What I learned from TS Debby

My friend Chuck Hagan, Logistics Chief for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, says that if you can still count the number of disasters you've worked, then you haven't been in the business that long. With the aid of the National Hurricane Center website, I figured out that Tropical Storm Debby was the 34th storm that I have worked. Of those 34 storms, 19 were Tropical Storms and 15 were hurricanes. I guess that means that 17 years in the disaster business isn't that long.

I learn something from every disaster and I learned a lot from Debby. What is disturbing to me is that I keep relearning the same lessons. You can't say that it's "just" a tropical storm or "just" a category 1 hurricane. This is where my experience screws me up, where I remember all those tropical storms and category 1 hurricanes that unrolled uneventfully while I sat bored in the state EOC. Every storm is unique. Every disaster is different in some important way.

Every storm is unique. Every disaster is different. We should put those phrases on a poster and post them in every EOC.

Let's go back to fundamental meteorology (I completed 2 1/2 days of meteorology classes at the Governor's Hurricane Conference in May. I guess I didn't listen well).  Tropical cyclones generate four principal threats: surge, wind, tornadoes and flooding. The Saffir-Simpson Category of a storm categorizes the hazard from only one of the threats: wind. For each storm we also need to analyze the potential for damage from surge, tornadoes and flooding.

This was the rainfall forecast we received in the State EOC from the State Meteorologist on Monday afternoon, June 25th: "Locally heavy rainfall of potentially up to 6-12 inches over North Florida, 4-8 inches in Central Florida, and 3-5 inches across South Florida through the next few days will lead to flooding of some areas. Isolated storm total amounts may reach up to 25 inches in North Florida."

This was two sentences in a very complete and detailed report (Note: I am not blaming the meteorologist). The main focus, as with all tropical systems, was on the track and the potential for surge. I wasn't the only one focusing on the wrong thing. Later in the week, during a county conference call with the National Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service Offices, I heard a County Emergency Manager ask where the eye of the storm would impact the coast. The NHC forecaster correctly noted that the threat from Debby was not from the eye but from the intense rain bands many miles from the center of the storm.

The key phrase of the week, of the entire storm was: " Isolated storm total amounts may reach up to 25 inches in North Florida." Somehow, I don't remember that phrase. 25 inches of rain anywhere is going to cause problems. I started to get a clue Monday night while watching the Weather Channel, when the on-air meteorologist started talking about the "unbelievable" amounts of rain that was falling in "isolated" areas of North Florida.


Suwannee County, at the intersection of I-75 and I-10, with a County seat in Live Oak, was one of those isolated areas receiving an unbelievable amount of water. At 6 A.M. on June 26 Suwannee County, which had partially activated at 3 A.M., delivered a two sentence situation report to the State EOC: "Suwannee County is evacuating many many houses within the County as well as City of Live Oak, US Hwy 90 and Pine is waist deep... We are contacting local air boat owners and school bus persons to assist with evacuations."


That got my attention. I looked up US Hwy 90 and Pine St on the map and realized that it was in the center of the city.


Does any of this sound familiar? How about Irene, you people in the Northeast? While the World focused on the eye of Irene heading for the coast of New Jersey and downtown NYC, the enormous rain bands in advance of the storm began to drop a record breaking amount of rain on the inland states from Pennsylvania to Vermont. A NOAA forecaster at this year's National Hurricane Conference pointed out that that the ensuing rainfall amounts were accurately forecast 5 days in advance, when Irene was sitting on the Bahamas. The forecast also noted that these same areas of the mid-Atlantic and New England had already received considerable rainfall.


Yet, later in the Conference, a Vermont emergency manager described his surprise when an idyllic stream rose in fury at Irene's assault and inundated his County EOC. I shook my head at him at the time. Now I'm shaking my head at myself.

Every storm is unique. Every disaster is different.

The Mother of All State Mass Care Exercises

Last December we invited a bunch of mass care people around the country to come to our Florida State Hurricane exercise in May and play in our mass care sandbox. In April, when we realized that most of them were going to show up, we scrambled to accommodate them. I didn't want to turn anyone away.

Ultimately, 64 people participated in the mass care portion of the State's Hurricane Gispert exercise. Over 50 of the participants came from out of state (some from as far away as California and Arizona). These 64 people came from 26 federal state, voluntary agency, private sector and academic organizations. The scenario was for a major hurricane to strike the Tampa Bay Region. If this was a real event, we would need about that many people from all those organizations to coordinate the mass care response to the high standard that the Governor and the public expect. In all the hurricanes and disasters we had done, both real and practice, we had never practiced a mass care response that large - which was why we did it.

Needless to say, some things went well and some things didn't. We all learned a lot. It's hard to bring together 50 people, no matter how good they are or how much they know, who have never worked together before, and put them in a organization and a system that is untried and untested, and not expect problems. I had spent several years thinking and talking to people about how we would organize something this big and I thought that I had a good plan. My plan lasted about 2 hours into the exercise.

Despite the problems we encountered the exercise was a tremendous success.  We got the job done, even if it was ugly. Come to think of it, that's a good summary for a lot of disasters many of us have worked. The After Action Report is now available online: Florida Hurricane Exercise 2012, Mass Care After Action Report. I recommend it to you.

We also developed and tested a document to assist states in acquiring mass care resources from the federal government. The document was posted online today and is called Acquisition and Employment of Federal Mass Care Resources: A Guidance Document. I recommend this document to you also.

2 Days of Tropical Meteorology at the GHC12

Tropical Meteorology

The able and competent forecasters at the National Hurricane Center are proud of their accomplishments but humbled and honest about their failures. While their record on predicting the track of the storm has shown slow but steady improvement the last decade their skill in predicting the intensity of the storm over the same period has been abysmal.

The science and forecasting tools (satellites, planes, dropsondes, computer models) have improved dramatically, just not in the area of intensity forcasts. The average forcast error at 24 hous before impact remains at 10 knots. The rule of thumb I learned 15 years ago, plan for an impact one category higher than forecast, still applies. The NHC documented that they are wrong by 2 categories 5-10% of the time.

Here are some notable comments that I wrote down over the last two days of listening to NHC and National Weather Service forecasters here the the Governor's Hurricane Conference in Ft. Lauderdale:

• The Saffir Simpson Scale (SSS) is now used only to categorize wind speed. A cyclone has other impacts, inland flooding, surge or tornadoes, that must be considered separately.
• Freshwater flooding from rainfall is the biggest killer in cyclones.
• Cyclone induced tornadoes most often come in an extended rain ban in the right front quadrant of the storm. 
• The size and strength of a hurricane not a reliable indicator on inland flooding. Get the six hour flash flood guidance values from your river forecast center.
• The Tropical Storm Surge Probabilities Product (created in 2008) is produced only when there is an active storm threatening land. This looked like a good product to evaluate the dangers of surge during an event, but I wasn't very familiar with it. That could be because Florida hasn't been hit by a storm since 2005.
• The SSS for each storm is derived from the highest measured estimate of one minute intensity wind speed. This intense wind speed is normally only in a very small part of the right front quadrant of the storm. Thus, category 4 intensity winds, for example, may only make up 5% of the total hurricane force winds generated  by the storm. 

A National Mass Care Exercise - Hurricane Gispert

The draft of the new "National Mass Care Strategy" recommends that the nation conduct "an annual national Mass Care System exercise that focuses on state-to-federal coordination systems and integrating staff from key federal, NGO, faith based organizations and the private sector into an effective Mass Care Multi-Agency coordination system." The state of Florida  will conduct just such an exercise in conjunction with the annual State Hurricane Exercise in Tallahassee May 21-24, 2012.

Over 70 persons (50 of which are traveling to the site from out-of-town) from 29 different federal, state, NGO and private sector organizations representing the nation's Whole of Community will participate in the exercise as player, evaluator or controller. The focus of the exercise will be on building the state and the nation's capability to deliver Mass Care Services in furtherance of the National Preparedness Goal.

The scenario for the exercise involves the landfall of Hurricane Gispert in the Tampa Bay area as a major storm. Such an impact on a large, urban, coastal community would require a coordinated, national mass care response. The purpose of the exercise is to test the systems, processes and procedures necessary to coordinate a mass care event of this magnitude.

Many of these procedural documents are new, still in draft form, and have never been tested before. They include:
1) "The Acquisition and Employment of Federal Mass Care Resources, A State Template,"
2) "The State of Florida Multi-Agency Feeding Task Force Standard Operating Guide,"
3) "Draft Multi-Agency Sheltering Task Force Guidance Document,"
4) "Household Disaster Feeding Guidance Document."

Three of these documents are draft national templates that will be refined based on participant feedback during and after the exercise. Once refined, the documents will be made available on the National Mass Care Strategy website for use by the national mass care community.

The exercise will have 3 evaluators to ensure that the lessons learned are captured. There will be a daily and a final "hot wash" to ensure that this critical information is captured while still fresh on the participants minds. The results of these efforts will be incorporated into the After Action Report. This document will also be made available to the nation via the Web.

The ambitious nature of this exercise, both in the number of participants and the complexity of the tasks to be performed, guarantees that this endeavor will be challenging for all participants. This is the best way for us to prepare.

Home cooking in Sokone, Senegal

Observing the  daily, laborious, backbreaking job of preparing lunch and then dinner for 25 people at Jamie's home in Senegal was one of the most interesting parts of my visit. The cooks were a crew of young women, supervised by Jamie's host sister Sophia, the eldest sibling in the family and the one who ran the household on behalf of her mother.

The women at work cooking another meal.

The count for each meal was about 25 and could vary from that number by five either way. The patriarch and matriarch of the family ruled over a household compound filled with children, grandchildren, students from the country living as boarders and one Peace Corps Volunteer. Almost all of the household were women and children: the men worked in other towns and only came to visit.

The menu was some unvarying combination of rice, fish or chicken, onion and some other vegetable. On rare occasions (like our visit) they prepared noodles.  The family was Muslim so pork wasn't served, even though pigs were raised and no doubt eaten by members of the country's minority Christian population. The rice came from Thailand in 100 pound bags, examples of which I observed in abundance on trucks and donkey carts throughout the country.

Jamie's host sister Sophia

Sophia starts off each day with a bean sandwich from her mother's stand at the front of the house before heading to the market to buy the vegetables and chicken or fish for the day's meals. The family has no freezer or refrigerator so items other than staples like rice must be purchased daily. The morning we accompanied Sophia to the market was a Wednesday, the big market day of the week, so Sophia dressed for the varied social aspects of the visit.

 The day was already warm as Jamie, Gale, Sophia and I left the bean sandwich stand for the 20 minute walk to the market. On the main street we joined a stream of empty handed pedestrians moving to the market to make a purchase and a series of heavily laden carts drawn by donkeys, horses or oxen with products destined for sale. The market itself was a riot of color and activity.

Scene at the market in Sokone. The colorful clothing is made with the famous

Senegal “waxed” fabric.

Buying food at the market in Sokone on market day. Note the dried fish and the

scales in front of the seated woman with the blue turban.

The kitchen in the compound of my son Jamie’s host family in Sokone.

Cutting up the vegetables for the meal. 

Dividing the food in the communal bowls.

There was no running water in the household. All water was brought in buckets from a public spigot on the street. Goats, chickens and ducks shared the interior compound with the family. There was no chopping of vegetables on a cutting board. The vegetables were cut by  hand over a bowl with a small knife. I asked a young woman in my broken French, as she was busily engaged in this task, if this didn't result in cuts on her hands. She nodded and showed me a example.

Cooking the food was a laborious, time consuming task, with the women spending too much time (in my view) either squatting by or bent over a pot of bubbling liquid. Once the food is cooked the rice  is put into the communal bowls from which it is eaten by the family. Pieces of chicken are apportioned to each bowl. Almost everyone eats from the bowl with their right hand. The family divides by age and sex to their assigned bowl. 

As guests, we were given spoons to eat with. Jamie, Gale and I ate from a bowl with the mother and father of the family, a duck darting between my feet to catch any stray grains of rice that missed the passage from bowl to mouth. The mother tore off bits of chicken with her right hand and laid the pieces before us to eat. She squeezed the rice into a ball with her hand and then ate by passing the ball with a vertical motion in front of her mouth, almost as if she was licking her hand. Except her hand never touched her mouth, because she was using the same hand to divide the food in the communal bowl. She ate sparingly until she saw that we had our fill. 

The food was delicious.

One of the meals that we shared with Jamie's family.

Ecotouriism and the bats in the beobab tree

At the end of our arduous first day of travel in Senegal we arrived at an island outside the town of Toubacouba on the southwestern coast. The Saloume River created a mangrove tree covered delta that came under the ecological protection of the government in 2003.

We stayed in a thatched hut on beds with mattresses and mosquito nets. We had started our malaria medicine 48 hours prior to our departure but we still needed to avoid the mosquitoes. The electricity came from solar panels and the water from overhead tanks. The bathroom, such as it was, had no roof.

We slept the sleep of the exhausted and awoke to a clear, cool, fresh morning and a beautiful view of the salt water and mangrove trees of the delta. Except for the occasional splashes of fish feeding in the water below our world was silent.

Unsure of when lunch was to start, we arrived an hour and a half early. While waiting, Jamie and I cleaned out the island's supply of Flag brand beer and started on the Gazelle. For lunch we had a traditional Senegalese lunch of rice and fish called ceebu jen. During the heat of the day we slept and swam and returned the to the dining room for a late (for me) supper.

When darkness fell we armed ourselves with mosquito repellant and sat in wooden chairs by our hut, gazing at the night sky. Gale wanted to see a shooting star. That's when the bats showed up.

"They live in a beobab tree over there," Jamie said, pointing to his right.

I briefly thought about rising from my wooden chair to investigate. Sanity and lethargy prevailed. My weekly quota of adventures had been exhausted the previous day.

The bats were dark shadows that flickered above or even between us as a few flew under the roof. That was the closest that I had ever been to a bat in my life. Gale quoted her kindergarten statistic on how many mosquitoes a bat consumed in an evening. 

A shooting star fell. We went to bed.