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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
DEBRIS MANAGEMENT BY WILLIAM MOORE
MR. MOSELEY: Next on the program is Bill Moore who is the emergency management coordinator for District 6 with the Florida Department of Transportation. Bill has 33 years of experience with the DOT. He did undergraduate work in engineering at Georgia Tech and received his engineering degree from Florida International University in Miami in 1975. Bill was responsible for maintenance operations in the southern part of Miami, Dade County when Hurricane Andrew destroyed the area in 1992.
MR. MOORE: First, I would like to thank Don Neumann of FHWA and David Musser of MoDOT for the invitation. Like David, when I got the invitation I had to call Don to confirm it. I said, "You realize FDOT in this case means Florida and we don't have too many earthquakes but we know debris." Florida has eight districts, seven geographical districts and one is the Florida Turnpike. I'm from southern Florida, which is Dade and Monroe County. Before, during, and after Hurricane Andrew, I had maintenance responsibilities for the southern half of Dade County and also Monroe County. Hurricane Andrew was Florida's wake up call in August of '92 and destroyed a 16 by 18 mile area of the roughly one third of the urban area in Dade County.
The response part of our emergency plan is the responsibility of my maintenance department and me. The one thing we don't count on is not to have a maintenance facility and that's exactly what happened to us. Of 184 employees, only 9 still had their homes. So getting personnel back was a critical issue.
Nevertheless, other district crews arrived in the area and we were able to launch our damage survey teams and get a picture of the devastation back to the maintenance unit. From that, we were able to assign the workload to the different maintenance units that came in.
They mentioned it took three days. The hurricane hit Sunday night and Monday morning. It took us most of Monday to clear the debris out of our office building so that we could at least function under cover from the sun. The roof was damaged in the storm, it rained, and everything was soaking wet. We pulled a plug-in generator off our garbage truck and got a radio going. The DOT radio was the only communication functioning in South Dade for about three days. As a result of our coming on line with car-powered communications, maintenance crew units and support from the state, we were able to have the highways open in South Dade Wednesday at noon.
Ironically, the last street that was opened was near, down near Miami but in the critical impact zone, everything was open before Wednesday that was basically one day and one half. Again, that was possible only because of the rapid response team went out and did the damage survey. That was the key to it.
So where are we now. In southern Florida we deal a lot with our counties and our local jurisdictions to develop plans for a coordinated response. We don't want the district to go into chaos that was referred to the other day. You are going to have chaos and the way to do that is with an effective plan. So your plan is going to have to be in place before it happens. You need to get with your counties and local jurisdictions and basically divide up your geographic area and decide who's going to do what. And then if they're not there on that day, you go ahead and cover theirs too, because you're going to have the need to do that.
Next thing, you must have a state plan that's in place that will support your efforts. Now, our state plan, there are probably many emergency management plans, works like this schematic. When the county's resources are overwhelmed, they make a request to the state EOC. The state EOC then may delegate, SEOC, ESF 1 and 3, and DEOC of our state, and it may come back to my district EOC. In addition, we have identified a Florida debris strike team. This is part of our EMAC commitment but I wrote this first plan in 1994 after I assumed the role I'm in now as emergency maintenance manager coordinator.
I want to call your attention to the wheel loader. Your front-end loader or skip loader should be equipped with a grapple and rake. You want to take your bucket with you. You can put your bucket up on the deck of the low boy and get your grapple rake attached to it. And you want a quick disconnect system. The American coupling system is one. There are others, but you want the quick disconnect system. Takes about an hour for a mechanic to make the transition otherwise, and you don't want to be doing that out in the field.
Next thing are tires. When you're in a severe debris situation you're going to lose tires. On your front-end loaders, install hard liners or the equivalent with grillage rubber with a split envelope, so you don't care how it rides. But you don't want those $600 tires going flat. Because you lose that piece of equipment, you're dead.
Next thing are dump trucks. You may want to consider a swing gate that locks in the open position. In the early hours of your debris clearing, you're going to want maximum payload on your dump trucks. The tailgate gets in the way. With it locked open, you're going to have the possibility of dropping debris on the road during your haul route, so you can prevent that with chain link fence. Some of our drivers were very innovative and they cut off a section of chain link fence and draped it across the rear of the truck. That increased the payload. You don't want to do this forever, but you do need to do it for the first day or two until you start to get a handle on your transportation network. And above all, when you're doing this, you need to coordinate with your state police or your motor carrier compliance officers that are part of the DOT in Florida. But you need to coordinate with them because they will help you with the regulations on tailgates and covering your loads.
Later in the process, after about three days, you do want to re-institute your regulations, because otherwise you're going to end up with debris everywhere and you don't want that to happen.
Next, having said all that, the disaster is not just maintenance anymore. True, the maintenance department in your state and DOT and your county is going the carry the load during the first two or three days to get your network up and running, but debris management is just part of the emergency event.
So how do you manage the event? Well again, in our state we come back to our state plan: when a county is overwhelmed, it goes to the state EOC. The EOC will turn to ESF 1 and 3, transportation, and it may come back to the Florida DOT district emergency operation center.
Why would you want an emergency operation center? A lot of people don't feel they need one, but you may want to consider that. Your EOC is your command and control point for your response and recovery activities. And believe your recovery activities may take months. I know David can attest to that. But another thing, it's also a communications center for all the inputs and outputs.
The most important things are your damage survey teams. They have to be out on the highway as soon as conditions permit. They have to get out there and find out what you're dealing with. So they're out early surveying our highways and telling us what we're up against. You're also going to be hearing reports from the county you're dealing with. Your state EOC is going to want to know what's going on in your area and your other highway districts. And you're going to be communicating with your field units to let them know what they're up against. And you're also going to be coordinating your response with the county and advising the state EOC of what aid you may need and also coordinating with other districts. Unlike Andrew, they knew we were down. So they mounted up and rode without being asked. But you need to be prepared to ask when you specifically need help. We will be next time.
Now, lastly but certainly not least, you need to keep your managers informed as to what the hell is going on because they're going to be on you every second wanting to know where we stand.
Now, in District 6, we have taken a three-pronged approach to event management. First is planning and coordination. Then we have formed district emergency response teams and of course we have a district EOC. Under planning and coordination, again, you need to talk to everybody, the local jurisdiction, the counties, in our case Tallahassee is our central office. We talk to other agencies: Florida Department of Law Enforcement, DEP, and environmental protection. All the agencies David mentioned, you've got to coordinate with before the event occurs so you understand where they are and what they are going to expect of you.
On the other hand you need to know what to expect of them. There are also task groups in your communities: metropolitan planning organizations, chambers of commerce, and various construction trade groups. And lastly, you need to maintain or invent rosters and maybe invent, as we are in Florida, a training program for DOT employees to know how to respond to the disaster.
Next, in our district we have created some emergency response teams. You can only belong to one team. I have to say that right up front. You can't belong to more than one team because all of these can be active at a given moment or be independent.
First is RIAT, the rapid immediate assessment team. That's analogous to your federal immediate needs team. We have a two-tiered approach under RIAT. The state RIAT is supported by the Florida National Guard with air and ground assets and all state agencies are represented on that team. That goes for a category three hurricane and up, or major event, that the National Guard be activated. We have found the National Guard activation is slower than we need. We need them out there, like yesterday. So we have an alternate RIAT plan in DOT. All highway districts have their RIAT teams with two to six individuals. And again, we have seven geographical districts. Two districts, my district and the Tampa district, have their air assets under emergency contracts and we're capable of launching an air recon within an hour. I've done that three times.
So we do our immediate needs surveys even at the DOT level. If we have to, we certainly survey our system in the air with our helicopters or our DST, damage survey team. When I worked that plan several years ago, I started using damage survey teams because everybody refers to damage assessment. You have to be very careful during an emergency. Communications are screwed up anyway, so when you're on the phone with somebody and they're tired and excited or you're tired and excited and you say damage assessment, you're conveying a message to that person. Damage survey and damage assessment are two different animals. The damage survey team (FHWA program), we've adopted that name for that reason. It's different than damage assessment team (FEMA program), which is DAT.
I noticed in the latest CFR in May, the Federal Highway has changed their program a little bit and they're now referring to the field report as the damage survey summary report. But I don't know if there is any connection there, but we're delighted that they've adopted our nomenclature in part.
Then we scoot over to the damage assessment team that is FEMA public assistance. In our comprehensive emergency management plan for the state of Florida, that's how it's defined. That's why I chose that name very different from their name.
We have a team set up in my highway district. We now have sixteen members and we have a DOT response out in the community. We are capable of running 24-hours, seven days a week in our own district operations center. Below that is our strike team. My district is the field two-strike team. Statewide, we could field fifteen strike teams. For EMAC probably that would be cut to ten and we would alternate five and five.
Individual assistance teams with FEMA are responsible for communities outreach. DOT is tasked in Florida to support and participate in that.
For EOC liaison, we have a team set up where we put a DOT person in every EOC and they are our eyes and ears at the county.
For coordination of our response and recovery efforts we have the forward SERT (state emergency response team) at the DFO (disaster field office). When we need a DST (damage survey team), we have to staff for that.
Finally, our EOC operation is in three branches; most important of which is our Intel section or information. The damage assessment coordinator gets information from the damage survey teams to the FHWA ER program coordinator. We have teams in both of our counties and then they feed the information to our maps and charts unit. They plot the impact area on local area maps and also keep status charts of the various problems on the highway network.
Our communications section in the EOC maintains contact by two-way radio, fax, or phone. Our two-way radios also have links to the adjacent districts.
And lastly, the administrative section tracks our missions and requests and they help you put together situation reports every several hours. I relay them to the state EOC and share them with our district managers.
Every good plan begins and ends here: planning and coordination. You must include everybody you can think of. You need to talk to people in your community, your county, your other districts, other agencies, and task groups. It's got to be an all-inclusive project. They have to know where you are and you have to know where they are.
The other day we walked across the street to the memorial to Thomas Jefferson and I was impressed by it. Thomas Jefferson wrote the very first emergency declaration of this country. Benjamin Franklin, his colleague on that committee, made the remark involving the signing of the declaration, we must all hang together or surely we'll all hang separately. We must communicate with each other. Thank you.
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