Past Projects
Los Angeles County EMS Agency Initiative
In 2019, Terry Crammer, then the Chief of Disaster Services for the Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Agency, hired Eric Cote to serve as the project consultant for a comprehensive, multi-year emergency power resilience initiative.
The project was designed to ensure that LA County and its municipalities, along with its electric utilities and critical healthcare facilities, were employing best practices in minimizing threats to emergency power and accelerating response when threats arose during power outages.
As part of the initiative, Cote conducted a census of the emergency power systems in 80 LA County hospitals, capturing data on 271 generators. The census revealed an alarming number of seriously outdated generators, facilities with no source of redundant emergency power and facilities with limited onsite fuel storage capacity. EMS Agency officials were alarmed by the findings and enlisted Cote’s help to develop a series of new protocols to address these vulnerabilities.
The protocols include accelerated emergency power status reporting and an emergency power system vulnerability assessment to help hospitals identify vulnerabilities that may not be detected during required generator testing. Accelerated emergency power threat reporting will help expedite EMS Agency response, which may include the deployment of temporary generators and the initiation of evacuation support protocols. Early warning will also accelerate service providers’ response and, when possible, hasten prioritized power restoration. The LA County initiative represents the most advanced work to date by a state or local jurisdiction to identify vulnerabilities in hospital emergency power systems and develop rigorous new protocols to address these weaknesses.
The new protocols were introduced in the EMS Agency’s Healthcare Facility Emergency Power Resilience Playbook, published in October 2023. The EMS Agency provided training resources and a table top exercise to introduce the Playbook and its new protocols its 80 hospitals. Today, Cote is working with other jurisdictions interested in launching their own initiatives to boost emergency power resilience for hospitals and other critical health care facilities.
Protecting Our Most Vulnerable Citizens During Power Outages
For the average person, power outages are inconvenient. For the growing number of people who depend on life support devices and other electric-powered medical equipment in their homes, even short-term outages can become a matter of life and death, especially when outages occur with little warning.
Absent a reliable source of backup power, many people who depend on life support and other types of durable medical equipment (DME) rely on hospital emergency departments or emergency shelters during an outage, simply seeking a place to plug in their device. For this reason, the CDC and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) provided funding and technical assistance to help launch Power Outage Partners, a groundbreaking program piloted with the Louisiana Department of Health.
The pilot sought to provide invasively ventilated Louisianans living at home with funding to enable them to purchase additional battery capacity for ventilators and other life support equipment, allowing more time for safe evacuations. In short duration outages, the need for evacuation may be eliminated.
This groundbreaking program provides a roadmap that other jurisdictions can follow to boost their support for DME users during power outages. This roadmap is detailed in Advanced Preparedness for Life Support Users During Power Outages, a Toolkit ASTHO published in August 2023. As the project director for the Louisiana pilot, ASTHO hired Eric Cote to author the Toolkit, which continues to serve as a resource for jurisdictions across the U.S.
From the Ruins of Disaster, a Safety Movement is Born.
Eric Cote conceptualized and built the Protecting People First Foundation to help raise awareness of the hazards of flying glass, most deadly in bombings and natural disasters. Eric recruited Aren Almon-Kok, mother of Oklahoma City bombing victim Baylee Almon, to serve as the Foundation spokesperson. Baylee Almon’s lifeless body being cradled by a fireman in the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph became an icon of the bombing. Eric worked with Baylee’s mother in arranging national media appearances, Congressional testimony and numerous speeches to promote safety from flying glass hazards. The Foundation created a Safety Award bearing the likeness of the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph and presented the award to facilities that had fortified its windows to protect building occupants from flying glass threats. The safety award helped transform the iconic image from a symbol of disaster to a symbol of security, a process that helped honor the memory of Baylee Almon.
Projects At-A-Glance
- Department of Homeland Security Taps Eric Cote’s Expertise to Automate Emergency Power Threat Reporting
The Department of Homeland Security hired Eric Cote in 2018 to help develop an online tool that would harness generator monitoring technology to provide automated, real-time reports anytime emergency power in a monitored hospital was activated or faced a threat while operating. This early warning was seen as an important advance that could significantly accelerate government and private sector response, minimizing the risk that a faltering generator would trigger an emergency evacuation. This work culminated in Cote’s launch of a new tool called Power P.I.O.N.E.E.R. (Power Information Needed to Expedite Emergency Response). Two installations of the technology took place as a pilot project in Los Angeles, CA in 2021.
- Finding the Breaking Point
Throughout the record breaking 2004 hurricane season, Eric Cote led an engineering team to Florida to conduct a performance study of various opening protection technologies. The resulting report, Finding the Breaking Point, was hailed by Max Mayfield, then Director of the National Hurricane Center, as a well-documented analysis. Craig Fugate, then Director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, praised the report before an audience of three thousand emergency management officials as “one of the best reports he had seen on the 2004 hurricane season”. Fugate later served as the FEMA administrator.
- ASHE white paper, Roadmap to Resiliency
In 2017, Eric Cote co-authored Roadmap to Resiliency, a white paper addressing best practices in emergency power resilience with Jonathan Flannery of the American Society of Healthcare Engineering (ASHE), a personal membership group of the American Hospital Association. The white paper detailed the advanced technologies available to safeguard emergency power and outlined best practices in safeguarding emergency power and accelerating government and utility response when emergency power is threatened during a power outage.
- Capacity Building Toolkit for Including Aging & Disability Networks in Emergency Planning
In 2018, Eric Cote was hired by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) to help author the Capacity-Building Toolkit for including Aging & Disability Networks in Emergency Planning. This Toolkit was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. It provided helpful information about the unique disaster-related needs of elderly and disabled citizens and how organizations serving this population could bolster their emergency preparedness and response capabilities to better service at-risk Americans.
- RIEMA Playbook, Protecting Patients When Disaster Strikes
In 2016, Eric Cote launched a stakeholder engagement initiative with the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency to bolster emergency power resilience for the state’s hospitals. Working in conjunction with the Rhode Island Department of Health and the state’s electric utility, National Grid, the initiative identified opportunities to enhance patient safety through new protocols to better protect emergency power and expedite prioritized power restoration. These protocols were captured in Protecting Patients When Disaster Strikes, a heralded Playbook that detailed the critical actions needed by key stakeholders to better safeguard emergency power and expedite prioritized power restoration.
- Rx Response – Helping the Bio-Pharmaceutical Industry Prepare for Disaster
Rx Response was an unprecedented initiative of America’s biopharmaceutical supply system to help ensure the continued flow of medicine to patients in a severe public health emergency – from natural disasters like hurricanes to the H1N1 crisis. Rx Response, now called Healthcare Ready, was inspired by the public health challenges faced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Eric Cote helped launch the innovative program, setting up meetings with public health officials in Louisiana, Florida and New York to get guidance in how the program should be structured to optimally support public health preparedness. After helping to launch the Rx Response, Cote provided communications support for many years.