Disaster master

In case of emergency, Shawn Graff’s the go-to guy

By Nick Budnick

The Portland Tribune, May 2, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Earthquake, flood, terrorist attack: When the spit hits the fan, Portlanders will turn to Shawn Graff, a man with a buzz cut, square jaw and movie-star good looks who one month ago took over as the city’s new director of emergency management.

Despite being only six years out of college and just 33 years old, Portland’s newest bureau director is unusually qualified Ñ with the emphasis on unusual.

In the last six years, Graff (pronounced “Grahf”) has gone from being a firefighter rappelling off helicopters to battle wildfires to a U.S. Army intelligence officer in Iraq, then to Washington, D.C., where he tracked potential terrorist threats for the Department of Homeland Security. Then, improbably, he became a rookie cop in Salem Ñ before Mayor Tom Potter dangled an $84,000-a-year salary to lure him to the Rose City.

Not the average city bureaucrat, Graff doesn’t try to sound like one.

“I want the citizens to have the confidence that I’ve been in the trenches,” he says. “I have tasted the blood and pulled out the bodies (from wreckage).”

Gulp. Who is this guy, and what is he doing here?

Hurricane brings perspective

It’s been just eight months since Hurricane Katrina slammed into Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana Ñ killing more than 1,000 people, costing billions and filling our television screens with images of tragedy and suffering.

In Portland, local governments and relief agencies feverishly prepared for the expected arrival of 1,000 disaster victims; afterward, when it became official that the victims would not be coming, elected officials and state and local emergency managers held self-congratulatory news conferences, proclaiming themselves as ready as could be.

Subsequent media accounts, however, highlighted concerns by other emergency professionals and medical experts about how prepared the region and its residents really are.

The disasters most feared? One is a 9.0-level earthquake and tsunami waiting to happen in a fault off the coast of Oregon, potentially triggering other quake faults lurking beneath the silty shifting soil that underlies Portland’s downtown, taking out bridges, toppling buildings and disrupting water and sewer service. The other: an avian flu that kills half of its human victims, one that experts fear could evolve into a highly contagious worldwide pandemic.

With scenarios like these, it’s small wonder that local officials have sought to prepare for the worst. In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, Mayor Vera Katz set up the Portland Office of Emergency Management.

While she made earthquake-planning a priority, other emergency professionals had questions about the agency’s overall direction. Last June, not long after being elected, Potter removed POEM managers following a consultant’s report alleging “serious management deficiencies.”

Potter has since made disaster preparedness a priority, according to local emergency managers such as Washington County’s Scott Porter. Indeed, the importance of the job is one reason why it took so long to find a new, well-qualified director for POEM, says Potter’s public safety liaison, Maria Rubio.

“My job was to find a good candidate, and I think I found an excellent one,” she says of Graff. “The mayor is really counting on him for information and direction, and for him to take command and make Portland prepared.”

After philosophy, wartime

Graff grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, one of three boys, his mother a nurse, his father an auto mechanic. He is proud of how how far he’s come. “I didn’t have any political connections,” he says. “I worked to put myself where I am.”

He worked his way through high school and then college. By age 17 he’d joined the Army Reserve; he spent summers fighting wildfires for the federal government in national forests around the West and Alaska. He also entered the Reserve Officer Training Corps at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh campus, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 2000.

To complete his commitment to the U.S. Army, Graff was commissioned for a three-year stint as an intelligence officer. In March 2003 he was shipped to Iraq for a seven-month tour. There, Graff headed an 18-member “ground surveillance” platoon, doing reconnaissance and handling base security. He saw combat but won’t elaborate, saying, “I was an intelligence officer there, so sometimes it’s hard to give a lot of specifics.”

Graff’s unit, the 311th Military Intelligence Battalion of the 101st Airborne Division, has made headlines. Earlier this year, an ACLU Freedom of Information Act lawsuit obtained documents from the Pentagon, including one describing the findings of a military investigator who, in December 2003, reviewed conditions at a jail in Mosul that was staffed by the 311th.

“There is evidence that suggests the 311th (military intelligence) personnel and/or translators engaged in physical torture of the detainees,” a memo from the investigator said, according to an Associated Press story dated March 25.

Graff, however, says he was a reconnaissance officer who had nothing to do with interrogations or jails Ñ the closest he came to detainees were “some detained vehicles,” he says. His battalion was 750-people strong, composed of many different units with different functions.

Shortly before Graff’s Army tour ended, he was contacted by the Department of Homeland Security.

“Apparently I had applied for the job,” he says. “I didn’t really realize I had applied for the job.”

That’s when he headed for Washington, D.C., leaving the ongoing emergency of wartime behind Ñ to help the Department of Homeland Security plan for emergencies.

Move spurs the job search

There, Graff proved to be something of an emergency-preparedness prodigy.

According to his application packet, released under Oregon Public Records law, in about 18 months he jumped six ranks to become an assistant deputy director. He helped run the Homeland Security Operations Center, an agency that amassed intelligence from across the federal government to track potential terrorist threats, as well as the occasional natural disaster.

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