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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
USDOT EMERGENCY SUPPORT FUNCTION BY JANET BENINI
MR. MUSSER: Our next speaker is Janet Benini. Janet has been the deputy director of the Office of Emergency Transportation of the United States Department of Transportation since November 1998. The Office of Emergency Transportation manages the departmental emergency preparedness and response programs including national security and domestic crises as well as integration of interagency programs both within and outside the Department of Transportation, Emergency Support Function (ESF) No. 1-Transportation. She led the Department of Transportation effort on Y2K activation, for which she was granted the Eagle Award by Administrator Kelley Coyner. She coordinated a multi modal team, which assembled a package of relief programs for the countries devastated by Hurricane Mitch. The proposal was accepted and the projects are underway. She serves on advisory boards for the National Emergency Management Association and the Natural Hazards Research Center. She is a certified emergency manager and was on the Commission for the International Association for Emergency Managers. Ms. Benini also worked in disaster response and recovery. She has been the operations, logistics and planning chief for earthquakes, fires, floods, and a riot. Her bachelor's degree is in Social Science from Colorado State University and her master's in Public Administration is from the University of San Francisco.
MS. BENINI: We at the federal level recognize that all disasters are local disasters. It's only when the local government is overwhelmed that the state comes in, and if the state has more than it can handle, then the federal government comes in. In those times of presidential-declared disasters, DOT is the lead for one of the emergency support functions. That's what I'll be describing.
USDOT is really more of a confederation than a department. I know that many of you have very strong and active ties with the Federal Highway Administration, but there are actually 11 administrations within the US Department of Transportation, including the FAA, US Coast Guard, Federal Railroad Administration, et cetera. One of those administrations is called the Research and Special Programs Administration, or RSPA, where I work. It has a special assignment among all the administrations of DOT in that the administrator of Research and Special Programs is the department crisis manager. So when events happen that are multi modal, the Research and Special Programs Administrator steps up to coordinate all the efforts of the Department of Transportation.
I work for the Office of Emergency Transportation and we provide the staff support for that function. So we do have department-wide responsibilities in this big confederation.
One thing that we've been seeing recently is the tremendous increase in the need for information. Even though I told you that we're here to help you, we need your help too in gathering that information. There is nothing that Secretary Slater likes less than getting a phone call from CNN about some event that happened in transportation that he hasn´t heard about through staff. It does occur. We know that CNN is very reliable for letting you know that something has happened. However, frequently, they get the details wrong. So if we in DOT can give the secretary information about what actually happened, we will all benefit from it. We can put the programs into effect that might help you recover. So that's my little sales pitch for feeding U.S. DOT timely and reliable information.
Even though we tried to deny it for many years, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Federal Government decided that we really are in the emergency response business. We decided if we're going to do that, we might as well come up with a Federal response plan. In the Federal response plan, there are 12 emergency support functions. Transportation is No. 1 and communications systems is No. 2 and public works and engineering which is mostly the Corps of Engineers is No. 3, and they keep on going down to No. 12.
I was in a meeting not too long ago where Secretary Slater was describing the work that DOT does in a disaster. He coincidently, said that transportation is so important that if a disaster happens, we're almost always number one.
First of all, we try to collect damage assessment information on the transportation infrastructure and that's part of the information we get from you. Our interests go far beyond the highways. We are interested in ports, railways, transit companies, pipelines et cetera. So we gather that information and then we assist you in route planning and establishing of priorities.
This is a project that we're working on with CUSEC. CUSEC has set up a special transportation-working group. We're very pleased to be sponsoring this working group in a project for establishing route priorities across multiple states. Most of the state DOTs have done some work within their own boundaries. This group will assure emergency routes line up at state lines and will establish priorities for restoration of the roads.
As a new function, we also provide leadership for the newly established evacuation liaison team. We're starting it this year in Region 4, which is the southeast United States, where we get hit so frequently with hurricanes. People in this South Carolina slide were in that queue during the Hurricane Floyd evacuation for up to 18 hours for a trip that usually takes less than an hour.
There are some interesting changing behavior phenomena among people. To look at how people´s behavior during hurricanes has changed over the last 15 years is interesting. It used to be what was known as a hurricane culture. Those were people who had experience with hurricanes or warnings and they tended not to evacuate. Today, people are evacuating in greater numbers. We think it's the news media getting the word out. The weather channel shows those big weather maps with all the rainbow colors and clouds. If you remember, Hurricane Floyd was actually four times the size of Hurricane Andrew. That was fearsome to look at on TV. Even though it was four times the size, it had nowhere near the punch that Hurricane Andrew had. But people saw this huge storm so the evacuation compliance was over 90 percent. In addition, 70 percent of the people that were outside the surge area also evacuated. So that put even more people on the roads.
Now, another changing phenomenon is related to families. When you study disaster management, they teach you that families evacuate together. So when you're doing your evacuation and planning, you need to make provisions for this. We're now observing, and it was most evident in the Hurricane Floyd evacuation, that that's no longer the case. Families tend to evacuate with the mother and the children going first and the father coming later in a separate car. So now for every family, we have two cars on the road.
What we're learning is how important it is to coordinate our plans for area evacuations. We need to coordinate in a multi-state way, especially when we do lane reversals. Obviously, if one state reverses all of its lanes and the next state doesn´t, we´ll have major problems.
The evacuations are state responsibilities so our role is to help coordinate multi-jurisdictions. This is what we'll be doing with the evacuation liaison team. It's a joint DOT and FEMA effort and within DOT the Federal Highway Administration is taking the lead.
We can also coordinate some waivers of regulations. We can restrict air space. If you have a bridge or freeway collapse, you don't want additional helicopters prop wash spreading over an already hazardous situation. We can restrict the air space around that so you don´t have to worry. We can also waive the load limits on roads so that you can move overload of heavy equipment. We can waive the hours of work for truck drivers to allow for extended work hours that usually are needed after a disaster for the emergency responses efforts. We can also provide direct funding support for recovery through the FHWA Emergency Relief Program.
Under the Federal Response Plan, we lead the transportation planning function. This is an area where we're still learning and getting better. As recently as Hurricane George, we didn't really have this down very well. In an incident command system, there are the four functions. One is operations. Another is logistics where we are. It's up to operations to set the priorities. In the past, Operations would work in a vacuum without input from logistics. As we found out, we needed to work together to set workable priorities. Now logistics and operations have established a team to make sure that we have a transportation person´s input before priorities are established.
When the Federal Response Plan was written, they turned to U.S. DOT and said, "Now we want you to let us know what´s moving." Through a few disasters and trial and error, we came to the conclusion that the best chance we have of knowing what's moving is if we are moving it. So we told the federal agencies, if you want to move anything into the disaster site, come see us, we'll take care of moving it. We're in the process of establishing a national contract to support this. You can imagine what it must be like trying to issue a request for proposal when you don't know what you're moving, from where and to, and when it's going to happen.
We have had a contract out on the street for zero to $50 million with very broad parameters. We did award the contract through FAA. There is a formal challenge to the award. So I can't we have this national contract in place.
We have learned a lot about availability of transportation at any point in time. I think we can say with assurance that if a federal agency needs to move things, we will get it there.
We also coordinate military airlift. It used to be that the military was one of our prime sources of emergency transportation. With downsizing, the military is relying more and more on commercial transportation resources: the same ones that we're likely to try and get during a disaster. There are some things that can move only by military air so it's very important that we work very closely with the military.
If you're at the state or local level and you need emergency transportation, whether or not we provide it, we can help get you competitive rates because we know the vendors. We would be happy to do that for you.
We also track shipments of goods to know where they are at any one time. This is unbelievably important. For example, one of our worst-case scenarios is a hurricane in Puerto Rico. In the best of times, it's a logistical nightmare getting things in and out of Puerto Rico. A requesting agency may put out multiple requests for the same item and same quantity. This happened during Hurricane George. They kept saying plastic sheeting, plastic sheeting, and more plastic sheeting. So, FEMA had plastic manufacturers in the country product sheeting 24-hours a day. There were no tents or plastic bags being made because sheeting became the priority. We were barging and flying and doing everything we could to get this plastic sheeting to Puerto Rico. So finally they said, okay, we got it. Little did they know there was about 30,000 tons of sheeting in the delivery pipeline. Had we tracked the source of the request, quantities, and status of the deliveries, we could have avoided over supplying a needed resource and wasting time and money.
We can provide you with technical assistance. There are 110,000 employees in the Department of Transportation. If we don´t know the answer, we can network to get you the information you need. So please don't hesitate to ask us.
We do have a regional structure. We use the ten standard federal regions with regions one and two combined. Alaska is by itself because it has some unique needs. But within the regions we have what we call RETCOs and RETREPs. RETCOs are the Regional Emergency Transportation Coordinators. They're usually the top DOT official in the region and could be a Coast Guard admiral or a deputy administrator or a Federal Highway Field Services Director. Then we have the RETREPs who are the people who work full-time generally on this business and the ones that will work directly with you. Many of them are in this room.
Where does all this stuff take place? We work in several places. The Office of Emergency Transportation, which is where I work, is in the NASIF Building in Washington D.C. We have a crisis management center that is not a 24-hour operation center in normal times but can be during a disaster. We have representation from all the different modes of transportation.
We also have a room over at the FEMA headquarters that is called the Movement Coordination Center. That's where we track all these movements, do transportation planning and work with TransCom and the military.
We also work primarily through the RETCO/RETREP program and the FEMA ROC (Regional Operations Center). You'll find ESF-1s there (Emergency Support Function 1, Transportation).
Usually there is one ROC per region or the FEMA disaster field office that generally comes along about a week or so into the disaster. There is usually one per state. We also set up a special purpose facility. The first time we actually used one was last year. It was called the emergency transportation center in Atlanta. That's where we did the transportation acquisition: finding the best mode to move the things you need moved.
I was involved in the Loma Prieta and the Northridge earthquakes working for the State of California. It was mentioned this morning that a group met every morning to talk and plan the details of the day. This is a very important meeting for coordinating all the activities that happen during the immediate response and recovery. It happens in a couple different ways depending on the location. In the Loma Prieta earthquake, the municipal planning office was the lead. It was CALTRANS for the Northridge earthquake. It was a joint effort that included public works, the port authority, the city, the county, and everybody involved in transportation.
These meetings attract policy makers. There is only a few different letters between policy and politics and this comes out in a disaster. It was not unusual to see the Secretary of Transportation or the Federal Highway Administrator in attendance.
On the second day after the Loma Prieta earthquake, Vice President Quayle arrived. When someone at that level comes to your area, it takes a lot of support to get him around. You need plan the day and on top of that work in security measures. Some of us felt kind of angry because we had to stop responding to the disaster in order to cater to these VIPs.
These are truly extraordinary events. An earthquake in the CUSEC zone, in the New Madrid-Wabash fault zone, would be a huge event. It's something that transcends the plans that any of us have. Policy makers are the people that can help us get past these extraordinary events. As inconvenient or awkward their arrival may seem, it is important for us to anticipate their arrival including congressional representatives and get them good information so that they can help us do our jobs better.
Early on, especially in Northridge and Loma Prieta, the U.S. DOT and FEMA sat down and decided what was going to be covered under the FHWA Emergency Relief (ER) Program and what was going to be covered under the Stafford Act. When you have a serious transportation impact from an earthquake or other disaster, be sure that you facilitate this discussion early on. The provisions are different, requirements are different, and you can avoid a lot of duplicated and wasted effort if everybody understands from the get-go exactly what's going to be covered under what.
Based on the experience of these two earthquakes, the Bay Area has formalized a process for the TCC, Transportation Coordination Committee and developed a plan for this. It's a group that started on an ad hoc basis and ended up being formalized. We've found it to be very valuable. So those are the things that we hope to be able to do for you and with you.
I have really enjoyed working both with the EMAC group and the CUSEC group. It would be nice if we could always meet under such congenial circumstances but I know that that's not always so during disasters. So I look forward to seeing you again at the ROC or disaster sites. You should feel free to come by and see us in Washington. We would be happy to show off our crisis management center. Thank you.
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