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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
EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS BY ED GRAY
MR. NEMMERS: The first half of this session related more to communications with the public and the media. The second part deals with route evaluations. We're going to be hearing from Ed Gray who is replacing Robb Pilkington from SEMA, the Missouri State Emergency Management Agency. We're also going to hear about a Missouri study assessing the earthquake vulnerability of structures on emergency relief routes. And finally, we're also going to hear about Indiana´s training initiative for inspecting damaged structures.
Ed Gray is what I call "Mr. Earthquake Program Manager" for the state of Missouri. He has been in this position for 13 and a-half years and is the key representative for Missouri and the Missouri Seismic Safety Commission. He's a graduate with both masters and bachelor degrees from Missouri Valley College in history and mechanics and has done some other advanced studies at Central Missouri State University. It's your pleasure to hear from Mr. Earthquake Emergency Preparedness in Missouri.
MR. GRAY: I am Ed Gray. You can contact me at the State Emergency Management Agency. I used to be the exercise officer dealing with all the mock disasters. We always found that the key component that always failed or had problems with was communications.
We use what we call the consequence assessment tool data set. Very simply put, you plug into your computer a Richter magnitude and the program gives you an estimate of the scale of what the problem is. We're working something called HAZUS, which is Hazard US. It is a FEMA developed product with the
National Institute of Building Sciences. It will give much better and more defined parameters of economic loss data systems. Right now CATS, C-A-T-S, Consequence Assessment Tool, is the best thing that we've got. Our current communication system is limited in the sense that we're heavily relied on hard-wired phone systems which we don't count on being there in the post earthquake session. We are relying a lot on partnerships. We've developed a good working relationship with the Mid-America Contingency Planning Group here in St. Louis. We work with Ameren UE. You heard the guy yesterday talk about that. We've got a couple other things that I'll get to hear in a minute. We are very busy working on strategies with which we can help mitigate or ameliorate some of the communication problems that we anticipate. We cannot anticipate them all. There are going to be glitches in our planning. We exercise quite frequently using an earthquake-based scenario because it's the worst-case scenario that we can imagine. If we can get through the earthquake problem, we can get through most anything. The flood of 1993 showed us some really bad shortfalls in the emergency management arena. We weathered the storm fairly well, but we have gone back, reviewed our plans, updated them, and have moved forward, especially in the communications area.
We used 6.5 and 7.2 Richter magnitude earthquakes as our basis in CATS. I'll show you some comparative diagrams centered on the boot heel area or what we call swamp east. You see the light green area, anything that is darker green, south and east of that dot is basically old aluvium flood plain, actually primeval forest swamp, cypress swamp prior to 1927 when the Corps of Engineers came in and built a heavy diking system. They put in drainage canals and made all the water drain to the west into the St. Francis River basin. You can also see many of the major known faults. The Cottage Grove Fault is the one that's going parallel into Kentucky. North of St. Louis there are several faults. The Sacramento Bay that Mr. Drago showed us that was an unknown fault. I call David all the time and ask, "Where was that earthquake?" He says, "Well, it was a fault we didn´t know about." Well, earthquakes are a way of Mother Nature telling us where the faults are; simple as that. We don't know where they're all at. Highway damage, this is a 6.5 earthquake. Richter magnitude is energy only indicated by Arabic numerals. It is a logarithmic scale. Each time you go up .2, you've doubled the energy release. The energy release from a 6.5 earthquake to a 7.2, is an increase of three and a half times the amount of energy released. It's a crapshoot what these numbers are. The numbers, you know, they will sit and argue all afternoon whether that was a 6.9 or a 6.7. The federal government is the final arbiter of what that number is going to be. National Earthquake Information Center determines it and that's by law.
The area is going to encompass quite a bit of land area for a 6.5 earthquake. The 6.5 size earthquake is what is most likely going to happen in southeast Missouri. The repeat interval is 45 to 85 years. The last one we had was Halloween 1895, 105 years ago. The good news is we're only 20 years overdue. The 6.5 size will cause damage to property and it will injure people. The 7.2 is going to be three and a half times that size. It's going to cover a much wider area and damage much more. Communication towers will go down and we're not expecting very much communication seeing that the Crowley Ridge has a tendency to dampen the effects of the earthquake going north into the Ozark plateau. So 7.2 according to the CATS diagram, there will be more damage in Arkansas than in Missouri. Western Tennessee, western Kentucky and the very tip of Illinois covering about five counties will also be involved. How are we going to communicate with each other? Well, in Jefferson City we have one of the last nuclear rated fallout shelters built in the United States. We have an underground emergency operation center that is about the size of this room. We can fit in the 20 to 27 federal agencies. We can fit in the 33 state agencies that have a primary or secondary ability to respond to a disaster and we have ways for them to communicate. We have computer aided dispatching. We have a console where we can monitor for highway patrol and Missouri National Guard circuits. We can patch in any over the air communications and literally patch into a phone system down into the computerized floor to a certain table. It's a rather unique system. We have four of these consoles, one of which acts as a backup for our satellite service. We have a weather radar display that is tied in with the Missouri Farm Bureau that is one of our public-private partnerships. The Missouri Farm Bureau has a satellite link hookup to every farm bureau office in each county in the state of Missouri. We have a memorandum of understanding with the Farm Bureau that if all other communications fail, we will be able to use their satellite service at least to get preliminary damage assessment into our office. We have special dedicated lines such as the nuclear power plants. We have a special black phone that's a direct line to Cooper nuclear station opposite Rockport, Missouri and another one is the hot line to Ameren UE's only nuclear power plant in the state of Missouri, which is Callaway. Callaway nuclear power plant is in Fulton, Missouri and it was the first seismically, designed building in the state of Missouri. We also have our standard state and national warning system lines. We don't expect those to be out in Jefferson City because of the Ozark uplift but we also have some pretty specialized radio equipment in our radio room. We have high frequency or ultra high frequency radios provided by the Department of Transportation and National Guard. We use ARES, which is the Army Radio Emergency Services, RACES that is the radio amateur, civil air patrol and then we have point-to-point radio systems. We can easily communicate with the Missouri State Highway Patrol, Missouri Department of Conservation, and MoDOT.
In Jefferson City we had one problem all along. We have a single point service vendor telephone company. Today it is Sprint. Well, it all flows from one building in one central location in downtown Jefferson City. We didn't think that was a good setup so we put four cellular trunk lines up on the roof of our building so we could reach Fulton, Missouri, which is 20 miles to our north and have at least four lines going to another switching station in the public switch network. The redundancy eases some of our problems.
We have a dozen portable satellite phones. We have five others in our offices. Mark is our southeast Missouri coordinator. He lives in Perryville and sometimes works in Cape Girardeau. He is responsible for the 16 counties in southeast Missouri and in the heart of the earthquake zone. He needed at least one satellite phone so we can contact him. The other six phones are with the Missouri State Highway Patrol at their various district headquarters throughout the state as backup communications. We have more on order. They´re expensive toys but nice. We´re relying a lot on industry and government data processing networks. The public switch network for data exchanges will still be open for business up in the northwestern part of the state. Southwestern Bell has taken a very proactive stance and have hardened all their switch areas, switch gears, and switch stations. They have done the nonstructural mitigation and in many instances down in southeast Missouri, thanks to Tim Buono. They have actually hardened several of the switch yards down there so I am confident that at least we will have some phone service available shortly after the earthquake.
We expect FEMA to be pretty much on the road from Region 7, Kansas City immediately after an earthquake happens. We work very closely with our FEMA partners. They have those MERS units, Mobile Emergency Response communications vans. We assume that the GETS system will be made available. You're talking about eight states with a fair number of electoral votes. Don't forget, it's an election year. So we figure in an election year if we get anything like a burp along the New Madrid fault zone that there would be a federal declaration pretty quickly. We expect those citizens out there to remain calm, remain in place, and be on their own for at least 72 hours until Missouri National Guard can activate units and we can get all our reconnaissance done. Communications are going to be our key problem. If you recall in the previous presentations, Watsonville, California, did not report into the office for emergency services until almost 36 hours after the Loma Prieta earthquake, yet they were the closest municipality to the epicenter. They were asked why they didn't call. They figured everybody else was worse off than they were and they didn't want to bother anyone. Well, I remind the people in southeast Missouri, to please make every effort to let us know so that we don't overlook anybody. So anyway, it will take a while for the juggernaut to get rolling but we expect our FEMA partners at Region 7 to be down, with us within one day of the happening. Thank you very much.
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