The 2014 National Hurricane Conference

The 2014 National Hurricane Conference is over and now I will have to wait until next year in Austin, TX to see all my mass care friends again. Actually, that's not true, since the Florida Governors Hurricane Conference is in 3 weeks and the National Mass Care Exercise is the week after that. April and May has abundant opportunities for the renewal of mass care friendships.

There was something missing from the 2014 NHC. As Gregg O'Ryon, Vice President for the American Red Cross, pointed out to me, the NHC wasn't helped by the movement of the GHC from Ft. Lauderdale to Orlando this year. The result was 2 hurricane conferences with 4 weeks of each other and both in hotels within spitting distance of each other on International Drive.

There was a drop in the number of Red Cross people at the NHC. The Florida Red Cross people will all be going to the GHC. There also seemed to be a shortage of Femites at the Conference (although Craig Fugate made it and gave a good speech). I could understand the shortage last year because of the sequester but we needed more FEMA mass care people at the conference. I think the reason for the continued absence of FEMA people is the lingering effects of last year's IRS Conference scandal. Getting approval to attend a conference if you're a federal employee is a giant pain in the you-know-what.

A big piece of what was missing at the NHC this year compared to the last 2 years was the absence of a hurricane impact the previous season. The 2012 NHC was filled with enthusiastic North-easterners detailing their newfound knowledge and wisdom gained from battling Tropical Storm Irene. At the 2013 NHC some of the same North-easterners returned, somewhat chastened and wiser, to recount their struggles with Hurricane Sandy (I refuse to call it a superstorm).

The big event last year was the floods in Colorado. We would have all benefited if we could have gotten some people from Colorado to talk about their sheltering issues and maybe some Red Cross people to give us a report on how their new Disaster Relief Operation structure worked out.

But we couldn't invite them because the disaster wasn't a hurricane. There's something wrong with this picture. We had Salvation Army people from Oklahoma at the NHC, and they haven't had any hurricanes there in a while, or maybe ever.

What we need at the NHC, or at least the mass care portion of the NHC, are training and workshops on the latest techniques and best practices in mass care, regardless of whether the techniques and best practices  were learned in a Rocky Mountain Flood or the National Mass Care Exercise.

I think the mass care community might be able to do something about that.

Day 2 of the National Hurricane Exercise

The highlight of the day was the presentations of Bill Read, Director of the National Hurricane Center, and Craig Fugate, the FEMA Administrator. They both emphasized the same point, that the devastating inland flooding that occurred in the Northeast as a result of Hurricane Irene was forecast well in advance.

Bill Read showed a 5 day inundation forecast map for Irene that was close to what actually occurred. He raised the question: why was the inland flooding a surprise to the public and some emergency managers? He offered the additional point that the areas that ultimately experienced record flooding (northern New Jersey, upstate New York, Vermont) had received considerable rainfall in the previous 10 days and the ground was saturated. Thus, it should have been no surprise that the large quantities of tropical moisture that Irene dumped on these areas created destructive flooding.

Craig Fugate pushed forward the suggestion that the lessons of Katrina may have led people to concentrate on the storm surge threat from Irene to the exclusion of the inland flooding threat. Bill Read raised the possibility that the media focus on the beach, with constant footage of meteorologists before a backdrop of a foaming ocean, may have contributed to the diminishment of the inland flooding threat.

Bill Read also asked: Did the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center do a poor job of communicating the threat? 

In an admirable piece of self-criticism, Bill showed a slide that highlighted how the NHC consistently overestimated the strength of Irene. He admitted that after much study there were unable to determine the source of their error. The barometric pressure of the storm is normally highly correlated with the intensity of the wind. In the case of Irene, this correlation did not hold.

Day 1 at the National Hurricane Conference

The first day of the National Hurricane Conference was a serious of vivid and engaging sessions on the response to Hurricane Irene from our friends in the Northeast. The New York City (NYC) Office of Emergency Management as well as representatives from the states of NJ, CT and NY filled us in as they related their challenges in sheltering and making evacuation decisions.

As I told one of them, "Welcome to our life here on the Gulf Coast."

In 2005, after witnessing the horrific images from Hurricane Katrina, the NYC OEM began doing the difficult but necessary planning required to evacuate and shelter the 8 million people in the metro area. Some of the key players in this effort, the Logistics Chief for NYC OEM, the Emergency Management Director for the NYC Department of Education, and a representative from Menlo Worldwide Logistics, spoke about their multi-year effort to develop a plan and the days that they had to execute it.

NYC has a series of shelter hubs throughout the city. They tried to make the hub locations as close to walking distance as possible. As the people arrive at the hubs, they are transported by city buses to the shelters. The supplies for all these shelters must be loaded from central warehouses and transported by truck through the city to the shelter locations.

The shelters are located in schools. The average age of the school buildings is 70 years, so many are missing conveniences such as elevators, loading docks or even front doors wide enough to admit palletized loads of freight. Visualize, if you will, hauling a truckload of bottled water, by hand, a case at a time, up several flights of stairs. Multiply that by the cots, food and other supplies necessary to stock each shelter and you get an idea of the effort required.

They talked about how their timelines to deploy these resources didn't exactly match with the Mayor's timeline for declaring a disaster. Thanks to their excellent planning, the resources were deployed to the right places at the correct times. What they hadn't planned for was picking all these supplies up again. Demobilizing the resources proved to be the more daunting task, but they worked thought it.

The discussions about the gut wrenching task of making the local evacuation decision were particularly interesting. They talked about evacuating all the hospitals and nursing homes in the designated zone. What really had an impact on everyone, the public and emergency managers alike, was when the announcements came that the subways, buses and trains were going to shut down as the storm approached. This was always in the plan, but no one could believe that it would actually happen.

I told them all that they did a great job, but they were lucky that the storm was essentially a very realistic, full-scale functional exercise. When the next time comes, and it will, they will be a lot better prepared.

Day 3 of the National Hurricane Conference

The National Hurricane Conference is more than training, general sessions and workshops. Emergency Management, like most other efforts of human endeavor, works more effectively if the actors are operating as a team and have established some level of personal relationship prior to the disaster. I have been to many hurricane conferences and the value of this particular conference is the opportunity to engage and establish relationships with emergency managers across the nation and the world.

The mass care community is a subset of the emergency management world and I spend most of my free time at the conference connecting and reconnecting with the members of this community. Most of the people in this mass care world are members of the American Red Cross and Mass Care Femites who are former members of the Red Cross. There is a smaller group from other nongovernmental mass care agencies like the Southern Baptist Convention and the Salvation Army. Finally, there are state and local employees who have mass care as a principal responsibility. There are very few of these, and frequently I am the only one.

During coffee breaks, sessions at the bar and over meals, there is a lively exchange of mass care developments and best practices. I hear lots of gossip from all the different agencies, frequently after being sworn to secrecy. Since I am utterly dependent on them all during a disaster, their secrets are safe with me. We talk about current, past and even future disasters, mostly while reading our Blackberries.

This morning I attended my breakthrough session, the one that makes the entire trip worthwhile. A woman from Louisiana talked about a program that was started there in 2006 as a result of hurricane Katrina. The program identifies and trains volunteers who will provide Personal Assistance Services to individuals with functional needs in general population shelters. These services are for people who need assistance with tasks associated with daily living. Finding out about this program has literally saved me months of work. I was wondering how we were going to create such a program in Florida, and here was the lady with the road map.

Back at the National Hurricane Conference

Last year the National Hurricane Conference was in Austin, Texas. I think. I have been to so many it's hard to remember. The most memorable Conference (in retrospect) was in New Orleans in April, 2005. That was the last time that I saw the Big Easy before it was destroyed by Hurrcane Katrina five months later. Fortunately for me, the Conference this year returns once again to Orlando.

I spent the first day listening to presentations organized by New York City Officringse of Emergency Management and the New, New Jersey and Connecitcut Regional Catastrophic Planning Project. FEMA has been spending $35 million a year the last four years to support ten of these catastrophic planning inititives across the country. From 2007 to 2009 I worked on the Florida Catastrophic Planning project, which developed a plan to respond to a Category 5 hurricane striking south Florida. The detailed consequences document for this storm was almost 100 pages and made for grim reading.

As the representatives from New York City made clear, and I agree, the big advantage of these planning intitiatives is that it brings representatives from local, state and federal jurisdictions together in order to solve very tough problems. And New York City would face a very tough problem if it were struck by a Category 3 hurricane, as happened in 1938, when a lot fewer people lived there.