to invite our host, Susan Barger, from the FAIC to please go ahead and begin whenever you're ready. Hi, everyone. Nice to see you. I'm really looking forward to this. We've said for years that connecting to collections and connecting to collections care was also dealt with living animals, but this is the first time we've done anything like that. So I'm going to run through some things. I just want to remind you that, since I note that there are many storms and floods going on, if you need assistance during a disaster with your collections, you can always call the National Heritage Responders hotline. And it's a 24-hour line. And there are people that are trained to help you with those kinds of things. If you have questions and you want answers about caring for collections, you can always post them on our website. In order to post a question, you need to register. But it doesn't cost you anything, and it takes a few minutes. So please take advantage of that. We're also on Facebook. We're on Twitter. And we also have a listserv that only does announcements. It only goes maybe once or twice a month. And if you want to sign up for that, this is the website right here. And then you can always contact me. This is my email address. And I'm happy to entertain you or answer your questions or whatever you need. And finally, coming up in September, we're going to have a webinar on MAP and CAP, which are two assessment programs for small and mid-sized museums. And then we're going to have one on the ASLH program steps. So be sure to tune in for those. And I think that's it. So I'm going to turn this over to Yvonne Medler and Ashley Zulinski. And I'll let them start. So go ahead, Yvonne. Wonderful. Thanks a lot for joining this opportunity to speak with you today. Like Susan said, my name is Dr. Yvonne Medler. I am the program manager for the ZAP Fusion Center. And I'll get into that a little bit, what that means, a little bit later in our presentation. But to give you an idea of who I am before I turn this over to Ashley to introduce herself is I'm a veterinarian with a master's in public health in epidemiology and biostatistics. My husband and I still continue to own a mixed animal practice in Teotown, Illinois, which I told Susan was the end of the civilized superhighway as we know it. It's a very small community in Illinois. And I am currently contracting with the Association of Zoos and Aquarium to help develop this ZAP Fusion Center. So it's important to know that I have a very strong background in agricultural medicine, food producing animals, as well as pets. I've always had a passion for zoological collections. And that's sort of what got me into working with the Association of Zoos and Aquarium at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. So I'll put myself on mute here, and I'll let Ashley introduce myself for herself. And then we'll begin the presentation. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Ashley Horsky. I'm the program coordinator for the ZAP Fusion Center. And I do work out of the Association of Zoos and Aquarium, which is located in Washington, D.C. If you're not familiar with the accrediting body of the Zoos and Aquarium, so I'm very happy to be on the ZAP Fusion Center project. I do kind of the day-to-day operations, website meetings, training, things like that. So my contact information is included in that handout, as is upon. But if you have kind of any day-to-day questions, you want to get on our listserv where we send updates for different disasters and preparedness resources for facilities with animal collections, please contact me and let me know. And we'd be happy to get you set up. And I will give it back to Yvonne for her presentation. Well, thanks, Ashley. Before we get started, I think it's important to give you all a little bit of history about how both myself, personally, as well as the zoological industry, has kind of gotten to this point in thinking about preparedness planning for our collection. So back in 2006, I was hired by Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago to work on a project known as the Zoo Animal Health Network. And at the time, that was a cooperative agreement between the Association of Zoos and Aquarium in the United States Department of Agriculture Animal Care to work on projects of mutual interest to the exhibitor community and to the Department of Agriculture. So one of the biggest concerns at that time was preparing our little bubble for foreign animal diseases. And if you don't know what a foreign animal disease is, it's essentially a disease of, there's obviously many different types of these foreign animal diseases, but it's essentially diseases of primarily food-producing animals that causes tremendous regulatory response and often results in trade restrictions. So this is very important to the agricultural community, which quite frankly, feeds the world, right? We feed the world. So it's very important for our country to keep these foreign animal diseases out whenever possible. And so I was brought in because while we're not, we don't often have agricultural animals as our primary missions in zoo. Certainly, we've got petting zoos in the life that are in some of our institutions. But I was thinking more on a population level. For some of these, incredibly rare and exotic animals, how to protect them? And what we needed to know from the USDA should foreign animal diseases emerge in the United States and how it would impact our business model, essentially. So I went about the task of finding out as much as I could about foreign animal diseases and how it affects our industry and our collection. And at the time, as you recall, my primary charge was avian influenza. And the reason I started with avian influenza is because back in the end of 1999, you'll likely recall that highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza emerged in Southeast Asia. And it's not all that important that you understand what the ancient N's mean. It's just a way to name this incredible number of viruses that affect birds, essentially. But the thing to know is that influenza A viruses, some of them, can also affect human beings. And so back in the late 1990s, early 2000s, we were extremely concerned about this nasty H5N1 that was circulating in Southeast Asia, essentially made its way to Africa and Europe. And how would zoos and aquariums and other exhibitors protect themselves from this? The biggest scary thing about this was the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta was also very concerned about this, because this is one of those viruses that also has the characteristic of potentially being zoonotic. And what that means is that it's a disease that's shared between animals and man. And I just looked up this morning the current number of this H5N1 influenza that has affected humans. And we know that the World Health Organization tells us that at the end of July, there were 859 documented cases of this H5N1 burn flu that affected humans. Now, again, these are only documented cases. So there's likely quite a few more. Of those documented cases, there's a case fatality rate of 52%. So that means that over 52% of the individuals documented to have this disease went on to die. So obviously, that's a very big concern for the public health community and for the animal health community. So this is why Asian influenza was such a hot topic at the time. So what we did, we had a three-prong approach to sort of preparing our community for influenza. First of all, we ran a little pilot surveillance project that we had three zoos across the country. And what we did is we set up a project whereby certain birds that were exposed more than likely to these viruses should they emerge in North America would be collected on a monthly basis. And we would take oral flabs and cloakal flabs, which is the anal opening for the bird, and look for influenza viruses and submit them through the proper diagnostic channels. And just to see if we can participate in surveillance that affects both animal and human health. And boy, oh, boy, we learned a lot from that effort. Just how difficult it can be to look for something you really don't want to find, that was quite a challenge. The other thing that we did is we developed a little white paper that we provided back to the United States Department of Agriculture. Because the poultry industry and the zoological industry, certainly at the time, we are not allowed to vaccinate for Asian influenza in this country, except in very, very rare circumstances. And it's certainly not for H5N1 influenza. So what we did is we developed a white paper that looked at the vaccination strategies for birds in zoological collections in Europe. They had actually done an entire vaccination program for each of the different European Union countries that allowed their birds to be vaccinated when the threat for Asian influenza was high. And the wonderful thing about it is the vaccination of zoo birds did not affect the trade status for the poultry in those countries. And that's a really big deal. Because like I said, the birds and animals that are in your collection and the animals and birds in zoological institutions were a very small part of the overall animal health pie. So we've got to be very cognizant of what our agricultural pod rays are doing in their industry. And so we basically went back and said, you know, if we do have it here, let's at least consider vaccination based on this European situation. And then, of course, the other thing that we did is we wrote an outbreak management guidance document. Because with the surveillance we were conducting, what do we do if you find something bad? You've got to know what to do with it. So we developed this guidance for state animal health officials and for the United States Department of Agriculture to deal with avian influenza. Should it be detected in a zoological institution? Oh, then what we did, we said, all right. We've got some plans in place. We've got to exercise it. And Ashley will talk a little bit about training and exercises a little bit in her time to presentation. But we developed certain exercises that really sort of tested zoos in terms of what would they do if avian influenza was near your facility and finally affected animals within your institution. And even though a lot of these places have really good plans in place, it improved their planning by running through these exercise scenarios and realizing where they had gaps. And so one of the things that we'll talk about is the training and exercises that need to be done to both evaluate your plans as well as make your plans better. And these exercise scenarios are on our website that you'll be introduced to. So if you guys are ever interested in looking at how we put these exercises together, that's all available on our website. So like I said, I really worry about disease issues. But one of the things that we discovered when working through avian influenza is that I really don't think it's an efficient use of time to think that you have to have a plan for every possible hazard that could be faced by your facility. Do you really need an avian influenza plan? Do you need a tornado plan? Do you need a dry well plan? Well, we started thinking about, can we provide guidance to think about disaster preparedness for whatever hazard and using that really all-hazards approach? So back in 2008 was our first attempt at developing some guidance information for the zoological community on all hazards prepared. And at the time, it's really a collection of great resources from many, many different industries because we had never really sat down before to try to collect this specifically for zoos and exotic animal collections or for curated collections of any kind. So this material is still available on our website. It's a good little resource. We know that some of the links are out of date. But a lot of the information there is still very, very valuable. But Ashley's going to introduce you to a more recent project that we worked on that really helped walk you through contingency planning in a really thoughtful way. But certainly one of the things that we recognize as we work through this is this was just me sort of being at Lincoln Park through being the best cheerleader that I could for disaster preparedness. So I recognized that my platform, my mission, needed a bigger tent to sit under. So that's when we sort of connected with the Association of Beings and Aquariums, which Lincoln Park is certainly a member. But Mr. Steve Olson, who remains our Chief Center of Chief Advisor, basically said, we need to have this under the ADA umbrella. And it was very helpful to do that because they bring to us someone like Ashley and a network of subject matter experts and connections with other members of the exotic animal industry that I could never develop on my own. So that was the concept for the Zaf Fusion Center. And really, Zaf is an acronym that very loosely stands for Zoo Aquarium All Hazards Preparedness, Response, and Recovery Fusion Center. So you can imagine why we need a catchy name like Zaf. I want to talk to you a little bit of what we're not before I get into who we actually are. We're not an incident management team. We don't have trained responders that come in to assist, come flying in out of our headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. And we don't have a cache of equipment and supplies to use for our members of the community in case of a disaster. But what we are is a very integrated conduit of information between the exotic animal industry, game ranchers, USDA regulators, nonprofit, non-governmental organizations, whose mission it is to actually be the responders for animals and the factors. So we access that connector to these other groups because what we have are people. We've got subject matter experts in virtually every species, every taxon, you can possibly imagine. So when these animals get in trouble during a crisis, we likely know someone in the area that may be able to provide some subject matter expertise to reach out to maybe even respond. And essentially connect people with other like-minded individuals that may be able to help in these situations. Many of these organizations that we work with, their primary mission is dogs and cats. And so when they reach to us information on exotic animals and the like, we've got facilities and we know people in institutions across the country. And that's what really makes that work. Ashley, myself, and Steve are the worker bees. The staff is really a much larger community than just us three. So before we get into going through the steps of this, I really want to take some time in explaining to you why, if you have animals or not, why it's important to invest your time and resources into contingency planning. Well, the biggest reason that I give to my folks is that our community as well as your unique community is very, very vulnerable. And this quote is attributed to a buddy of mine, and Mr. Cherry Lincoln. And he's the director of the Dakota Zoo. And he underwent, his facility underwent, a very serious flood back in 2011. And they ended up evacuating their entire zoo not once, but twice during that flooding event. And later on in the month, he arrived at the Roosevelt Park Zoo, I'll have some photos to show you of that facility in a moment, where Terry was interviewed by The New York Times. And he said this to the reporter. He says, if you're taking a furniture and throwing it up on a truck, anybody can do that. But in a zoo setting, you can't take someone off the street and say, go get the 500-pound lion. It just doesn't work that way. And I'm sure that you likely have animals in your care that have very unique needs in managing them. You have very unique needs for managing your precious inanimate collection. I wouldn't have the slightest idea how to manage valuable, priceless manuscripts. And so this is why you need to take this upon yourself to recognize that your planning is going to be very important because of your unique vulnerabilities. The other reason that's really important to the judge about this is sometimes they think our community is a little overconfident. Because I have been, I've had the pleasure of meeting a number of emergency managers from across the country. And I've talked to them, these local folks that have training and they know their job very, very well. And I've talked to them and I've said, well, have you worked with your local zoo? Have you worked with your local special collection? And I've been told, oh, we don't have to worry about the zoo. They've told us that they have their own plan. Well, that to me just makes me want to scream because the development of a good plan absolutely has to include your local professional. 90% of the things that happen in your facility, you likely handle without the need for their assistance. But that 10%, that 5% of these low likelihood, high-consequence events where you really need them, you need their help to recover from this. If you don't have them helping you with your plans, you're not prepared. Your plan isn't good. It's no better than the paper that is to it now. So this is why one of the biggest take-homes I want for each and every one of you to remember is that you've got to work with your locals on developing your plan. So I'm going to just briefly run through here. Some of our examples of disasters, our community is not immune, and neither is yours. Your best plans are in facilities that have had disasters. So if you're starting from this today going, oh my god, we've got nothing, well, our plan is really thin and we really need to get working on this. Don't worry. You have time. Remember that the best plans are in the facilities that have had disasters because it tested their plans and they've realized it's not thin enough. Reach out to your colleagues and help them figure out how can you make your plan better. You guys, these new threats are now reality. 15 years ago, we had thought that some of these highly vulnerable targets, such as buildings that would be flown into by airplanes, we need to recognize that we are really soft targets. And so how do we start to get our heads wrapped around preparing for these things that we never hoped we'd have to worry about? And finally, I always like to bring this up in terms of climate change. We know that the climate in the globe is changing. And the projections for a number of our facilities are looking at 50 years down the road where they're going to be suffering extreme difficulty in dealing with flooding along the coast. And I'm sure that your facilities are in the same situation. So we've got to be forward thinking and lean into this and recognize that the old way of doing things is not going to be adequate for preparing us for new events. We've got to share our lessons learned about the practice. So specifically, why do you want to plan for your animals and disasters? You've got to keep your staff safe. One of the primary objectives of incident management on any level is human life, health, and safety. Responding to a disaster is very stressful, and you're doing things you don't normally do in a day. You've got to make sure that your staff has adequate direction and can stay safe during the disaster. Our animals have very high societal value. Your collections are locked by the members of your community. We want to protect public safety. We don't want our animals getting out in a disaster to threaten the public. We've got to protect our first responders. What if you have been in these animals in your collections? And for some reason, the fire department has to go into this reptile room. Have you worked together with them to make sure that those first responders are going to be safe? We've got to protect public and agricultural health for diseases that our animals may have. We don't want that filling over into wildlife or the public for the mistakes. Conservation is a huge mission statement for many of our facilities. Some of these animals are genetically irreplaceable. If we are planning for them in disasters, we are going to lose a significant amount of that gene pool. And that's not in anybody's interest. And finally, it's good business practice. You are going to be able to reopen and get back to doing the business of educating the public much quicker if you have thought about some of these things ahead of time. And finally, I don't want to ignore a very real reason to plan and its public perception. I'm not going to read this out loud, but you can get the drift. This is taken from an internet chat site, and this is also a quote in print, following a disaster in a zoo. And your public expects that you have plans in place to protect the animals in your care. You cannot get your message of education, conservation, and whatever else your overall mission statement is, if the public doesn't think you're protecting the animals and the people in your care. So really, have I convinced you yet that you really need to spend some time thinking about contingency planning for your collection, both inanimate and alive? And there are some interesting resources that Ashley's going to share with you a little bit later on in the presentation. But one of the things I'm going to do for you is give you a little brief overview here, the time I have left, to talk about some of the disasters that have affected animal collections specifically, and give you some of the lessons that we learned from that. Well, certainly, Hurricane Katrina was a watershed moment for animals and disasters. One of the things that came out of Hurricane Katrina was resulted in something called the Pets Act. I'm not going to go into what that means. But essentially, what it does is it requires accommodation for those individuals being evacuated from natural disasters that we have to think about taking care of pets and service animals. Because Hurricane Katrina showed us that people will not evacuate without their pets. I want to put a note, a big actress on this note, is that the Pets Act mentions nothing about animals in collections, about animals in zoos, about agricultural animals. So this is why we, as owners and operators, really need to step up and do a lot of that planning ourselves. The Audubon Zoo. The Audubon Zoo, or I should say Audubon Nature Center, is a collection of facilities down in Louisiana. One of them being a zoo, another one is a lovely nature center that was really affected by Hurricane Katrina. We learned a ton about animal emergency management from them. Just a little bit of background. You know a lot of the story about Katrina. But there was 6 to 8 feet of water in the lower 9th cord, and there was 10 foot in the St. Bernard Parish. Luckily, the Audubon Zoo, there was obviously a lot of rainwater on the ground. But the levels of water in the zoo never rose to that amount, which was obviously very good. The scary thing about this, though, is it caused $10 million damage to the Audubon Institute grounds from Hurricane Katrina. $2.5 million damage to the zoo itself in fences and roofs. $7 million in lost revenue. That's a significant, significant amount of money in anybody's book. And when you talk to Mr. Lurie regarding that was at Audubon at the time, one of the things he tells us is that the reason they were able to get back on their feet was really because they had business interruption and insurance. So any of you that are involved in senior staff and upper level management, it really believes you to understand what your insurance coverage is for these sorts of things. Because even though this was a federally declared disaster and they were able to get some FEMA reimbursement, FEMA does not protect everything. It does not pay you back for everything. So you've got to keep that in mind. You've got to know what you can expect back and who might be able to come to your aid if you have one of these catastrophic events in your institution. Obviously, here's the black berry yard, lots of damaged trees. I believe they lost 1,000 trees. These fences were all damaged. Most all of the animals were in holding. So nobody escaped. Ironically, many of the birds that they have down there remain on an exhibit. Because these are species that are used to storms of this nature in their natural habitat. And I believe they only lost one bird to the storm itself, which is pretty darn good. And that's because they had some warning. And they really stepped up and got a lot of these vulnerable animals into state holding situations. And this is one of the things Larry likes to talk about. They had a very well-developed plan going into Hurricane Katrina. They have what they call their response teams. And you can see on the left, they had a number of folks that were ready for two weeks of isolation in a reptile house, which is a very steadily built brick building that was a bunker. And that's essentially where their staff lived until the zoological cavalry arrived from some of our neighboring institutions. But one of the less groups that they learned, look at how they increased the number of folks on their team in 2008. They recognized that they started with five keepers or curators. They'd grown up to 15. And the other thing to note is that they not only have one response team, they've got their B team, which is also as staffed as much as this team is. Because they recognize right away, if you're working in 90 degrees humidity, in 95 degrees heat, it exhausts folks. And another one of the interesting ads to their storm lighter team is the chefs. Because the last thing these keepers and curators and these folks working these operations want to do is worry about cooking when they come in after a $12 shift and they're exhausted. OK, this is Soros River Flooding in 2001. And this is what that friend of mine, Carrie Lincoln, went through that we mentioned earlier, that nice quote talking about the vulnerability of special clashes. This is the Roosevelt Park Zoo in Minot. The water came in for them. They had about six to eight feet of water that sat there for days and days and days. They had a brand new $1.8 million visitor center that was being constructed at the time. And there was $180,000 to that as of yet completed building. That was heartbreaking. This is their education building. Eight feet of water there. There was literally no building on the property that they could even work out of. The entire place was absolutely inundated. What these folks ended up doing, and fortunately, again, they had some preparation. They knew this water was coming. They were able to evacuate a number of their more dangerous animals, such as bears, to other institutions in the area. They were able to move their farm animals out to neighboring farmers. And this was a temporary, they called Blue North that was set up in an abandoned furniture warehouse that was north of the zoo. And they operated out of that for months. They had just a tremendous outpouring of support from a number of institutions that sent other folks there to aid them, because they were spread out all over the place taking care of these animals. And so it was a real testament to what can be done with a little bit of planning. Fortunately, they were able to, you know, the zoo reopened, but it took two years to get that facility back up and fully functioning. Sometimes we don't have warning for these sorts of things. A superior zoo in Duluth, Minnesota, this was a torrential rain event that the first note that there was anything wrong at the zoo was a photo posted on Twitter. And this is it. One of their animals had floated up and out of its enclosure and was found in the middle of an intersection in Duluth, Minnesota. And so, obviously, this was extremely distressing. The zoo itself is sort of on the banks in a lovely park-site-type setting. And you can see this very large sort of swale area on the left-hand side of your screen and a small babbling brook that usually runs through it. And you can see what this freakish 500-year rain did to that small babbling brook. It essentially overwhelms the entire city. You can see that the farm in the zoo area on the lower left. The water so deep you've got Coca-Cola machines. Floating down the river, you can see all the debris piled up against the footbridge. That is usually many, many feet above the ground. Very sadly, they did lose a number of animals in their farming resuits of it. But the entire community suffered. You can see that there were cars that were swallowed up by sinkholes. So this was a total community situation. But fortunately, because these folks had had some plans in place, their training paid off. It may be a little bit difficult to see, but the individual in the red on the tailgate of the white pickup truck is my friend, Dr. Louise D.A., who consults with the zoo and manages their animals. That is Berlin, the polar bear, safely tranquilized on one of the walkthroughs in the zoo with the police department, the poor guy standing behind the door with crews, or because he's scared to death. But he's essentially there in case Berlin was not quite as sedated as we would have liked. But their training together paid off. And Berlin was successfully tranquilized and returned to disenclosures after the water receded. And fortunately, no one was hurt. So that was a very good lesson learned. The Gatlin Burkfire, very briefly. Willier, this year, this is Ripley's Aquarium. And many of you may be set up like this with most all of your animals housed in the water. Aquariums are amazing. If you ever get a chance to visit this place, it's a phenomenal aquarium. Well, this is what it looked like in the middle of a fire. This is all the smoke that surrounded that aquarium. And many of you know that there is very sophisticated life support systems in aquariums. And it's my understanding that the fire was very, very close to the facility. You can even see this clip on YouTube. This is the aquarium here sort of all decked out in their holiday lights. And there is the fire burning behind it. Fortunately, there were very good outcomes from this.  The folks at Gatlin Burk at the aquarium, there was a forced evacuation. They were not allowed to keep their team there. And so what they had done is they fueled up the generators as best they could. They prepared things as much as they could prepare. And then everybody bugged out and literally had 24 hours of sleeplessness to figure out what was going to happen to the aquarium. They had done some pre-planning. The biologists in the Aquarists were among the first individuals allowed back in to the area once it was being safe. Unfortunately, no animals were lost. That's a Ripley's Aquarium due to this fire. And that was a result of doing some pre-planning, of doing some mitigation around their facility before the fires began. And like I said, you can look this up on YouTube. It was quite an event at the time. So the last thing I'm going to talk about here and before I turn it over to Ashley are some of the lessons that we've learned that you may likely know or that we definitely want to impart to you. It's, first of all, those that have plans in place have better outcomes for living collections as well as other curated collections. Integration with your local responders is key to your success. Please do not develop your plans in isolation. And Ashley will talk to you a little bit about who your partner should be in just a moment. And the other big thing that us animal people have to remember all the time is that human life must come first. And to effectively evacuate your animals or care for your animals in a shelter-in-place situation, you've got to protect the people that you expect to perform those tasks in managing those animals under these trying circumstances. So that's about all I have at the beginning here. I'll stick around to the whole thing to answer questions. But what I'd like to do is put myself on mute and turn the rest of the presentation to Ashley. Thanks, Devon. So now that we've given you some evidence of previous cases that we can face in the Aquarium setting, we're going to get into how you might actually go about developing your plans. Now, before I get started, this is based on six community planning modules that we have standing on our website. And the link to those and the accompanying workbook is going to be included in this handout that you see below. So when we reference links and resources, those will all be included in the workbook. And we're just going to quickly go over the tenants and introduction to contingency planning, how you might identify your planning partner, needs and limitations, and a risk assessment, writing your plan, and finally, training and maintenance of your plan. So again, this is kind of a quick, quick overview. But those full modules are available. And we certainly encourage you to take a look at those after we're done here if you'd like to learn more. When you're writing your plan, it's most important to realize that the process is more important than the plan itself. And as we continue on in this presentation, we're going to be using terminology used in the internet command system, or ICS. So ICS is a flexible, scalable method for organizing incidents that's used for pre-planned events and national disasters. It was originally amended by the fire service and its utilities and demonstrated over and over again. We definitely recommend that you learn more about ICS. And if it works for you, consider using this to write your plans. It will help you integrate and lock in with your local responders. There are training courses available for free online. There's a great one I'm seeing this website that you can take. But we also have a training app on the ZAP website that we have adjusted for the report of the community. And that's also in the access to write it. A brief introduction of the roles and responsibilities. Again, these roles are designed to expand or contract, depending on the size and initials, so these are just the basics. The instant commander of ICS is going to be the person in charge of this incident, and they must have the authority to manage the situation. The IC may or may not need assistance of command staff for that second tier that you see, depending on the size and scope of the incident. A public information officer, or PIO, is going to be the person who has the authority to update the public on the incident. The firing to police departments have designated PIO who will address them if yes, and that's actually during any process of this. A safety officer, or F.O., is directly responsible for the safety of responders. The response can be dangerous, and the instant commander looks to the safety officer to assure them that responders can do their job safely. A liaison officer has the important role that if there's a fire in the community, your authority may not be directly impacted, but that's who you would work with as a stakeholder, in case you have any impact on the fire. And then these general staff positions, operations, planning, logistics, and finance are all designed to reform the task needed for response. It's devising the best plan to reach the response objective and acquiring and paying for resources needed to manage that incident. It's highly recommended, again, that you learn more about ICS and in that workbook is where you'll find some links to resources for that. There are three basic objectives that are at the core of incident management, and these are ingrained in the emergency managers and first responders. The first, and most important, is to preserve human life. The instant commander, or again, the person responsible for the management of the incident, recognizes that the safety of their responders in the public is the prime objective. As an animal person, you might think of your collections first, but people cannot do a good job of responding if they are not safe themselves. Do you wanna make sure that your plans emphasize safety for your responders now? The second objective of the ICS incident management is to stabilize the incident. It refers to doing anything that can be done to prevent further damage and to make conditions safer for the responders. Think about some of the previously discussed incidents affecting the adult animal industry. What are some strategies and tactics that you may have used to stabilize the incident? For example, if a tornado was moving through your facility, what are some steps that would help to stabilize the situation? Who would assess if your animal work has been secure? Who would determine if live wires were down and dangerous? Who would be trained to turn off natural gas? These are tasks that can be done by your staff and they can also be done by first responders, but determining the responsibility and authority for doing these tasks is something that should be included in your plans to allow for incident stabilization. The third and final objective of the ICS emergency management is to preserve property and the environment. And this is what refers to your collection. So if you haven't engaged in pre-planning, your animals may be low on the list of priorities. As owners and caretakers of these animals, it is your duty to make sure that you work with locals so that the needs of your animals are included in community planning. Again, I must reiterate, the safety of your staff, the public, and first responders must come first. Before we get into some of the details about plan development, we want to suggest that you make sure your plan is smart or follows the new safety limits. So whenever possible, you want to keep things simple. Simple things are easier to remember and easier to do during an emergency. You also want to try and keep things measurable. Adjectives like our plan supports the evacuation of all guests and grounds within 30 minutes, or we need to stockpile 40 bales of hay to last one week. Those are measurable. And when it comes to resources that you need to respond to an incident, having a measurable count of things is very helpful. Plan should also be achievable. If you write a fantastic plan that there's no realistic way that you can achieve it, it's not a very good plan. Start with what you know you can do, and then build from there. You also want to make sure it's reasonable or that it makes sense for your facility and your local responders. And finally, your plan should be time-sensitive by defining what you will do and recognizing how long it will take to do it. And of course, we all know that things always take longer than we think they should. So identifying how much time it might take to meet your objectives and managing the incident is an important part of this area. So moving on, we're going to discuss the planning partners. Your facility needs help when writing a plan so you want to use your local responders because they already know your local risks. They also would have an event history for your area. So by tapping into their knowledge, you'll greatly decrease the amount of time required to research the risks that your facility may be in. Your local partners may also suggest a format or template that they would like to review. We don't want you to be compelled to reinvent the wheel if your community emergency manager has a format existing that they would prefer you utilize. Finally, you should use your local responders in your planning process because they are going to be the ones to show up when you call for assistance. Your responders having a greater awareness of your facility for the planning process will pay out big time if they ever need to respond to an incident at your place. Another very important reason what you've got to get local responders involved is because they should integrate you into their plans. They need to know your resources and capabilities. That way, they're going to be much less likely to forget about your research needs during response. If you're not at the table when they're planning, then you could end up lacking lines for resources. And a key concept that everyone really needs to understand is that disasters begin and end locally.  And they're going to be the ones that know the next steps if an incident escalates past their ability to manage it. You also want to think about your county emergency response. They may not be directly on your community planning team, but they can provide subject matter expertise or even equipment in the event of a disaster. Public health is going to be an important partner in any zoonotic disease event that impacts the collection since they have the power to shut you down if a disease would pose risk to your staff or guests. You're going to want to make sure that you work with them on any zoonotic disease theory. Your animal control officer may be able to assist you with capture or relocation with some of your animals during an evacuation. Extension agents may know local farmers who can provide large animal transport equipment and some counties might even have a county animal response to them or carts. Your state partners should also be considered a room planning team. One state partner that should have direct input on your plans, especially when it comes to infectious disease, is your state animal health official, or state veterinarian. You have to remember that they bear the responsibility for the health of all animal species in their state and that includes yours, as well as agricultural species that may be a good economic driver for your state. State emergency management should also be considered a room planning, but it's important to note that state agencies are only going to be deployed if your local resources have been exhausted and if the state resources are reflect. When identifying federal partners, you'll want to think about what agencies have a regulatory role over your facility. What veterinary services region your facility is located in and if you're eligible to see that assistance ministry's activities. And I know we're going over this really quickly, but there's a lot more detail on all of this, including including those models that I referenced earlier. If you want to come to other stakeholders who can help you with your plans to provide resources, you don't want to make sure that you don't overlook your non-governmental organization. These can be great resources and you want to check out who is available in your area. In another degree resources would be other wildlife facilities, which they might be able to assist you with the contingency process, sharing the equipment that you might not have or give some training methods that have been helpful at their facility. Their proximity to you is going to be a real advantage to other stakeholders meeting you. First, stakeholder. Some of the stakeholders that we talked about, such as emergency managers and your first responders, are going to be heavily involved in helping you write your plans. But others, like the USDA and the state veterinarian, are going to just provide input and review. Integration is key to having a successful plan and that integration may be critical to get a good place in line to get the things that you need to respond to an incident or a disaster. Integration and timely acquisition of resources may need a more successful outcome with a quicker return to normal activity and business continuity. So to draft useful plans besides having the right people to help you, your facility must figure out for what you need to prepare. So that brings us to introducing the concept of a risk assessment. Why do you need a risk assessment? Knowing the risks ensures a proper preparation for the most significant or most likely scenarios while minimizing resources to the least critical. Making a facility-specific plan means knowing your facility-specific risk factors and making the plan starts with assessing those risks. Of course, the low probability and minimal consequences are going to be at least concerned, but the other instances should be evaluated and prioritized through planning. Some examples of how to evaluate the risks are included in module three of these modules that we keep mentioning. And when you're looking at your factor risks, you're going to want to consider internal versus external or what risks might come from inside your facility versus what might be beyond your control. Internal risks are often going to be based on your animal inventory. Animals can present a risk to people, to wildlife, and to agricultural animals, and they also vary in their own vulnerability to various types of factors and instances. Relative vulnerability to adverse conditions or infectious diseases must be considered. Think about what species in your collections are particularly sensitive to smoke. What about water quality or contamination, excessive heat? Cold, wild species viability is short without filtration, aeration, oxygenation, and circulation. Some other internal risks that you may face could be some chemicals stored on site or potential recruitment malfunctions. Final factors are the risks that we're usually going to consider a risk assessment, and that's things that are going to be out of your control, but within your power to anticipate, diminish the impact of, or mitigate, in their severity. This could include severe weather events, fire, tornado, flood, hurricane, and less considered risks like hazmat leaks from nearby railroad and pipelines, water contamination, or nuclear or volcanic impacts. Now we're going to figure out what it takes to make your response successful and what might be beyond your ability to control, but within your capabilities to diminish. So that means figuring out your needs and limitations. Begin by choosing the top three to four hazards that are high likelihood and high consequences for your institution, and identify what you have on hand and what your limitations might be before you begin to write your plan. Process will help with resource identification, and it's going to build a list of needs. It doesn't make any sense to write a plan without the resources available to accomplish it. You're going to want to think about the resources that are required versus what you have available, and when you're doing this, remember those smart goals we talked about earlier. You want to keep it simple or break down your plan by hazards, so you're really breaking down what you might need. Think of individual action items and what you might need to accomplish those. Make it measurable. So if you're trying to secure your building from wind damage, don't just make that your goal, but think about what the exact materials might need to be. You have those. You have the money to get those. And then you're going to want it to be achievable. Is it within your funds? Is it within your expertise? Reasonable? If it's not, is it something you could get? And time-sensitive? Of course, the end date for any of this preparation is going to be when you start to write, but you don't know when that can be. So, spending a time-sensitive goal will make sure that you actually just need it versus needing it on the shelf for a later date than over time. If you have animals, you're likely going to want to consider a form writer team or a small group of staff that can stay and perform special functions in the event of a lockdown so that they can do animal care. Whatever you want to call them, they're going to have special capabilities and in your needs assessment, training for them might be more important than actual equipment. Now it's time to write your plan. If you've done all your homework, identified your partners on your risk assessment, identified your needs and limitations, then it's going to be time to write your plan. You assemble all your documents, maps, board plans, and mutual aid agreements that you might have with other institutions. And now you're going to have to determine the planning components of your individual plan. History has taught us that most of these are critical for wildlife facilities, so you're going to want to work with your planning partners to determine exactly what it can do for you. Communications, you have to consider for both into and out of the facility. Administration is all about people and documentation, how we take care of your staff that's responding or can't get to work, who will document what is going on in the facility as a response and recovery continues. Data preservation, what data will be preserved, where, when, how often, and who is responsible for doing so, where do you have your data backed up? For a shelter in place or walk down under what circumstances will this be started, how will sheltering be accomplished? How can it be scaled up or expanded if the event is more serious? Evacuation, under what circumstances will you need to evacuate people or animals and how are you going to accomplish this? And we will have an mandatory evacuation or EMS order, what's going to be the trigger point for animals or people? What's your partial evacuation criteria? An infrastructure assessment. Free and post-event facility assessments are going to be critical to many aspects of your plan. In fact, infrastructure assessment and documentation in advance may greatly assist with insurance indemnity or through that safety and security. This describes what protocols are in place for both free and post-event to ensure safety of the people, animals, and structures. Every facility is going to have distinctive considerations, so your plans should include any other unique considerations as identified in your risk assessment and needs and limitations. Specific concerns, characteristics to your facility, such as overhead tram response, rides, on-ground housing, and other considerations are things that only you can identify and should be included in your plan. Animal-specific plan elements of your plan are your distinct challenges in a wildlife facility, so this is going to include animal escape response, multiple animal escape protocols, escaped animals you can't find, and numerous other special considerations that only you can really address. What's the clear plan for the use of lethal force for human protection? From animals and how is it controlled or executed? If you need to shelter your animals in place, how, where, and for how long may they be sheltered? Animal evacuation, what are going to be the components of a partial or complete collection removal? What are the trigger points for animals to be moved? Infectious disease is another very specialized consideration which may require planned subtractions and veterinary expertise, and that's going to be where you really want to get your state animal health official and USDA input for any agricultural disease that could have other economic consequences in your state. So before we move into training and maintenance, we want to look at the cycle of disaster preparation. Once your plan's written, you have to train the people who are expected to respond. You want to make sure that you realize that not everyone at your facility needs to be trained on every element of your plan, but you need to make sure you train your staff to whatever their individual role and responsibility is going to be, so that they're really able to follow that plan. For example, if you have an animal escape and the education intern is supposed to direct people to a secure area, make sure that their training includes how you want them to perform that task, and then decide how you're going to exercise that training. Where is the shelter for deaths? How do they get information about the escape? What status does the incident as it unfolds? And how do they get the all clear once the incident is under control? You don't need to go into any drug doses that doshes or response strategies for the recapture team with that education intern, since that's not going to be what they're responsible for. Only after you've achieved plan approval and properly trained your responders can you implement your plan. Now the cycle is going to continue, because if an incident happens and the plan is implemented during response an evaluation should be performed that discusses strengths and more important needs, the weaknesses of both your plan and your response. This is going to allow you to identify new risks that you didn't recognize when you were first planning. Take your lessons learned and generate new needs, and then you can modify your plan to better address the hazards it has or next time it might have. Don't ever think about planning as a one and done situation. And later we're going to discuss some recommendations for keeping your plan as updated as possible. You must develop this graphic which shows the different types of training exercises from discussion-based to action-oriented. We're going to get into some of the details in a minute, but note that as you increase capability as your responders, the more complicated your exercises can be. You don't want to dive into a full-scale exercise without doing some of the less complicated training and exercises first, because remember to walk before you rest. Again, you only need to train personnel on what you expect them to do in a response.  An actual incident will certainly be challenging. So talk to your local partners, your planning team members, and see how you can train an exercise together. Your facility might be a great venue to host drills and exercises. You'll find that your partners probably enjoy and excuse you something out of the ordinary like coming to your facility for training. Maintaining your plan is another critical component of a planning cycle. You want to make sure that you're pulling out your plan at least annually and definitely at new risk or needs are identified. After every actual incident or every exercise, you're going to review your plan and decide whether or not anything needs updating. Plans that sit on the shelves and are never reviewed and updated as new houses are identified will not be valuable. So if you've stuck with us, you've made it, but now's when the real work will begin. Again, this is a quick crash course in consistency planning. So we highly recommend that you take the course in full as shown on our website. This quick introduction is just paired down with six modules that are each at least a half hour long. But for now, your first steps are going to be to develop a relationship with your partners in preparedness, do your thorough risk assessment, look at your needs and limitations and write your plan. Consider how you're going to train people to execute the plan and how to maintain it. And don't forget that you're going to need the help of folks that you might not deal with every day. Make sure that you develop a relationship with your state veterinarians and don't forget your emergency management professionals in your area. They're going to be key partners in preparedness and should help you develop your plan right from the start. And if you have any questions moving forward, you can certainly email Ivana or myself. And then our supervisor and our university contacts are also included upstairs. You have questions for them. And now I'll turn it over to Susan for any questions. Okay. I'm going to put up the evaluation link here. And evaluations are really important for us. So please let us know. Please respond to this. And then we'll see if there are any questions. I have to say that in my experience, people usually don't get an emergency plan until after they've had an emergency. And so this is really valuable, whether you have animals or not, to figure out what you're going to do. Exactly right, Susan. You're exactly right. Yeah. And to get, you know, I know so many museums that are afraid to have the fire department come in, for instance. And I tell them, if the fire department doesn't know what's important in your collection, how are they going to help you out? Exactly right. And like Ashley talked about, how we wanted to take the top three to four things that are most likely to happen, and raise plans that address the needs of certain species of animals or certain collections that you may have. You've got to start slow, because otherwise it's just too easy to look at the enormity of it and go, oh my god, this is way beyond my ability to do anything about it. But if you start concentrating on those things that are most cherished by the institution and start walking through that, you're going to be amazed at how other things and other species will be managed and will be included in some of the things you need to worry about. Certainly, OK, say, for instance, you start talking about, OK, I've got birds, and we have snowstorms, and we worry about electricity going out. So you begin down that path of we're above a bird in Corian. So obviously, birds are very key to our business model. So let's talk about the snow load and losing electricity. Well, that's what. You're going to have a pretty sound electricity outage plan when you're done planning for that. It can be used for any hazard.  Maybe it's not snow that causes this problem. Maybe it's a transformer fire away from your facility that's going to keep electricity out for a week. Well, you still have gone through that process of planning for an electrical outage for your high-likelihood snowstorm that's also going to help you when you've got a transformer that blows. So it's a difficult concept in a way to begin to get your head wrapped around. Well, how to build all these little pieces together. But I'm telling you, your folks that do this for a living in your area are why it's so important to leverage their expertise. And like Ashley said, invite them to your facility. Bring them over for lunch. Give them a crude of your facility. Some of our members have talked about how they've had invited an emergency manager and his family to come to the zoo for the day. And what they've done is that they'll see the planning team will sit down with the emergency manager, they'll have lunch, they'll have a curator take the kids and the wife who are behind the scenes, look at the facility. And then that relationship is what brings the importance of what you do every day to the attention of these folks that can help you. That's how you get connected. And so I would highly encourage you to consider doing something with that. I'm trying to get in touch with and playing some tags. I believe the state police in the night just did a full scale exercise at the Kansas City Zoo for a search and rescue training opportunity. I mean, that's pretty darn cool. That's a huge campus. And to have those subject matter experts on the ground looking at a search and rescue situation and they're highly, they talk very highly about we should be doing this in any place there's these animal issues, where you have these exhibits and these facilities. And once they begin to see your unique challenges and how you can play along with this to your benefit as well, it's a really good stepping stone for further collaboration. Yeah, yeah. Um, there must be some questions out there. So please post them in the questions comments box. And I have to say I never really thought about what to do with animals. But I know from talking with Yvonne that sometimes people just let their animals out, which is horrible. Yeah, there was an incident in Pennsylvania. Several years ago where the plan was to just open up the gate and let the bison out. And, you know, the bison at the end were all right. But anybody that works with bison will tell you it's not like Langland cows. They're a very, very dangerous animal. And, you know, that public safety officer, or police, if, you know, if they came upon a situation where they thought that the public was in danger, that bison would be in trouble. And considering police probably don't know the best place to try to take down a buffalo with firearms, even if they're most powerful, it did not end up nicely for the buffalo. So, you know, it's our responsibility as much in our power to try to prevent those things from happening in the first place. And, you know, in the first place. Go ahead.   You know, the equipment needed to do that are few and far between. But those of you with smaller animals that are less dangerous, you've got, you know, you can make some good connections there that can bring resources to you if needed. And I just get a question that says, there are AZA accreditation standards in relation to emergency procedures. Absolutely. Absolutely there. Not every licensed exhibitor, of which AZA is, like 237 facilities out of over 2,200 licensed exhibitors, currently there is no requirement for written contingency plans in the Animal Welfare Act, which is what allows you to be an exhibitor. But we also know in talking with some of the folks within AZA that their plans could be more robust because they're looking at maybe some of these high likelihood things. They've got great plans for safe animals and the like that some facilities have recognized through working through this process that maybe their plans for their storm rider teams or for their shelter in place for people in the events of storms are not quite as robust as they should be. So we are trying to encourage everyone to really work with their locals and determine if their plans are not just adequate for accreditation, but are really taking into account these low likelihood, high consequences that could happen. Yeah. Mike had a question. What did they do at the New York City zoos when the hurricane went through a couple of years ago? I imagine that's Hurricane Sandy. Yeah, I've got some anecdotal information from that. Certainly, I'm not an expert. Is there anyone on from that area that can speak directly to that? If not, what I can tell you is that that was kind of an interesting situation because there's five zoos, believe it's five zoos, that make up WCS Wildlife Conservation Society. And that's like Staten Island Zoo, Black Zoo. There's a number of them. And the aquarium was hit pretty hard.  One of the things we did learn from that is that there was a lot of water inundation, especially on the facility that was right along the coastline. And the only part of that facility that didn't lose power was the new animal hospital because their generator had been put on the roof. And so many of our facilities have these big life safety equipment thing in basements because they're just darn ugly, and you don't want them sitting out. So they were able to conquer down a lot of these vulnerable animals in that animal hospital area that kept the life on, that kept the people safe. And then a number of WCS employees from the facilities less affected by Supercom Sandy were able to come to the aid of the facility that was really in trouble. And the other thing that's kind of interesting about that situation is that the facility that was the most severely affected obviously had done a lot of pre-planning and it's one of the largest economic engines in that particular area of the New York metro area. So everyone was very committed to getting that place back up and open as soon as possible. So they were able to raise some funds. They did some fundraising. They had a support from, like I said, their other WCS institutions that really helped them get up and get going quicker than probably would have happened almost anywhere else. And then another interesting thing about the employment response that kind of came out that you might want to consider in your planning is if you are an institution that's really beloved, a lot of people locally want to help you out and they might just kind of show up after you face disaster. And of course, with lots of animals there, with potentially downed wires, there's a lot of hazards that might be faced. So you want to think about what you might do if volunteers show up on your doorstep wanting to help you out because they might be angry if they're turned away. So trying to think about how you might mitigate that. Yeah, it's a really good idea to have a consider, having someone that's going to be in charge of volunteer management. Because I know you've probably all seen people want to turn out and do something. And in Katrina, there were parking lots full of just junk that people dumped. And it just sat there getting wet and rotting because obviously that was a huge incident. But people want to help. And sandbags, the zoos up in Minnesota employed some of their more able-bodied volunteers with just the sandbagging. And that's very common in a number of communities mandated by floods. You may also have assigned people to monitor social media. So if there's rumors being spread about things, there was a rumor in one of the floods up in Minnesota that I think it was the Canadian floods from the same incident. It was that incredibly wet 2011 where virtually every zoo from Canada all the way down to the Mississippi River was flooded at some point in time. Calvary Zoo, there was a huge rumor going around that all the large cats had been relocated to the county jail because that was the only place that could keep them. Well, that was complete fabrication. But you've got to make sure that you are getting your information out in an accurate way. So maybe you get some of your more trusted volunteers to monitor social media. You may not want to have them engaged with the public directly, but it might be nice to know what is being said about you in this time of these things going viral. But then your public informational officer can address on behalf of the entire institution that has the same message going out from the management, incident management team that might be managing the situation on a community level. So it's always more important to keep an eye on that stuff. And we have seen some, I forget the exact example that had told me this, but we definitely have seen some of our zoo's in aquariums that have working relationships, that if something's kind of going on, they'll help each other out with these small staff and have an sister institution kind of looking at what's going on on social media and kind of putting the public information officer at the institution facing the disaster, make them aware of things that they might be seeing if it's too much for one person to monitor on their own. OK, I think that since we have no more questions, I want to say that Yvonne and Ashley have made all this material available to us for free. I mean, it's available on their website, but now we have a connection to it. So please take advantage of that. And as soon as you look on our website, as soon as you see that the advertisement for this webinar is no longer there, you can look in the archives for 2017 and you'll be able to click on the link. And there'll be the recording, the slides, and the handout will be there and anything else that they send me. So be sure to take advantage of that and tell your people that you know who may not have been able to catch this webinar that that's happening. And we hope that we'll see many of you in September for the two webinars then. And keep looking at the website because we'll have more things happening. We're going to have a course on exhibits that will have a small price, but that will be happening in October. So stay tuned. And we're really glad to have people that we've never seen before joining us. We're here. We offer webinars a little over once a month and they're free. And we are here to help people in smaller institutions take better care of their collections. So thank you all. Thank you, Yvonne. Thank you, Ashley. Thank you, Mike. And I think that's it for today. So enjoy the summer and we'll see you in September. OK. Bye-bye. Wonderful. Thank you.


Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the workshop entitled future direction of the energy analysis, visualization and informatics lab space, also known as anvil. My name is Valentina different Chesco and together with the, with Dr. Ken Wally, I'm one of the colleagues for the anvil program. And, and I have a brief presentation, I will spend a few words describing the anvil and the goals for which energy or I decided to launch this program. We'll go over the workshop goals and the agenda. Some information about the discussions that will happen during the breakout rooms. Spend a few words about the workshop participants and then we'll conclude this presentation with additional information and guidance to the participants. So what is the anvil. It was established by energy or I in the fall of 2018 to provide a cloud based platform for storage sharing and analysis of large genomic and related data sets. In particular, it was established to support collaborative efforts and data sharing needs of the energy or I program and initiatives. And an important aspect of the anvil is that it aims to facilitate training and development development of genomic research workforce and genomic data scientists. So we have specifically organized today's workshop around this very important specific aims for the anvil program. Of course, we don't have a lot of time to really go into the details of all the operations and activities of the anvil program and that's the reason why we prepared a booklet, an information booklet for you all to read it's long, so it's long, and I apologize for it, but we thought it was important for all of you to have some basic foundational knowledge about all the activities that have been happening in the anvil. I want to emphasize that this program is only three year old. And, and in spite of all of that, in spite of being only three year old. I think that we're very pleased energy at eyes very pleased with all the accomplishments and all the progress that has been made for the past few years. However, we all know that there is still a long way to go in a number of activities and in particular the reason why we want to host this workshop is because we wanted to hear from the community about potential gaps and challenges and future opportunities related to the energy investments in the anvil cloud based infrastructure tools and services. I want to pause a moment here to basically make sure that it's clear that the focus for today is really to think about the future. And not much about the past. We, we, we are building this resource as best as we can, and we really want to basically get your input in suggestions on potentially new key technology, new ways of training students, new ways to bring users to to this resource. So focus is on the future not on the past. So, with respect to the agenda after this presentation. Mr events Bonham, who is our acting deputy director will give us a presentation on data science at the forefront of enhancing diversity in genomics. Then we'll hear an introduction to the anvil a little bit more information and what I just gave you about the anvil from the PIs. Dr. Anthony filipakis at the Broad and Dr. Michael chats at Johns Hopkins. Then we'll go into session one of the workshop, which really consists of two breakout rooms, one focus on data submission and consortia engagement, and the other one focus on analysis tools. This is each breakout room sessions last for about one hour and 15 minutes. And then the moderators of the breakout rooms will provide a report to the whole group on the highlights of the discussions, and then we will finally have a break it's going to be a short break. We'll move on to session two same framework as the breakout rooms of session one. I want to emphasize that for both session one and session two really we're not going to spend too much time on present hearing presentations from the anvil stuff, but the focus is really on discussions. So we really want to hear from you and your thoughts and your suggestions. And that's the reason why we set aside 45 minutes for for that. And then we'll report back from session two again the moderators will give us the will give us the reports and then finally it will close with Ken, my colleague and Wiley with a summary of what we heard and then we hope you're going to help us to prioritize some areas that we should focus on over the next a few years, both in the short term and in the long term. So back to the breakout rooms. We have decided that it would have been useful to set a general framework for how the discussions could be focused. And so we decided to use the framework of SWAT analysis where SWAT really means is an acronym and it means strengths weaknesses opportunities and press. So in the context of this workshop, really what we would like to hear from you is, what is it that the anvil itself. Where is the anvil at a disadvantage, where can and will grow and improve, and which factors jeopardize the anvil. So we hope that by, you know, providing this framework that we're going to be able to focus the discussion a little bit more. As I said, we have only 45 minutes and it's important to to be able to touch on all of this point. The other thing I also want to emphasize is that there are some cross-cutting themes. These are themes that are relevant to the four breakout rooms. And so if possible, we would like to hear from you also your thoughts about how the use of the cloud platform could support or be an impediment to some of the goals of the anvil. And what type of tools and services would really improve, please be on mute. Would it improve the services provided for clinical genomics, as well as how can we improve and do better with establishing interoperability across with other genomic resources at the NIH or also now funded by the NIH but by other entities and agencies. Who is here? First of all, this is an invitation only meeting. We have invited about, we have invited about 50 people. And in particular, because, again, we wanted to ensure that people were able to lead discussions, we have provided, as I said, the information booklet with some general background information about anvil and its operations. So we are following a model that is similar to what we're doing with our council meetings. We are, you know, doing council meetings with sign discussions to grants or group of grants or programs. So we did the same here with sign discussions to the various breakout rooms. And I hope you found your name on page five to see on which breakout room you were assigned to. The people that are here are also the key investigators that are supporting the activities, operations and services of the embo platform. These are investigators from the Broad and Johns Hopkins as well as the partners institutions. Then, here are also members of the energy I embo staff, as well as other energy I staff, and they're going to be here just as listeners. So it takes a village to really support this project. So every single person whose feature you see here is an important contributor to all the activities of the embo and I want to thank them all for all the amount of work that they put in support in this program. And this is my final slide and it's just the general information and guidance to participants. So without recording this whole workshop, including the discussions in the breakout rooms and soon after the workshop ends, we will make all the materials as well as the recordings available publicly on our genome website. During the, the entire workshop please use your raise your hand feature in zoom for questions and comments. If you're not speaking please mute yourself. And so, as I told you we're going to have breakout rooms and the participants will be automatically redirected to the breakout rooms based on either whether or not you had a discussion for that room, or based on your choice, the choice that you made during the registration phase. So we have set up a publicly accessible Google Drive folder, which I hope you will remember is a weekly and will workshop. We will post it on the chat every once in a while so it's easily foundable and you will, if you don't remember it you should be able to access it through the chat. And it's very easily organized. Basically, you will find, you know, the root folder and then there are sub folders for the individual breakout rooms. And then if you are lost, and you do not know what's happening with zoom, please feel free to get in touch with the general for money, possibly directly in zoom, and he will be able to help you. And with that, I think that is no time for questions so I will immediately introduce our acting deputy director Ben, Ben small now Ben. So thank you. And thank you for this invitation to participate in this meeting. Next slide. So I just want to make a few comments this afternoon or this morning depending where you are in the country. But I just want to thank the planning team for inviting me to participate and having this opportunity just to share with everyone that's on this zoom workshop. Some of the important things that I believe that are important for the Anvil program that are happening at NHGRI and why I think the Anvil program can play such an important role in these efforts. Next slide. So that I know all of you and next slide, Tina. Okay, great. I know all of you are familiar with the strategic vision that was published in October of 2020. That lays out these four different areas with regards to how NHGRI sees the vision for the future of the field and the work that we as an institute are doing to help to lead the field with identifying guiding principles, robust foundations for genomics, breaking down barriers and compelling genomics research projects. And from the perspective with the recognition that genomics is now integrated across all the biomedical research and all of NIH Institute centers and offices. What should we at NHGRI be doing to actually push the field forward. And I think that the work with regards to the areas that would identify for us this afternoon are so important to the field from the perspective of the work of Anvil. Next slide. So I want to highlight three of the guiding principles that are in the vision document and encourage you to go back and review the vision document and some of the areas that are important to your own work and to the whole Anvil program. And one of the areas is to strive for global diversity in all aspects of genomics research, committing to the systematic inclusion of ancestrally diverse and underrepresented individuals in major genomic studies. As a field, we're continuing to challenge with this issue of how do we truly enhance the diversity of the ancestral populations in our data and our ability to learn new information on understanding human genetic variation that's important to understanding our science. This continues to be a major area of importance to our institute and clearly is a major area for the broader field. So I see that this is an area that we as a field involved in data science must recognize. The second area is to embrace the interdisciplinary and team-oriented nature of genomics research. And I think this Anvil program and the process of the Anvil program is a perfect model of how do we develop interdisciplinary teams and work together in collaborative ways and can be a model for the field. And I just encourage that of this group. And then the final area that I want to highlight here is to adhere to the highest expectations and requirements related to open science, responsible data sharing, and reproducibility in genomics research. And that's clearly something that this process of using the Anvil lab model is a way to do that and that we can lead for the field of genomics and for biomedical research.  And that's the next slide. And that is to champion a diverse genomics workforce. We say in the guiding principles the promise of genomics cannot be fully achieved without attracting, developing, and retaining a diverse workforce, which includes individuals from groups that are currently underrepresented in the genomic enterprise. This is a major area of focus that the National Human Genome Research Institute has taken on to see how we as an institute can help to enhance the diversity of all of the genomic research workforce, including what can we do with regards to genomic data science. And how can we think about our steps, our strategies around our training programs, around new engagement programs to enhance diversity of the workforce. So as you think about your SWAT analysis today, this issue of thinking about how do we increase the diversity of data scientists, how do we increase the diversity of the individuals using the Anvil platform, and what are strategies that we can take with regards to that. What are the opportunities for us to actually enhance the diversity of the people using Anvil for their research. Next slide. But we also talk about these issues with regards to the foundation for genomics. And I just want to highlight two items within box two in the vision. One is to ensure that the next generation of genomic scientists are sufficiently trained in data science. And that is the work of Anvil from my perspective with regards to providing a platform that's user friendly that's available for individuals that truly a diverse group of trainees and then scientists across different biomedical research can use Anvil for their research and their research questions. So a recognition that there is an important role around training that I believe that the Anvil program has. Next slide, but also in the foundation for genomics is this foster diverse genomics workforce. So I challenge you to think about where the opportunities are for the Anvil program to truly to help to facilitate and to support this enhancing of the diverse genomics workforce. Next slide. The NHGRI has established an action agenda and you can see the website here. And the website of the action agenda lays out four different goals that we've identified that are important for our work. One is to develop and support initiatives that provide exposure and access to careers in genomics. Second is to develop and support training programs that with networks that connect undergraduate and graduate education to careers in genomics. Can we think about how Anvil can help support go to and third to develop and support training and career development and research transition programs that lead to independent research and clinical careers in genomics. This is an area where I think that this group can play an important role with regards to go to and go three with regards to the Anvil network. And finally and go for is to evaluate the progress toward achieving greater diversity in the genomics workforce. So we're going to evaluate all of our programs all our efforts and activities to determine if they're making a difference and to modify them as appropriate so that we can really truly use the resources. The programs initiatives that we start to actually improve the diversity of the field. Next slide. But I believe that Anvil is a leader and I just want to applaud all of the individuals have been involved with the genomic data science community network. On everything that I've heard about this network and the engagement that you now have with academic institutions across the country particularly minority serving institutions including tribal colleges and historically black universities women's colleges the engagement with these groups these faculty members and students about the use and using data science and using the Anvil program is a model. And I just hope that this group can move forward to expand on the work that's already going on with the genomic data science community network to examine how can within your own lab within your own department and within your own academic institution continue to develop programs to increase diversity to bring more students from diverse backgrounds and to data science to bring more faculty into the work using the Anvil platform. So with that I just want to say thank you. Next slide. I look forward to listening in on part of the workshop today and I hope you have a really successful workshop. And that you raise this question of how can you broaden the tent with regards to those that are involved in using the platform and broaden the tent of who you train with the use of Anvil. So with that, thank you. Thank you, Vance. Thank you. This is excellent. Unfortunately, we don't have time for questions but if you do have questions please put them in the Q&A or in the chat and we will address them. Thank you. Great. Thank you. So the next speakers are Dr. Anthony Filippakis from the Brody Institute and Dr. Michael Schatz from Johns Hopkins. They're both the PIs of the Anvil program. Anthony, Mike, who is starting? Go ahead and share my screen. You should be able to. Great. And I am not quite sure what's going on with my video but now is not the moment to try and fix it so I apologize for that. Thanks so much everyone for the opportunity to speak today. Maybe I'll, next slide. So as Valentina mentioned, my name is Anthony Filippakis and I'm from the Brody Institute. I'm the Chief Data Officer there, trained originally as a cardiologist and now oversee a lot of different software efforts at the Brody. Mike. Hi everyone, my name is Michael Schatz. I'm a professor at Johns Hopkins in computer science and biology. And it's really a great privilege and pleasure to be here today to talk about the Anvil. I just wanted to say that Mike and I hadn't ever worked together before the Anvil, but I can't express what a pleasure it is to get to partner with him. I think we both feel that we will be friends and collaborators for life. Next slide. And moreover, we really are very lucky to have an incredible team on both sides of the Anvil, both the Hopkins and the Broadside, more than 12 different institutions make up the leadership team of the Anvil. And it's been great to see the groups come together over the last three years and work collaboratively to build out a real community. In order to organize a lot of our efforts, we've created a series of working groups that cover important areas that the Anvil will focus on, whether it be, you know, data access or data processing, outreach, engagement, etc. And if it's of interest going forward to get more involved in these working groups, we would love it. Many of the members are from outside of the Anvil awardee community, and we really want greater involvement from the overall NHGRI community. Next slide. So to motivate a little bit about what the Anvil is all about, what we see is an incredible moment in time where there's a need for new cloud services to help researchers store, share and analyze genomic and clinical data. At very large scale. And it boils down to a few key needs. The first is cloud-based infrastructure, which provides a whole new suite of capabilities that will get into greater detail on the next slide. Moreover, data access and security cannot be understated. The data that we handle in the Anvil is often from human subjects, has a great deal of regulatory and compliance requirements associated with handling it, and being able to ensure that we can protect this data is another key area of focus. And then finally, the cloud offers a lot of opportunities for collaboration and being able to perform new types of analyses that would be much more difficult in a non-prem environment at your university data center. Next slide. And one of the things that I think is really important in motivating the Anvil is to recognize that we're in the midst of a one-time sea change in terms of how genomic data is stored, shared and analyzed. You know, I think Genomics has always been a leader within life sciences about the ethos of data sharing. I think a lot of this goes back to the Human Genome Project, where there was a public effort and a private effort, and the public side sharing the data and having it be open became a rallying cry, and that persisted in the subsequent generations. But while we've been very good about the ethos of data sharing, the way that we've operationalized it has been sometimes unsatisfactory. Our current model is to put data onto servers and tell researchers to download it to their local environment, and that presents four problems. First, in order to share data, you have to copy data, and that means that NHGRI and other funding bodies have to pay for storing a copy of every data set at every research institute. Second, when you download data, it becomes very hard to audit who's touched it and for what research purpose. And again, as we think about the sensitivity of the medical data sets like e-merge, this is a big problem. Third, there's real need for a common pool of resources. It's a moment in time where genomics is at risk of becoming a sport of kings, where in order to even begin to work with genomic and clinical data, you have to be at a large and well-resourced institute with a security and compliance team and lots of, you know, system administrators. But I think we all realize that there are many great researchers who could make discoveries that are outside of these traditional environments if only they had access to the data. And then finally, we have a lot of need for elasticity in genomics. So by instead of bringing data to the researchers, but instead bringing researchers to the data, we can address these four limitations. Next slide. And so what we seem to do with Anvil is to provide a suite of capabilities to our users. We provide them data that's been processed and QC and staged and made easy to use. Second, we provide computing capabilities that let you deploy large-scale analytical workflows and interactive analyses with ease. And then finally, we do a lot of work to educate users on how to use cloud services and how to use the data and tools and enable new models of collaboration. Next slide. And also as I said before, one of the key things that's a component of the Anvil is having a secure and compliant environment. For those of you who are new to it, one of the things that's key in cloud is to be able to have a security perimeter where you can say these set of services are within our boundary and we are able to attest to their security and compliance. But there are a lot of applications for whom trying to meet this regulatory requirement would be very cumbersome and very expensive. In order to become fismo-moderate, it requires several hundred thousand dollars and a third-party audit. Not every application can afford to cover that. So by making the Anvil in a way that it's an ecosystem where different applications like bioconductor or galaxy can be deployed within this secure environment, we save that challenge of reduplicating, creating a secure environment over and over, and instead take it over for them. Next slide. Just a few things by the numbers. The Anvil now has nearly four petabytes of data, a large number of users, a great array of workflows that are used by many different researchers. And again, have the beginnings of a real community around it that's engaging via social media and other tools. Next slide. And as you'll see, most of the large NHGRI consortia are now have been onboarded and ingested into the Anvil, and many future consortia will be engaged going forward. The early wins focused on human genetics, the CCDG, CMG, and GTECS consortia. But more and more, we're taking on a lot of different clinical use cases such as CSER and the next phase of eMERGE, which is quite exciting, as well as functional genomics efforts like telemer to telemer, and then soon IGVF. Next slide. And with that, I'll turn it over to Mike to do the second half of the introduction here. Thank you, Anthony. And again, thank you all for being here today. So there's a lot of really impactful work going on within the Anvil itself. And another dimension to the work going on in the Anvil is our efforts of interoperability. NIH has established something called the Cloud Platform Interoperability Group and CPI. And Anvil is one of the founding members of this and really kind of, in my opinion, leading the way for this. So in addition to the data sets, as you just heard about, about four petabytes within the Anvil, we've also established a number of key technologies so that the Anvil can interoperate with other NIH Cloud Platforms. And collectively, we have about 11 petabytes of data across all these platforms. To put some perspective on this, currently the SRI, the entire SRA, is about 40 petabytes. So already we're about a quarter of the size of it in just the two years and rapidly grow. In addition to sort of the data, the analysis, a major thrust of the Anvil has been to sort of interact with users and form them and bring them on and support them in the research needs. In the next couple of weeks, we have a few events next week at Genome Informatics, and then ASCII, some workshops coming up beyond that. We've partnered with individual research labs to get them on boarded onto the platform through something called the Cloud Credits Program. We've also been working with a number of major consortium like CCDG or CMG or new consortiums like PrimeMed coming on. We've also given classes and outreach at different institutions. We were in a data science program organized by Howard University, and you just heard from Vince. We've been organizers of something called the Genomic Data Science Community Network. We're really making a focus effort to outreach to do those communities that have traditionally been underserved by this type of research. In addition to all these activities, we're starting to see some really impactful science coming out of this. There's a manuscript that is currently under review describing the anvil and sort of its technical components today. We look forward to that publication coming out later this year or early next. And we're also seeing some tremendous science taking place on top of the anvil. We had an early success scientifically using anvil and using Terra to analyze the spread of COVID-19 around Boston, just being able to sort of survey all of the relationships between those genomes that were being transmitted in the environment. And beyond that, we've had some successes at the basic science level. Through work with the Tealmer to Tealmer Consortium, the anvil was the platform for analyzing 3,202 genomes to be able to do a global analysis of human diversity around the world using that new reference genome that is available. Similar efforts are supported through the Human Pan Genome Project where they're using the anvil as their platform to develop new reference genomes to catalog genetic diversity worldwide. On the clinical side, we've had great successes with CCDG where they've already ingested more than 100,000 human genomes, where there's joint calling going underway right now. Very large-scale efforts in CMGs, eMERGE, other aspects to bring in these types of data. To support that analysis, we've developed and launched a number of major analysis tools to support this. On the top right there, we have sort of a screenshot from a major tool called Seeker that lets you study transmission across families to support Mendelian genomics. At the bottom, we have a polygenic risk score report that can be generated inside the anvil, in this case to look at coronary artery disease. Our vision here over the next several years is to really grow the anvil in many different ways. Number one will be growing the data that is there, but more than just having static collections of disorganized data, we really want to lower the barrier to discovery. So having it harmonized, having it presented in a way where it's very, very easily accessible so that we can really make those tremendous discoveries with it. In terms of the number of sort of activities and data sets, we really want to support many, many consortiums as possible. Our vision in the not too distant future is to be able to support all consortium across the NIH any year on. And related to that, as you heard, a lot of these data are controlled access. Historically, that's been a barrier to research where there's sort of an extended process where you have to apply for access, get it reviewed in many different ways. We still want to have that reviewed process. Of course, we want to streamline it as quickly as possible to make it as efficient and optimized so people can access to those critical data sets. On the computational side, we're going to definitely be increasing the number of tools and number of analysis types that are possible. And part of this is supporting a diverse set of users. So it'll be interactive computing, batch computing, visual analytics. We want to be able to support people that are very comfortable at the command line to those that are just want to see kind of higher level summaries, really kind of be able to see the big picture. And I think a major focus moving forward is now that we kind of have the basic infrastructure, the basic tools in place, we want to be more predictive, more sort of forward looking about the types of analysis that we've done and see a big thrust into sort of capabilities for machine learning in the coming years. And then finally, in terms of the number, in terms of user activity, obviously we want to increase the number of users and the number of consortiums. And then furthermore, we want to empower them to be able to do the analysis on their own. We've had a few early examples and a number of early wins showing off, you know, some of the capabilities that are possible inside the Anvil. We just want to see more and more of that so that we can serve really as the platform for cutting edge biomedical research for all. And there's this great opportunity where we can democratize it, where it doesn't just need to be the big institutions, the Broads, the Hopkins. It can be really anyone anywhere. It can take advantage of this platform to make discoveries. And just to kind of have one final thought, I think we're at this really tremendous up moment in time. I'm old enough to remember an era before the internet, when I was dialing up on my modem to individual servers, individual computers, and it's very inefficient, it's very clumsy, data were siloed. It was a mess. I think we have this tremendous opportunity to sort of reverse that model, really have things harmonized, really have things interoperability, but we have to get it right. If we're successful, we're going to catalyze the creation of this open and federated data ecosystem. The internet itself being a premier example of how that could be so successful. If we fail, unfortunately though, there is this real risk of sort of degenerating into a collection of monolithic data silos that obviously we want to avoid here. So I'm really excited about the successes we've had in the Anvil just a few years, and I'm delighted to talk to you the rest of this afternoon to talk about how we can make it even better moving into the future. Thank you everyone. So I think now we're going to shift into our deeper dives through our breakout sessions, but hopefully that gave you just a little bit of context. Valentina, can you take it over from here? Yes, yes, I'm taking it over. So yes, so we as mentioned earlier, we're going into the breakout rooms. You're going to be automatically reassigned to your own breakout rooms, either as a discussant or just because you chose to select that particular breakout room. So stay tuned and hopefully this is going to work as quickly and quickly. Okay, thanks. Stay on.