 |
  |
MISSOURI DIVISION |
|
 |
 |
PROCEEDINGS OF THE SEPTEMBER 2000 POST EARTHQUAKE HIGHWAY RESPONSE AND RECOVERY SEMINAR HELD IN ST. LOUIS MISSOURI
TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT BY ROGER HAWKINS
DAVID JOHNSON: I´d like to introduce the next speaker, Mr. Roger Hawkins. He´s the Division Traffic Engineer for North Carolina Department of Transportation.
He´s responsible for traffic control in six counties on the coast of North Carolina, including the maintenance of more than 5,500 miles of interstate, primary, urban and secondary highways. He's been involved in numerous hurricanes including Diana, Bertha, Fran, Bonnie, Dennis and Floyd. He also assisted in Hurricane Hugo. He´s a graduate of Gaston College. Please welcome Mr. Hawkins.
It doesn´t mean we might not get one after the 15th between then and the middle of October because Hazel was the landmark, the benchmark hurricane in North Carolina. It came aboard on shore October of 1954. They still talk about that hurricane.
We had one last year. It followed Dennis by a week or so. It was called Floyd, and we'll talk about that because we´re going to be dealing with lessons learned from it. But that one will probably be the benchmark in North Carolina in the future when we talk about damage. It was an unbelievable experience.
The one thing we talk about in North Carolina is customer service. We talk about safety. We talk about communication and we talk about teamwork. If all of that jells, we call that no chaos. You´re still going to have confusion. I don't think there's any way to never have confusion; it works out that way.
In the handout, the chief engineer's office is what I placed in here because we work in operations and the chief engineer serves under the secretary of Department of Transportation, that's Mr. McCoy. The secretary serves under the governor. So you don´t have to go far in the food chain to get to my boss.
The chief engineer´s name, his name is Don Goins. He's a neat guy. North Carolina has 100 counties. We're divided up to 14 highway divisions, as opposed to districts. I hear the word districts a lot around here. Missouri has districts; North Carolina has divisions. The head person in the highway division is called the division engineer, as opposed to a district engineer.
We have six counties alone in our division. 5,500 to 6,000 miles probably is realistically what we maintain. My little unit is called traffic services. We're responsible for signs, signals, and pavement markings as a maintenance unit.
I'm going to wear two hats. I'm going to wear the first hat when I talk about what comes down the pipe from Raleigh to our office. Then I'm going to talk about my unit that is my passion. You'll find that my folks make me look good. I've always said that you praise them and take the blame when things don't go exactly right. Always praise the ones that make you look good.
In the handout, I'm going to go through just the basic pages where we're talking about Hurricane Floyd, lessons learned.
There's a key name in there, Kelly Hutchinson. She's really a unique lady. If you flip one page, you'll find there's something called dedication. We talked about safety and mention safety; it's been mentioned in the conference several times. If you look, you'll find Mr. Wilder and Mr. Summerlin became 2 of 51 people who died approximately a year ago when the flood came.
Mr. Summerlin happened to work in Dublin County, which is one of the counties I'm responsible for. I actually knew him. He went into work, got swept him off the road and drowned.
There's executive summary where you will get a lot of information about Hurricane Floyd. I will tell you that the damage that came from that hurricane from residents being flooded was phenomenal.
In the area closest to Wilmington, four to six foot of water standing on the first level. As you moved into the coast, I actually knew of people who had water in the second floor level of their homes. The recovery of the homes is still in progress.
We have a program where on each weekend, we'll go out and gut a house and rebuild it. Hopefully, the spores and the molds and all that won't come back and kill the people that will live there.
Over 1,500 roads were shutdown by Floyd. It opened our eyes. We got kind of complacent; I'll be truthful with you. The way it went during Bertha, Fran, and some of these other hurricanes, we thought we had it pretty well in line. And Floyd came. Floyd was a natural disaster that came along that defied description. Nobody was ready for what happened and we thought we were pretty well prepared. The roadways were flooded by Dennis the week before. When Floyd came, it went past us, northward, doubled back, and then went back again. It decided to bless Wilmington by coming to shore. So we ended up with over 20 inches of rain, compounded by what was already saturated.
So the flooding basically started shutting down the roads. Wednesday night, about midnight, we were still putting up road-closed barricades where the roads were being washed in before the hurricane got here. When Floyd actually came onboard sometime during the night, by the next morning, we found out real quick that we didn't have enough road-closed signs or barricades or anything. It was phenomenal what was going throughout basically 200 miles within the coast. It was just absolutely chaos.
I gave you something called action items. I'm going to make a comment on a couple of them. I will tell you that the action items are either completed or in progress to the extent that we're proud of what we've done in a year.
One of the things that was mandated by our secretary was to come up with a way to handle reversal of Interstate 40 from Wilmington to Raleigh, approximately 92 miles.
When the plan was presented to my supervisor, he basically asked, "What are we going to do?" We got resources together and everybody did a lot of brainstorming and we talked about how do we do what we needed to do. It became very obvious that the emergency management personnel, highway patrol, sheriffs, cities; all kinds of law enforcement agencies had to be brought into this thing.
Records, we basically started working on a plan. If it were complete, you would have a copy of it today. It is probably 98 percent complete. We could implement it at just a moment's notice. It's all but ready. All that came from watching what had happened in Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, and everything south of us. The roads were clogged and the reason was everything waited too late to flush out just a tremendous amount of people.
I'm not in the fault and blaming mode standing here. I would share with you that the most positive thing that came out of it is it geared North Carolina up to probably, and very realistically, to handle it in another manner. Our evacuation of the coastal area of North Carolina will happen when the weather is looking like it is right now, assuming it's not raining or cloudy.
We don't plan to have gale force winds. Our complete shutdown and reversal of interstate will take place from 72 hours, down to what we call 12 hours. That´s the way the system will work.. At 12 hours, we will deploy trailers that will have all the traffic control devices to shut down interstates. We will close the ramps that need to be closed. Basically, all the on-ramps, of course everybody is going in a reverse way. We'll have highway patrol at every interchange making sure no one goes the wrong way first of all.
When, what we call "they blow the whistle," we think within two hours we can have everybody leaving Wilmington and the adjacent counties, heading west in the eastbound lane of Interstate 40.
One other thing that´s come from this effort is how we might extend this to other routes and adjacent states to the south and north of us, South Carolina and Virginia. From an incident management level, just something routine as something happening on the interstates and closing them down require us to communicate with the adjacent states. We´re doing a better job about that. We've already met with Virginia. We met with South Carolina.
So once we found out that they too were concerned, it was like contagious. For your all information, from Texas to Maryland, that´s brought into lane reversal. So the model that we've heard the Federal Highway folks talk about already is one that we just hope works so well that it will take some of the burden and pressure off of us as the hurricane moves from the south to north.
My favorite story is there's a sign in Cuba that says, Wilmington next right. Castro will not take that sign down for nothing.
On my right and your left is what we call our emergency management response manual. The ink is not dry on the pages. It's brand new. So if any of you all want, what I call the fill-in information, it will be available. It's going to be on our web page. You'll be able to get that.
Within the last two pages of the handout is something called the traveler information management system. Of course, the acronym is TIMS. We're real proud of this. It's brand new also. What it's going to let us do is handle information in a way that we've never done before in the state.
Secretary McCoy came in about three days after Floyd hit. I don't know how many thousands of phone calls everybody had answered. Anybody that had a telephone in his area was answering the phone trying to say, "You can't get there from here anymore." I had a lady call me at 3:00 o´clock in the morning from Philadelphia. She wanted to come to Wilmington. I told her to buy an airline ticket. That was about the only way.
It was a phenomenal thing. We had every roadway that came into six counties flooded. About two days later, the water was going down. If you had a high carriage vehicle, I used the National Guard. They came in and forded a stream. There was no way to describe it. I guess the way to describe it is what would happen after an earthquake...just unbelievable.
We had actually had communications that was unusual. We could talk to just about anybody we needed to. So between our telephone system and our state radios in our automobiles, there were no communication problems.
The emergency power that we had at our facility was working because the first thing you lose is electricity. I would share with you that if you do not have generators at your facilities, I would recommend that. I would recommend that generators be capable of heat or air conditioning also. That means you're going to have to get a big one. The reason I said that is because you have no idea when this thing hits, when you're going to quit using emergency power. It's well worth it. The expenditure of funds that we did, we did that in our six counties. I know it's done in other parts of the state. We've done that so we're ready to go.
The TIMS commercial is on that sheet and Kelly Hutchinson is the resource for that. Good luck on getting her right now because she's a busy lady. I will tell you right now if you want to e-mail her and ask her any questions about this information system, it's great. We came up with a statewide toll-free number, a 1-800 number, so anybody in the State of North Carolina could call and ask. And trust me, they've called and asked.
I think the biggest problem that we encountered and nobody could anticipate was the evacuation was successful. We probably sent between fifty and one hundred thousand people out of that area of the state. It's when they found out they could not get back in that they started calling. So the 1-800 number, the computer gurus went to work. We had TIMS in operation within probably four or five days after the hurricane, real-time information on that computer.
It's not one of these things that you put up information on and then maybe three, four, six hours later, it changes. It's real time. That information is actually entered from the field so that people who are opening and closing roads enter that information. I'd say realistically, it's probably within a hour of being accurate statewide during that time period.
The beauty about that program is it has been expanded. It now includes detours across the state. It includes construction sites that have lane restrictions also.
If you pull up the web page, it says TIMS. You can plug that in your computer and go right to that web page. Kelly's web page is there. If you go to our web site, http://www.ncdot.org/, you get what we call smart links, then that just takes you right into the program. Then you can query by county or by route. That comes up in an Excel spreadsheet and it works fine and works well right now. We've been just overjoyed with it.
Traffic services unit is absolutely mandated to provide the material that closes roads, establishes detours, and makes sure the traffic stays in operation. We also take the paint people that run those machines and put them to work doing other stuff. A lot of times they'll do record keeping during emergencies.
The business part where the group gets together and we talk about hurricane's coming. It's maybe three, four days away, a week away. Basically when we think we've got potential of being hit, we go into action and we just have a meeting. We sit down as people and we talk one to the other.
I appreciate the comment I heard yesterday that said you empower people at the lowest level. I believe that 100 percent. You can't have a one-man show in an emergency; it's foolish. You'll end up with failure.
So we empower our employees on what I call the supervisor level and up. At that meeting, we find out everybody's telephone number and we give them instructions to call us if they can't come to work. If they can't call us, whatever information it takes to get it. Because when we go home the day before the storm, we take a chain saw and our vehicle and we cut our way out of our driveways or we cut our way back to work.
If an employee has his own problems, they let us know and we send somebody to help them. If you've got roof damage and you can put tarps up and secure your home and you don't lose your home because of not being able to secure a leak.
That's basically what happened on several homes. We actually sent employees to help our folks just so they could come to work. Most everybody that works for us asked their families to go to the interior of North Carolina. I think the ultimate range is about 200, 250 miles on the interior. Hugo in 1989 actually came through Charlotte, which is exactly where we would send most people. Sometimes you can guess wrong when you evacuate people. Hopefully, that won't happen again. Maybe we can get these models and track these hurricanes better.
After we plan what we're going to do, everybody shows up at work the next morning. When they show up at work, each county is divided into sections. Each person has a responsibility. They have a person with them, and they're on their own until they come back with damage assessments on that very first day. That first day is damage assessment. We know that we can't start any kind of recovery on day one unless it's truly an emergency. In other words, a traffic signal could be in a roadway. We're going to have to cut it out of the way. Normally, there's no power and traffic signals don't work anyway. So it just takes a while to get them back in order.
After the damage assessment comes in, we report to our Raleigh headquarters staff so they know whether it was mild, moderate, or major and in what order. We deal with signs and traffic signals at that point. That's what we're reporting on.
One thing that we do in the planning stage also is we've already made our contacts with sign companies and contacts with signal contractors. So between the contractors, signs, and signals, we're in pretty good shape. All we have to do on that day one is we make a telephone call.
Day two, they report at 7:00 o'clock in the morning to go to work. And that worked so well last year, that's one of the reasons I said lessons learned from previous hurricanes showed us what we had to do better. We did a real good job making sure that we had our folks and contractors ready.
In North Carolina we pair up with the other highway divisions that are not affected by the disaster. In other words, west of us, if they didn't have any damage because of the storm, they would send people to help us. There would be sign and signal crews ready to go. It becomes our responsibility at that point to make sure they're safely housed, that they're fed, and that they don't wonder around trying to figure out what they're supposed to be doing. We put a local person with them so that when they take a county map and they move out and start doing repair, they don't get lost. Remember signs are blown away so it´s hard to find you way around if you aren´t familiar with the area. That's a lesson we learned from Fran.
I'm just going to say some ended up in the twilight zone as far as where they went. We still don't know where some of them went. They didn't get lost but when they got back they had their work accomplished. So we learned a good lesson and we help them with that.
The traffic signal contractors that came in during Floyd opened my eyes to a better way of doing business. We would take a crew and assign them to an intersection and it was kind of a hodgepodge; it wasn't very organized. When the contractor came to work on that Friday morning, he said, where do you want me to go. I just happened to have a county map marked up and I said, we're going to try this like we're doing the signs. We're going to ask you to start here from point A and go to point C and stop. And he did. I went out and observed his operations. He brought four crews with him and each crew was on each side of the intersection on each approach. That meant they could communicate with each other. The repairs on traffic signals were phenomenal. They still didn't have power that made it hard to work on but they had a generator and they'd power them up and make sure they were left in operation when the power did come back on.
The sign people were doing the same thing. When they came in from other highway division offices, they had the same kind of mapping. They had somebody with them that knew the area, and we didn´t micro management.
We checked behind each crew to make sure they met our standards when they worked in our division. When they worked in our counties, we didn't want problems after they had left because they had not done it to MUTCD standards first of all. Some of them came to us for the first time with Fran. We tried to make it work better this time. We actually had it better organized.
Another thing that goes on in the planning or getting ready is we look at materials. Like most DOTs, everybody has an inventory of materials; it's signs, it's signals. Normally, we're able to take and knock down an intersection and we can put up four of them just based on material we keep on hand.
When we know a hurricane is coming, we still keep that same inventory, but we call our central supplier in Raleigh and put them on notice that they may be getting a call after we do damage assessments and we're going to let them know what we need. That works real well.
The signs are done the same way. We know that we've got a certain inventory on signs. Ones that we beef up are the ones that we know we're going to need; whether it's road closed or detours. All the common signs that we know we're going to need in an emergency, we keep on hand.
The last page of that handout shows a barricade. That's our design. It actually meets FHWA 350 criteria. It's a barricade that we made out of an-inch and a-half steel. It's break away. The boards across the barricade are plastic. They are UV protected. The guy that sold them to me said they will last a long time. We'll see about that. They're light in weight. The foot on that barricade actually is a vertical member. It's bolted to the vertical member holding the board with a long bolt. When you drop it down to make a foot out of it, that bolt becomes the thing that stabilizes it. It's light weight. From the time we took the barricade out of the vehicle, until we set in place, probably was about a minute. I don't know what you all use for barricades but we used to use four-by-four posts and steel and everything that you can imagine. They were heavy and awkward. It was almost a danger trying to get them out of the truck.
These light weight things stack. You can prop them up against the fence and you can put 500 up as long as the fence doesn´t fall down. They're distributed in six counties now. I believe one of the manufacturers is going to steal our design before it's over and patent it but that's okay too. We came up with the idea. We don't mind sharing; we're not greedy.
One thing that's worth mentioning on administration is how we do what we do. I think it works real well. We use what we call a single point of contact. In other words, if you call our office, you would be referred to the person who would handle traffic, maintenance, whatever the issue is. If you needed to find a motel room for someone, we've got all those folks in our division office and we're all assigned duties. We wear more than one hat during a crisis. To lessen the load in my department, I started empowering all the employees below me to do what I was doing and doing very poorly. I was micro managing and the organization didn't need that.
I felt it was my duty to get out and ride all those roads and that became very apparent that was not going to work. What I would say up front is delegate down. Whoever told you that, gave you some really important good stuff yesterday. It's great.
 |
Send mail to scott.holder@fhwa.dot.gov with questions or comments about this web site. |
