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What creates a resilient community? We explore the issue of community resilience with Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman, Tom Perrigo, the Chief Sustainability Officer for the City of Las Vegas, and Jonathan Ullman, President of the Mob Museum, as well as several other city leaders. Based on their experiences managing responses to emergencies and crises in Las Vegas, they discuss how leadership can help a community recover from a crisis, and renew itself as it moves forward.
Leading Las Vegas is a podcast produced by the Emergency and Crisis Management Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Each season, students in a Leadership, Innovation and Adaptability class interview prominent leaders, who discuss their leadership approaches, and how they prepare for, respond to, and recover from shocks and stresses faced by the community.
Las Vegas is known for being the entertainment capital of the world. However, it is also a complex environment, with a highly diverse community living in densely populated urban and suburban areas. It is situated near rugged and desolate land, with an arid climate and extreme temperatures in summer months. This unique nature of the city and its location create dynamic challenges for leaders.
Each season, the Leading Las Vegas podcast will focus on specific issues relevant to emergencies and crises, as well as community resilience. It’s a must-listen for emergency managers, leaders, community members, and students interested in the field of emergency crisis management.
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Season 1 of Leading Las Vegas focuses on Tourist Safety. Tourism is an integral part of Las Vegas, with over 42 million people visiting the city every year. Large-scale events from shows at hotel properties, to music festivals, to high-profile sporting events, occur on a nightly basis, along with conventions that can draw well over 100,000 attendees. Different agencies work together in the community to plan for these events, and respond when safety threats occur.
In this season, we discuss issues of event planning, current and future threats, as well as community resilience. Las Vegas was also the site of the October 1, 2017 Route 91 Music Festival shooting, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. The season contains an episode focused on the shooting, and conversations with the leaders involved with the security planning and response to the attack, and an interview with Las Vegas mayor, Carolyn Goodman, who discusses the city’s resilience.
0:00:00
On October 1st, 2017, 22,000 country music fans were enjoying country singer Jason Aldean during the closing performance of the Route 91 Harvest Festival, The Unthinkable Happen. The festive night was interrupted by the staccato of gunfire as the subject of this attack rained down bullets into the festival. For 10 minutes, the perpetrator of the deadliest mass shooting fired a thousand rounds of ammunition from the 32nd floor. In the chaos, consult goers took action, making makeshift tourniquets out of belts and transporting patients to the local hospitals in privately owned vehicles. Their quick action assisted first responders and saved lives. For the fourth podcast in our series, we will explore resiliency when a critical incident such as the Route 91 shooting occurs. Hi, I'm Travis Price, and thank you for joining us. When the gunman opened fire during the Route 91 shooting, which took place on October 1st, 2017, leaders emerged not only from elected officials and first responders, but also from concert attendees. When a critical incident like Route 91 occurs, how does a community return to normal and what do our leaders do to help that community? The focus of this podcast will be on the leadership and its impact on community resilience. The Rockefeller Foundation defines community resilience as the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, business, and systems in a city to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they may experience. During this podcast we will focus on how communities and individuals respond to traumatic events such as the Route 91 shooting and how they can recover. We will also explore resilience as a proactive state of mind where everyday people take responsibility for their safety and their loved ones and their community. When we experience a traumatic incident such as the Route 91 shooting, the wounds, whether physical, mental, or emotional, take a long time to heal. While very painful, physical wounds can be seen and the human body will eventually generate scars. But how does an individual and community heal the emotional and mental wounds, when left unhealed, will fester long after physical wounds have healed, negatively impacting the survivors and the overall community. In the immediate aftermath of an incident like October 1st, communities often look towards their elected officials for solace and to guide them in the healing process. But where do these leaders learn their roles in helping the community be resilient and recover? This is what Mayor Carolyn Goodman shared with us.
0:02:27
What a shock that was. And I know we're limited in time, but I have to tell you, when I took office in July of 2011, I came home, the city manager called and said, so here are the dates for our FEMA training. And that's the federal emergency manager. And she explained it to me at the time that 72 of us from Southern Nevada were going to Emmitsburg, Maryland for emergency management training. So I turned to my husband who had also gone and said, oh I can tell you Carolyn it changed my life. You have to go. However, it's a horrible experience because it's the worst time of year in Maryland. Mosquitoes, bugs, the school they've taken over a college or a school, the beds are like rocks, there are no pillows, you're sharing the bathrooms, the food is inedible and you're there for a week. So I said well then I'm not going. So of course I went. It was awesome. I can't even begin to tell you. And what it did for me that entire week, and it's a fabulous process, I could give you a whole program on what we did there. Our leader, Carolyn Levering, who's the head of our emergency management here in the city, had chosen for us to deal with terrorism as it would come and attack Las Vegas. when we got to the last two days was so real, I can't even begin to tell you. But it was like a pyramid and everybody, the 72 people that were in attendance, all in different parts of the piece of this pyramid, were instructed that your role is going to be here in this spot. My role as mayor is the communicator to the public.
0:04:29
Being a leader means being ready to respond at any hour. Mayor Goodman shares where she was that night of October 1st.
0:04:35
It was certainly at 10 o'clock at night. I was not only in bed, I was fast asleep, and my cell phone rang. It was our public information head director, David Riegelman, who had been there also with me in my role because his role is public information. And he said, Mayor, there's been a shooting. We don't know how many people, how many locations. I mean it was deja vu. I was just right there. I got out of bed. I was out of bed and dressed in probably six minutes and he said he was then calling the next person that was on his list. We'd all been trained what you do. Immediately, my brain from fast to sleep was absolutely spot on. All right, get dressed, get ready, get that booklet and wait. You're going to get a call and it's going to tell you whether to go to this location or that one.
0:05:31
Unfortunately, October 1st thrusted Mayor Goodman into her role as a communicator and healer. In her own words, the mayor described what she did to support her community that night.
0:05:40
And being the impatient soul that I am, and Las Vegas is so dear to my heart and the people. It's like my children, and I'm sitting there and there's no phone call. It's like this, the first phone call came in on a say probably around 10.20. And the carnage, of course, had already was out. And I just said, I can't sit here anymore because my husband woke up too. I said, what happened? I said, I don't know. We don't know where it's coming from, how many people are involved, whether it's terrorism or what it is. I called the sheriff, who of course, I have his cell phone. I couldn't wait. And I said, Sheriff, it's the mayor. I'm a block and a half away from UMC Medical Trauma. Can I go there or do you want me to do something else? He said, go ahead. That was it. And so my marshal took me over to UMC and wow it was just I can't it was like it was an hour ago. I see it I see the people I see the ambulances I see the flatbeds I see the vehicles I hear the screaming and Mason Van Howling was then their CFO CEO and we also at some point went over to Valley's emergency. And then
0:06:56
it was just trying to talk to people to help. As the mayor mentioned, the community of Las Vegas was incredible following the October 1st shooting. This is an important point to consider. While we often look towards our elected officials to lead us after these cries, the community also plays an informal leadership role in recovering and achieving resilience. Here's Mayor Goodman discussing the Healing Garden.
0:07:18
And then of course the miracle of our magnificent Healing Garden because everybody felt they had to touch something. You have this need to do something. Don't tell me I can't do something. I don't care what I'm doing. And so out of Jay Flegenfuehl and his small team building that gorgeous healing garden. It has such significance and that's why on the eves, on the memorials that we have done these past two years, it's not about people speaking and doing anything. It's just about those people we lost, all their extended friends and families and being there. And then of course, I don't know if I brought it in here, but I remember when we opened the garden, I took to the microphone to thank everybody and talk about those that we lost and even an employee here from the city, a youngster who was in our legal department, the wife of one of our parks and rec, no, maintenance and operations, his wife was shot. She's probably since then had 25, 30 operations. She still struggles. But to be able to talk and thank people and talk about the significance of the garden. And as I was speaking and I was facing west over the mountains, over Red It was almost like a jet trail that came up. And I stopped and I said, Please, everybody, please stand up and turn around and look at the mountains.
0:08:58
And there was this gasp from everybody. Mayor Goodman highlights how important the Healing Garden was for survivors, as well as anybody touched by October 1st, to have a place to face the pain of that night and begin the process of healing. But it wasn't just Mayor Goodman's leadership that led to this healing. Mayor Goodman shows how the community was a key part of the recovery.
0:09:22
It was incredible. You just knew their souls were in a better place and that we were doing the right thing with this garden of healing and hope and compassion which came out of that. And it stands so sanctified and pure because we never do anything to destroy that memory and that moment. Because out of it, people came, all races, religions, everybody, everybody, whether they were visiting, just came to help build that garden.
0:09:56
And over a four-day period, over 400 people worked 24 hours to build that beautiful garden.
0:10:03
Listening to the mayor, we can see how her role as a communicator and the
0:10:06
survivor's role in building the healing gardens gave the survivors and the community a physical location they could visit to address the grief they felt. Resilience after a critical incident is also about mentally strengthening the community. Sadly, time and a time, we see on social media a hashtag followed by the latest city or community impacted by tragedy in the word strong but for those survivors in the community these hashtag phrases represent the strength of the community to overcome the tragedy. Metropolitan Police Captain Dory Corrin spoke to this when he sat down with us. So community resilience in my opinion I think a cornerstone of that is this concept of maintaining a positive attitude or cultivating optimism. I think that in of itself allows for people to be resilient and communities to be resilient. In emergency management, that's a big concept, right, is how do you establish resiliency? And if you think about comparing it to one of the worst mass shootings in modern history, which was one October that we faced as a community here locally, at the end of the day, ask yourself, how did we overcome? Because there's no doubt that we did. As a community, we quickly showed resilience. And our economy swung back into full motion,
0:11:23
and the community came together.
0:11:26
Captain Corrin touched a key point when talking to us, optimism. Optimism speaks to the mindset survivors have. Having an optimistic mindset is part of the community resilience, because with optimism, a community knows that it will recover. Captain Coring shared more with us about optimism and having a positive attitude.
0:11:42
The community came together and if you ask yourself how did that happen? How could we replicate that? And what to me, what I noticed is that we, there was really a couple pieces, but one was that in the face of adversity, maintaining a positive attitude. And that's the Vegas Strong mentality that came out and everyone basically, instead of indicating defeat, people organically took it upon themselves to do two things. Create a brand that unifies us, which was this Vegas Strong concept, but then also this brand that unifies us with an optimistic vision. That was the Vegas Strong perspective. I think that in and of itself shows us how valuable it is to create a sense of unity that's based on optimism and to continue to cultivate that optimism to bring that community together to help each other out.
0:12:36
So I think that's definitely one aspect of community resilience. American poet Maya Angelou once said, I can be dragged by what happens to me, but I refuse to be reduced by it. As Mayor Goodman and Captain Corn highlighted, embracing the healing process such as the healing garden, finding strength and optimism through unifying statements such as Vegas Strong are key to helping a community recover from a critical incident, tragedy, or even an economic downturn. But this healing occurs after an incident. What if we as a community can be prepared before something happens? We will address that next. As we discussed at the beginning of our podcast, the music fans at the Route 91 music festival faced the unthinkable when the subject fired over 1,100 rounds into the concert venue. But was this act of violence truly unthinkable? The Federal Bureau of Investigation, or ALERT Center, have conducted significant analysis of active shooter incidents in the United States. From the analysis, the FBI and ALERT identified 277 active shooter incidents in the United States between 2000 and 2018. Of those 277 incidents, the three incidents with the highest casualties were Route 91 Harvest Festival with 58 killed and 489 wounded, the Pulse nightclub shooting with 49 killed and 53 wounded, and the Cinemark Century 16 movie theater shooting with 12 killed and 58 wounded. All of these events occurred in public places where the victims attended fun events not expecting an active shooter. While an active shooter incident at schools quickly grabbed the attention of the public, the data from FBI and Alert indicate that over an 18-year period, more incidents occurred in the commerce area 121 or 44% than any other location followed by educational environments at 57 or 21%. In 2000, one active shooter occurred which met the FBI definition for the incident. Each year, the amount of incidents have grown. We share this data not to scare you, the listener, but to highlight that the active shooters are not an unthinkable event. In our previous segment, we discussed community resilience after a critical incident. How the Las Vegas community and Route 91 survivors came together to begin the healing and turn the wounds into scars. But community resilience also means many things based on your personal and professional life. Here we have Carolyn Levin, Emergency Management Administrator for the City of Las Vegas Office of Emergency Management, share what she thinks resiliency means.
0:15:12
Resiliency is a great buzzword, right? It gets tossed around a lot and it means different things to different people. From a family perspective, you know, as a mother, as a wife, from a family viewpoint, I have one idea of what resilience means. From an emergency manager standpoint, responsible for a city of 650,000 people, that's a whole different kind of resilience we're talking about. And resilience is not a post-disaster thing. Resilience is built up in advance of an emergency and it's a reflection of how stable your
0:15:47
community is prior to the event. Carolyn's words drive home the point that community resilience is not just something that is important in the wake of a public crisis or disaster, but it's something that needs to be built up over time. Again, here's Carolyn discussing community resilience prior to the emergency, in this case, the current COVID-19 pandemic.
0:16:09
So how stable was our community prior to this long-term drawn-out emergency known as COVID-19? Well, considering the fact that we experienced job loss in an eight-month period that took 18 months to occur during the Great Recession in 2009. So we lost as many jobs in eight months as we had in 18 months. But we're already rebounding. So we're finding that as rapid a drop as we had, we're getting an almost equally rapid rebound in comparison to the rebound that it required for the Great Recession. recession. It's showing us that our economy is more resilient than we even imagined. We've been working on economic diversification for a long, long time. We're still not there, but it shows that the things that we have had in place have
0:17:05
helped. Listening to Carolyn allude to planning for a critical incident. The question is how successful has that planning been for community resilience.
0:17:14
But it's working together to make sure that we can do it safely and effectively so that we can weather this pandemic, I think is a real shout out to how resilient we were before COVID started and how we're continuing to maintain that resilience through this process. But it's not by accident. This is all directed towards the same goal which is to bring our community out of this with as little damage as possible and getting families back to work and back to school and back to a pattern of living that can
0:17:54
continue to contribute to long-term success. In some respect being resilient as a community means resilient as an individual and that means being prepared when a disaster or critical incident strikes. In Unthinkable, Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why, Amanda Ripley discusses the mindset necessary to survive a disaster. This touches on something Captain Corn shared with us. The second aspect is some level of shared responsibility. Whether you're an individual, a business owner, a large subset of the community. If you expect somebody else to come in and solve your problem, then there's no resiliency there. You're not going to survive with all the challenges that we face individually and as a whole. So I think that some expectations that you're going to have to help be part of that cultivation of optimism and part of that cultivation of resiliency is an important aspect as well. Captain Corn highlights the individual responsibility of community members to be resilient, but that does not mean they have to do it alone. The private and non-profit sectors can often be allies to local government in helping equip local community members with skills to build community and personal resilience. A great example of this is the Maw Museum in downtown Las Vegas, which has offered monthly community safety lectures open to the public on everything from self-defense tips and active shooter preparedness to home safety and emergency management. Here the MAH Museum president and CEO Jonathan Ullman discusses why the museum provides
0:19:21
these lectures. We love the community safety forums. They've been around, we've been doing them since I want to say 2016. We've been very fortunate I have to say ND Energy was sponsored these programs. They've been very generous to us which not only helps us get them, you know, create the programs and promote them. But one of the key aspects of this has been, we've also viewed it as, this is really about our commitment to community, which is one of our core values, as well as one of the specific tenets under our mission that is about addressing contemporary topics, things that are really relevant in people's day-to-day lives. I mean, I think there's, you know, when you think about a museum that's largely about history, you can always apply lessons of the past, but it's not quite as concrete as some of the things we address. Community safety forums is us at our most practical in terms of, you know, finding ways to be relevant to members of the community. Jonathan's effort to speak to the multifaceted approach he has taken to have the Maw Museum not only be an entertainment venue, but also a way to educate the community he loves. He also realizes how the museum can bridge the gap between the public and first responders, providing a level of access the community may not enjoy. We often forget because of perhaps the access that we have through our jobs, or through perhaps being a member of the university. You probably are in a similar situation. It's not unusual for me to interact with members of law enforcement. It happens every day. But for a lot of people out in the community, they don't get an opportunity to just talk with and ask questions of someone in law enforcement. So even when you think about a program like this, even if you just distill it down to having an active member of law enforcement, some branch of law enforcement, some with a particular expertise and you can just come in a room and not just listen to that person present but fire off some questions or afterwards ask for some advice about something. I mean that's a pretty useful and powerful service to be providing.
0:21:31
As we saw with the Route 91 shooting, a city like Las Vegas so heavily dependent on tourism sector for jobs and economic stability and development. Not only has to worry about the safety and security of its residents but also its tourists. In building community resilience therefore city leaders also have to take into account this transient population of visitors. Here again is Jonathan Ullman talking about tourist safety in the wake of the October 1st
0:21:54
shooting and other future emergencies. Before 1 October it was you know the concern was people driving up on the sidewalks, where people are walking around. There was that whole, people don't remember these things necessarily, but there was this huge baller project that was undertaken to try to address the possibility of that happening again, and not just being accidental, but being some type of a terrorist attack. And again, you can't necessarily anticipate what specifically that emergency might be, but there's certainly commonalities. After 1 October, there were all sorts of people who were effectively displaced here. They couldn't leave immediately. They didn't necessarily come to Las Vegas with all of the funds or all of the clothing or supplies for an extended stay. You pack for a weekend getaway, and then for one reason or another because maybe somebody that's with you is getting medical care, you all of a sudden have to stay for an entire week or maybe two weeks. Are there things that we could be doing as a community to set up an organization that addresses tourists? I mean it's almost like a safety net for the tourists. I don't know who does that right now.
0:23:19
Jonathan's insight about the whole role of entertainment venues such as the Mott Museum and their dual-use ability to entertain and inform illustrates that community resilience comes from all aspects of community, where government and private sectors engage the public as stakeholders. The idea of inclusivity is touched on by Tom Perigo, Chief Operations and Development and Chief Sustainability Officer for the City of Las Vegas.
0:23:42
One of the things, working with a few friends of mine, that we realized is if we are truly going to create a resilient community or a sustainable community, we had to be far more inclusive than just what we were doing in the public sector or within our own organizations. What really was most effective was creating a network of community leaders whose missions aligned within their organizations that really expanded what we were doing as a community.
0:24:10
Tom's message of an all-encompassing concept that everybody, every corporation, every government agency within a city is connected. Tom expanded on this in discussing the protective web these partnerships provide the City of Las Vegas.
0:24:23
We sort of have a little bit of an advantage here that our major industries, the resort industry, is very sophisticated. Each of those organizations, each of those hotels, is like its own little city. They have people who are some of the best, most knowledgeable professionals in the world who sort of manage their emergency response and emergency management programs. And they work very closely with all of the emergency management programs of the local government. So again, it's sort of this web that we have across the city that connects all these different public agencies and all these private major employers and major centers where our tourist population would be that we work really well together. So again, in my mind, that's really the best thing we can do is make sure we have that And I think that most cities are the same way. The major employers, they have experts and their organizations that are part of that web that sort of pass that over the entire city to protect the city and to be able to respond quickly to big emergencies.
0:25:33
October 1st was the worst mass shooting in the U.S. but as FBI data indicates it may not be the last. As our guests have shared, a resilient community before and after an emergency incident is one in which responsible government agency teams with the private sector, non-profits and community members to develop and sustain the ability to prepare and recover. Whether it be an active shooter incident or the current COVID-19 pandemic, a united community focused on the welfare of all determines on how community will respond and recover. We hope you've enjoyed this podcast focused on community resilience. This podcast was a collaborative master's project for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas's Master of Science Emergency and Crisis Management Program, which is a program offered within the Department of Criminal Justice at UNLV's Greenspun College of Urban Affairs. Those collaborating candidates for this project were Kelly Anderson-DelBello, John Creighton, Kalix Lewis, David Parnell, and myself, Travis Price. We would like to thank the guests of our podcast, Mayor Carolyn Goodman, Captain Dory Corrin, Carolyn Levering, Jonathan Ullman, and Tom Perigo. All of our guests took time out of their busy schedules, which are devoted to serving and protecting the citizens of Las Vegas to speak with us. And we are incredibly appreciative of the insights they provided us. Last but not least, we would like to thank Dr. Joel Lieberman and the University of Las Vegas for the opportunity to bring this podcast to you. If you would like to know more about community resilience and how you can prepare yourself and your family, we suggest you visit the following sites. For general disaster preparedness, please visit www.ready.gov. www.ready.gov. For disaster and emergency preparedness in Las Vegas and Nevada, please visit www.lasvegasnevada.gov.
Transcribed with Cockatoo