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MISSOURI DIVISION |
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PROCEEDINGS OF THE SEPTEMBER 2000 POST EARTHQUAKE HIGHWAY RESPONSE AND RECOVERY SEMINAR HELD IN ST. LOUIS MISSOURI
COMMAND CENTER BY STEVEN MONDUL
MR. WILKERSON: Our next speaker, final speaker will be Steven Mondul. He is with the Virginia Department of Transportation. And he's the Director of Emergency Operations for the state DOT there. In his capacity he coordinates the state Department of Transportation emergency operations and planning and serves as the state transportation emergency support function. He's point of contact for other state and federal agencies. Prior to the Virginia Department of Emergency Services, he had some background in emergency management. He has quite an extensive career in the military. He retired as a captain in the navy.
MR. MONDUL: Thank you. I would like to talk to you about transportation emergency management in Virginia. First of all, we have a multi-tiered emergency management system. The president is on top. He's the director of emergency service for the whole country. Then there's his coordinator who is James Lee Witt from the great state of Arkansas. In Virginia our governor is our director. Then we have a state coordinator, Michael Kline. Then we have state agencies. That's where the Department of Transportation comes in.
We have augmentation capabilities. So from our normal two-watch officers, we have gone up to something like sixty or so people in there including members from the Coast Guard and perhaps in the future, Virginia defense force and other agencies that help us do our job.
By decree of the Secretary of Transportation of Virginia, we're responsible for all modes of transportation emergencies. In the event of an emergency, we also coordinate with our Department of Rail and Public Transportation, Department of Aviation, and the Virginia port authority.
We're organized. TEOC is the Transportation Emergency Operations Center. We have nine districts statewide, 49 residencies that are within the districts and about 200 area headquarters.
VOIS is the Virginia Operational Information System. We're connected around the Commonwealth: the TEOC, TEOC districts and residencies, and traffic control centers. They're not all smart traffic centers. There's one in Cape Verdes area and one in northern Virginia. We're about to open another one out on I-81 in the western part of the state. We're also connected to all of our rest areas, weigh stations and special facilities for things like bridge tunnels. We have tunnels through the mountains in the west going to West Virginia so we can communicate with our cousins out there. We have bridge tunnels in the Hampton Roads area crossing the James River.
The state department of emergency services is on the net. Virginia State Police and their divisions are on the net. Federal agencies are also on the net: FHWA Virginia Division Office is on the net. Right now the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, namely the weather service is on that network. The network also includes automatically the VDOT home page in the worldwide web, and that gives us a way to talk to the public and give them information.
We have a very generic disaster management plan. In the EOC there are two big signs. The first sign says, "The function of headquarters is to support field operations." That's a big red sign and nobody who works in there is allowed to forget that. The second sign says, "RTFI" which means read the fine instructions. We have a very comprehensive emergency operation plan and we like to have it followed.
Our job is to make sure that folks can drive on the roads, ride the railroad or fly their airplanes. When we're clearing roads, we do it in the order of interstates first, primary routes second. The Commonwealth of Virginia state routes numbered under 599 are primary routes and then secondary routes are numbered over 600.
Virginia has over 57,000 miles of state maintained roads. We maintain all the roads in Virginia that are not inside the city. Years ago, there were two counties that elected to take money up front and maintain their own roads. They regret it every winter.
For the primary routes and the interstates, we have a "bare" pavement policy which means we are committed to getting those routes down to bare pavement within 24 hours after a snowfall. There are some exceptions. We have some four-digit, state roads, for example, the Fairfax County Freeway, which is eight lanes. Needless to say we treat that like it was an interstate.
We also have arrangements with emergency facilities. We give priority to hospitals, police stations, fire stations, power, and power grid control stations. Anything that public safety requires, we get access to. We will clear those roads free of snow first. We do special clearances on request. Occasionally during a blizzard, we get a call in the EOC saying, "I have a medical emergency, you have to get to my house." Requests like this need to be passed to the Norfolk public safety people who then call us and tell us that we need to get to the house. When that happens, it becomes a priority.
How does this work? We got a good chance to try out what we prepared ourselves for in Hurricane Floyd. Floyd made its way up the coast. It came in North Carolina and hit them a pretty good. Then it came through Virginia, exited out over Maine, and scattered lots of things along its path. It spread mostly heavy rains over Virginia. Less than a week before, Hurricane Dennis delivered a lot of rain so our ground was pretty saturated. Both storms resulted in severe flooding. The hurricane force winds were just barely hurricane force. The very tip of Hampton Roads and the beach area got some strong winds. We got a lot of rain all over.
Maximum winds experienced were 75 miles an hour. We got 18 inches of rain on top of super saturated ground. It fell in a matter of about eight hours. Floyd did us the favor of closing 260 secondary roads, 30 primaries, and two interstates. We had never lost an interstate during a snow day but we lost two interstates due to flooding.
Hurricanes are easier than earthquakes in the sense that we know they're coming. We have established readiness positions. We start with a readiness position of five that starts on the 31st of May and goes through November. As we see hurricanes coming towards us, the position could step up depending on how far away the hurricane is. Condition of one means we expect damaging winds and the hurricane is expected to arrive within 24 hours.
One time we were at hurricane condition one. That means we were already mobilized. The entire state was mobilized. The people who were in the path of the hurricane were getting ready. Our tiger teams were ready. We call them Tiger Teams because we expect them to go about their work like tigers. Each of our districts has several tiger teams that are pre-identified with their equipment staffed up and ready to go. We have debris clearance teams, road building teams, bridge repair teams, sometimes bridge building teams, sign and signal teams and last but not least, our management teams.
So each of our nine districts throughout the state has sets of people dedicated to those teams. A person may only be on one team. We don't have one person trying to be on two teams. They have their equipment set aside ready to go. Under condition two for a hurricane, they load it onto the trucks and fuel up. Their equipment includes a fuel truck and water and those things they need to be self sufficient for 24 to 48 hours.
These are our EMAC teams. If they are called up for out of state duty, we insure the logistics first and arrangement for rented motor homes for our people to live in if the disaster is like a Hurricane Andrew type situation. We assure they're taken care of.
In any major event, we assume the VDOT people and their families in the area are victims. They need to take care of their families and their homes. So we staff and bring in the tiger teams from other parts of the Commonwealth to fill the void.
In the case of Hurricane Floyd, we had the tiger teams on the road before the hurricane ever hit and they were pulling in as the winds got down to a safe level. We positioned them just outside the hurricane area. As the hurricane moved away, they moved right in behind it. So we had roads full of orange trucks as soon as the winds diminished and the rains let up. Those people got all the roads back very quickly which enabled us to respond and recover quickly. It cost us about $40 million. We expect to get about $30 million from the federal government. Our federal partners were very cooperative and very good. We worked very closely with the Federal Highway people. They are in our EOC during any kind of event. Their Richmond office is right there next to us. We work hand in hand with them.
In summary, I would point out Hurricane Floyd was the first real hurricane to hit Virginia since Camille which was back in the early 1960s. All of our preparations really paid off. We learned a lot of lessons from Florida, South Carolina, and Mississippi. These are the places we always send people. After any event in another state, we sit down with them and go over what went well and what didn't go so well. We made sure we learned form our experiences in other states and that our emergency response plans were revised. It really paid off for us when we needed to respond to a disaster with Virginia. No disaster is a good thing but the transportation response to this one went by the book. Normally no plan survives intact and we made some were adjustments. Things pretty much went the way we expected them to go.
Utility companies are our major partners. We now have combined response teams. When we go out for an ice storm, a blizzard, a hurricane, or a flood, we go out as a convoy of VDOT orange trucks, electric people with their gray trucks, cable people and phone people. It is much more efficient for all of us to work together. That has paid off big time in getting people back up with all the amenities of life.
What kind of issues did we have? We always have communications issues. We the VOIS net that is an on line network. We found out not everybody in the field did what they were told. Some didn't have back up power supplies for their computers and had to wait for the generators. They learned that lesson.
We're now in the wonderful world of reverse lane Interstates. We have a plan which if the Governor decides to implement, we can in fact reverse lanes on I-64 which comes up from Hampton Roads.
Despite our best efforts, we found that we had in fact left some of our people in a position where we did not want them to be and that is without help from their Department of Transportation. We feel like our department is a family. We need to help our own people as well as restore transportation. We have a much better out reach and care program for our own folks and their families. And the bottom line is, of course, work continues as it always does. Thank you very much.
MR. WILKERSON: Sounds like VDOT has done their homework and it's paying off and there are some benefits to be seen there. Obviously, in the New Madrid area we don't have the luxury of having pre-warning for an earthquake, but that doesn't mean we can't be out there getting better prepared for the event.
I heard earlier about the Indiana Department of Transportation and the efforts that they have undertaken. They have established an internal preparedness team that has been working very hard to get them at the level to be very close to what Virginia has done. I suspect we'll see similar activities in other states to follow that.
Steve touched on the issue that they work very hard to quickly get the roads open and the power back up for the communities. I can tell you firsthand, having worked in an ice storm in Mississippi that the patience of the communities get very thin as the weeks wear on and their frustrations grow. For an earthquake, we're looking at repairs that are going to be months and maybe years in the recovery process. The ice storm we had, we started getting in the third and fourth week, people weren't getting their power on, we saw a few take guns in hand and hold power officials up on poles thinking that was going to get their power on. That's the kind of thing we start having to factor in. If you are going to be out there, if you're one of the inspectors looking at bridges on the front lines, you're going to have to deal with that...with the stress we talked about earlier in the first panel session. There are going to be a lot of issues that aren't factored into the planning process that I think we need to be looking at covering as much as possible before a major earthquake happens. So I would like to open up for questions.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: This is for Steve. Taking care of your own. Do you find obstacles such as state rules and regs?
MR. MONDUL: Absolutely.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: Can you devise any plans you can share with people how you can overcome that?
MR. MONDUL: I will say that after what was described to me as a very spirited presentation on my part to the commissioner, we went to the governor with the problem that the Department of Transportation is really the first line of defense for most of us. We're always out there and we need to be there and we got some regulations eased so that we could in fact let people off without charging them leave; we could give them cash money in advance instead of treating them like potential crooks. A few other really onerous things had to be done and the governor bought off on. Once an emergency gets declared, we get management right on down through the ranks to understand different policies and procedures apply.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: I want to follow up with Steve. After Hurricane Andrew, we had a lot of problems with our own employees that were victims and there were huge obstacles with limiting support to your own. We ignored that and did it anyway. Do you have in your plan a way to deal with your employees as victims at the DOT?
MR. MONDUL: Yes, sir, we have in our plan a way of helping our own people who are victims. We have not had masses of our people with big problems. We were informed by the Andrew experience in Florida. We have a plan which has ways to lend people money, provide temporary housing, feed them, take care of their kids, all of the things you need to be able to do for those of your folks who are victims. If we take care of our own folks, it's that many fewer people that need to be taken care of by others and we can get our employees back working on our highways much sooner. The DOT is the biggest state organization. We have over 10,000 people and we will take care of them ourselves.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: It also allows to remove the stress, allows them to come back to work.
MR. MONDUL: Exactly. The folks who are in the disaster area, who work there, know that area best. We need their knowledge and we need their connections. If we can assure them their family and their property are being taken care of that let's them come back to work sooner to help the rest of us.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: How have you found the best way to set up a command center? When you set up a command center, how is the command center stocked as far as supplies? Where do you lodge people? Do you keep military cots or do you book motels in the area? Do you stockpile enough food to feed them or if you don't do that how do you set it up with a grocery store or restaurant to supply them food? That's what I've been charged to do and I don't know how to do it.
MR. MONDUL: I can speak from the perspective of the state transportation emergency operation center that is in Richmond. If you recall, I said we had different readiness levels where various folks did various things at various readiness levels. DOT is no exception to that. In fact, in readiness condition three, we move in, we make sure that we still have bottled water and emergency rations which are basically MREs, or a commercial version of MREs. We do have cots, but we normally have a standing arrangement with one of the local Richmond hotels that will put our people up at the government rate in case of emergency. We also have the mobile command center that is a Suburban that we stock up at the same time. We make sure our generator is fueled up and tested. All the sensible things that you can think of are covered.
The important thing to me is that we practice. We have at least two exercises a year. We have one in the spring that's a pre-hurricane event exercise that helps us work out any problems especially command control. We have one in the fall, which is a pre-winter storm event where we concentrate on the things we need to do for a winter storm. The exercises serve us well. People have a rule. They take it seriously and it has worked. The answer is organization. Fortunately, we have gotten a lot of cooperation from our senior decision makers. The commissioner and governor have been very, very good in letting us do what we need to do, sometimes changing or bending the rules a little so we can do it.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: You said you tried to get the Feds involved in your EOC, what are the issues there, just trying to get full-time manning or just internal National Guard issues, what is that?
MR. MONDUL: Normally we have the addition of a couple. The Federal Highway Administration does come to our EOC and they have their desk. Normally FEMA will be at the state emergency operation center that is across town underground. We do have a fiber link to there and we have virtual relocation for transportation. The Virginia defense force, which is not National Guard, but an authorized state militia comes but there are some funding and procedural issues that we have to work out. Once we can do that, it will be a great help to us. They're all trained, disciplined people and we can always use that in going about our jobs.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: I have a question for Dianne. When you go in and do your contracting for logistical support, have you ever considered something like what the military does with Log Cap, Brown and Root, who has permission to support the troops in Bosnia and Dyne Corps who has taken the Log Cap contract. Have you ever considered something like that?
MS. WILSON: We set up territory logistics centers across the United States. FEMA practices the instant command center and we've learned a lot from the Forest Service on regional management teams. So our logistics capabilities are not only FEMA staffed but U.S. Forest Service and Corps of Engineers and sometimes we use defense logistics agencies. There are multi-agency teams at these logistics centers. But as far as the actual contracting, they are standing contracts similar to what the Corps of Engineers has for their prime contractors that they use for part of their response teams for hurricanes.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: Do you have separate contracts for messing, for billeting, and stuff like that?
MS. WILSON: Not so much for billeting. Our emphasis is pre-establishment of mobilization centers. Part of the blueprint for mobilization centers includes billeting. When it comes to working with the Department of Defense to identify these facilities, we don't really have that many active bases, but their mission is probably a little more important than establishing a FEMA mobilization center. I'm talking about places like Whiteman Air Force base. But we can work with National Guard facilities and looking at their armories and the things they have. The Department of Defense really wants us to work through DOMs. You can establish some early coordination but they would like to see one standing agreement from their DOMs level down to these installations. For mobilization centers we know the square footage in a warehouse and how many staff we might have to house there. We also cover the care and feeding of our responders. Does that answer your question?
FROM THE AUDIENCE: Kind of sort of, but with Log Cap it's --
MS. WILSON: I'm not familiar with that term.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: It's something you guys might want to check into from all the emergency people, especially from the FEMA standpoint. It's in an enabler to relieve some of the logistical support. If you call to DOMs and DOMs sends troops to assist with actual recovery, the sustainment of those troops is necessary. So you need almost double to sustain those troops. But if you bring in Log Cap they're a contractor that's a blanket sustainment package and they contract everything and pull from all over the country and have all kinds of people to do the job.
MS. WILSON: If you're looking at major contracting capabilities, the General Services Administration, the GSA, has responsibilities under the Federal Response Plan. We would go to GSA. But when we have large deployments like the Olympics in 1996 in Atlanta, we pre-deployed and used it as a training mission. We had 13 urban search and rescue task forces and each task force had 62 people on it. We were staged at the Cobb County fairgrounds in Atlanta. We contracted with the U.S. Forest Service to have their contractors come in to set up the mass feeding kitchens. Unless you're talking really catastrophic environment, normally, we provide MREs, water and things like that for at least 72 hours. After that, hopefully, we can get back into the local economy get the local and the state back on their economic feet.
MR. WILKERSON: I think what we heard is there are a lot of complexities to this. You look at the different levels of government, whether it's local, state, federal. It always seems to come back to the need for public awareness and education. This seems to be the driving force. Thank you very much.
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