National park's prized safety system fails during coronavirus pandemic
The coronavirus exploits groups of people. Humans give the dogged parasite legs to spread everywhere, by jumping from person, to person, to person.
And in the U.S., we've given the virus everything it could have ever dreamed of during a pandemic: crowds in bars, crowds gazing at cherry blossoms, crowds on beaches, crowds awaiting takeout Italian dinners — and crowds in national parks.
After a sluggish, if not woefully irresponsible, response to start closing crowded national park visitor centers and heavily-trafficked areas, the Department of the Interior finally relented on March 17 and "empowered" parks to shut down busy places where the coronavirus can thrive. But the struggle to close parks that invite crowds (and infected people) continued. In a March 25 internal Park Service memo reviewed by Mashable, Grand Canyon National Park's COVID-19 response team informed all employees that the park had submitted a request to the Department of Interior to close the park to visitors. Only on April 1, a full week later, did the Interior Department and Park Service close Grand Canyon — three days after a resident in park housing tested positive for coronavirus.
The National Park Service never needed to become mired in this weeks-long, belabored controversy over how and when to close parks. And, critically, the vaunted agency didn't have to become a contributor to a historic, horrifying pandemic (at least seven Park Service employees have now tested positive while rangers continually express fear, anxiety, and frustration in a private online forum). That's because the Park Service has a system — in which employees receive formal training — that grants any worker, however far down in the ranger hierarchy, the ability to raise the danger flag and halt risky situations.
It could be during a routine construction project, or a rescue mission, or a pandemic. It's a program called "Operational Leadership." It was implemented by the agency in 2010 and touted by the former director of the National Park Service, Jon Jarvis, who retired from his post in 2017.
"The Park Service was a high-risk endeavor," said Jarvis, who noted the agency at the time had more deaths than any other agency in the entire Department of Interior.
Operational Leadership is a program that hammers home the idea that if a situation is too risky, any employee can slam on the brakes and ask for the risks to be mitigated, avoided, or stopped entirely.
"It’s an empowerment program," Jarvis emphasized in a call. "Anyone on the team can stick up their hand."
After Jarvis took the reins of the agency in 2009, he wrote: "This is not a top-down policy, but a bottom-up movement, driven by early adopters and advocates who see the way to change the NPS into a safety culture organization."
The "bottom-up" movement has collapsed under the Trump administration. As Mashable reported in March, many park superintendents (the usually powerful leaders of each park site) were eager to close down problematic parts of parks where social distancing isn't possible, like Liberty Island and congested trails at Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But the Department of Interior, which oversees the Park Service and whose acting secretary reports directly to President Donald Trump, had been unwilling to approve these closures.
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This "top-down," out-of-touch, slow, bureaucratic system is the polar opposite of the Operational Leadership strategy.
"The whole point of Operational Leadership is you’re putting decision-making at the local level," said Jarvis. "But this administration is totally into the chain of command, and it comes from the tippy-top."
Jarvis, who was privy to a recent Operational Leadership analysis for parks to assess their coronavirus risk, explained that parks can certainly still weigh their exposure and risk using the safety strategy. But these risk assessments are ultimately futile: Parks were powerless, for weeks, to close visitor centers on their own. Now, they're powerless to close parks on their own — if they deem it necessary during a crisis. Grand Canyon is a case in point.
"They requested closure," said Kristen Brengel, the senior vice president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, an organization that supports the national parks. "And they were not allowed to close."
"It's a shame," added Brengel, who spoke to Mashable the day before the Grand Canyon closed. "At the end of the day, it's Park Service staff and people visiting who are being put at risk. Park superintendents have the best interests of staff and visitors in mind. They should be making quick decisions to make the public safe, and that is just not happening."
"It's a shame."
During a pandemic, it's all the more critical that weighty decisions are made promptly in parks — not potentially thousands of miles away in Washington, D.C. offices. "When you're faced with a crisis, you need to push operational decisions down to the local level where the problems occur," Susan Schurman, a distinguished professor in the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, told Mashable when parks were struggling to close visitor centers.
The internal Grand Canyon memo reviewed by Mashable specifies that the park's superintendent, the park's regional director, and the Park Service's acting superintendent all supported closing Grand Canyon National Park amid the coronavirus pandemic — which will kill at minimum 100,000 Americans under the bestscenario.
The Department of Interior did not directly reply to a request for comment about why Grand Canyon had not been allowed to close and why park superintendents cannot make on-the-ground closure decisions. Contacted separately, the Park Service did not respond to questions about Operational Leadership's role and effectiveness during the pandemic. It did send Mashable a news release Wednesday evening announcing Grand Canyon's closure after it received a letter from the chief health officer of Coconino County (where the park is located), who requested closing the park.
"The health and safety of park visitors, employees, residents, volunteers, and partners at Grand Canyon National Park is the Service's number one priority," the Park Service said in the Wednesday statement.
Also, the Park Service's Operational Leadership website is currently down. (Clicking "View the NPS Operational Leadership leads to a "Page not found" error).
Already, infectious disease experts expect infections to continue rising in the U.S. through much of April, if not longer.
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To make Operational Leadership useful in the real world, the Park Service trains its employees in the "GAR" model, which is short for Green, Amber, and Red. Employees can calculate how risky a situation is, with green being "low risk" and red being "high risk." (This is done by multiplying scores for three factors: how severe an event might be; how much exposure to the event might occur; and the probability of an event happening). "[Operational Leadership] had a significant impact in the reduction of employees being injured on the job," said Jarvis.
You can imagine that crowded trails — like those recently identified by Zion National Park before it closed popular hikes — would score as a high risk to visitors and employees alike. The CDC recommends keeping at least six feet away from others. That's just not possible on many bustling trails or other crowded areas.
"I am urgently calling on @SecBernhardt to close @GrandCanyonNPS in #AZ01," tweeted Congressman Tom O'Halleran of Arizona, after the first Grand Canyon employee tested positive. "We must act now to save lives."
SEE ALSO:Coronavirus won’t make a dent in the climate problemA week after requesting to close, and three weeks following the World Health Organization's declaration of a pandemic, Grand Canyon National Park was finally able to shut down. But its frontline staff and superintendent never could quickly react to present conditions — including a confirmed infection in the park.
With a contagious microbe like this coronavirus, infection may have already spread around the area — especially in busy, crowded places where park employees and the public can't responsibly social distance.
Instead of closing parks to curb the disease, "then the parks become a contributor to the spread of the coronavirus," said Jarvis.