Train for disaster, speaker says

OGDEN — As a longtime NASA flight director, Ronald Dittemore gradually became accustomed to system failures pitched his way during mission training by a team of people "whose job was to make flight controllers sweat."

Failure upon failure were added with each flight simulation at Mission Control. At his peak, he handled 36 such failures in one 10-minute period.

"Now, if you can get good at 36 failures in 10 minutes, you can really handle one failure in 10 minutes," he said Thursday.

His remarks came during a "Ready Your Business" seminar, and Dittemore told the crowd of more than 100 at the Eccles Conference Center that if training can help people deal with stimuli during training, actual emergencies will be "a walk in the park."

"You know how to do it," Dittemore said. "You react naturally. It's not foreign to you."

Two major failures in the first five minutes of an actual space shuttle launch were no problem for the Mission Control team, which handled those and was looking for more, he said.

"Preparation is absolutely key. Training is absolutely essential for us to react properly under stressful conditions. It's too late for us to prepare when the time for decisions is upon us. It's too late for us to train how to react if we've never had the experience beforehand," said Dittemore, president of ATK Thiokol, provider of solid-fuel rockets used to propel the shuttles into space.

Attendees Thursday heard an expert panel and discussed the challenges and abilities of emergency organizations and heard recommendations for preparedness to cope with pandemics, earthquakes and other natural or man-made disasters.

And they were reminded that those disasters will occur.

"We know that we are going to have a disaster along the Wasatch Front. . . . We all know that we are going to have a natural disaster at some point, and our ability to respond to it appropriately and quickly will be the difference in piecing our economy back together, putting lives back together and saving lives," said Ogden Mayor Matthew Godfrey.

"It's not a matter of 'if,' " Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert said. "It's only a matter of when will a disaster occur, and they come in all different sizes and shapes."

Herbert and Commissioner Robert Flowers of the Utah Department of Public Safety warned that people will quickly look for help from the business world in a disaster's aftermath — small businesses, big-box stores, doctors and grocery stores especially, Flowers said.

"It's not government that comes to rescue you," Flowers said. "It's businesses."