something, Say Something Campaign.

That not a single noteworthy or critical incident took place is just one indication of the success of the championships.

As Tiger Shaw, the director of the US Ski and Snowboard Association, said: “Great job, Vail. You’ve stunned the world. The Olympics weren’t this good!”4

Lessons Learned

Many lessons have been learned over the 20 years of the Vail Emergency Planning Group including the following recommendations:

    • Participants will come and go, but the core basic philosophy will remain if the agency leaders remain committed to stakeholder collaboration and coordination process.
    • Write plans down so they will transcend individuals.
    • Start small with tabletop exercises where participants can gain confidence in their interactions and planning processes.
    • Build exercise complexity as participants gain confidence.
    • Conduct after-action reviews and document actions needed to improve. 🛡

 

Notes:

1U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, Protective Measures Guide for Mountain Resorts (for official use only).

2U.S. Fire Administration, “An Overview of All-Hazard Incident Management Teams,” June 23, 2023.

3Neil Colclough (former security manager, Vail Resorts), email, August 14, 2023.

4Tiger Shaw (director, U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association), quoted in Randy Wyrick, “2015 World Championships Garner International Praise,” Vail Daily, February 14, 2015.

Please cite as

Dwight Henninger, “Collaboration in the Mountains,” Police Chief Online, December 6, 2023.