Although the recent once-in-a-century polar storm that socked northwest Louisiana stretched our communities’ abilities to cope to the extreme, things could have been far worse.
The fact that they weren’t is a testament to the abilities of the Caddo Parish Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (OHSEP).
Robert Jump, OHSEP deputy director, said, “Basically, we’re a group of emergency managers that’s our job to mitigate the disasters that affect the citizens of our corner of the world. And that can be any kind of disaster. It can be manmade when we start talking about hazardous materials that are in our community, manmade in the form of terrorism. …
“And then also, the natural disaster portion of it — flooding, 2015, 2016, major flooding to our area. Severe weathers, which we experience, like, every week around here.”
Exercises like active shooter drills at local schools have been utilized to adopt and amend methods of dealing with such tragedies. The same holds true for dealing with natural disasters.
“Every time that you respond to something, regardless if it’s an exercise or an actual event that you’re trying to deal with, you’re going to see ways that are more efficient, you’re going to see things that probably weren’t as efficient,” he said. “You won’t last long in this business if you don’t adapt to each scenario. I guarantee you, the next flood that we have in Caddo Parish, there will be individuals who have positions that are making decisions that weren’t here in 2015 and ’16. And that will be the first time they are experiencing flooding at that level.”
The recent winter storm was certainly unlike any other ever experienced in the Ark-La-Tex, and normal procedures sometimes weren’t enough in some cases. As the storm drew nearer, how did OHSEP prepare for its arrival, especially as its severity became clearer?
Jump said this was going to be a community-wide event, not an isolated incident. “We had everybody that would have a vested interest this — city leadership, parish leadership, police chiefs, fire chiefs, hospital representation, representation from our volunteer agencies.” There were also daily briefings from the National Weather Service. “And we ask each of those entities to review their plans, because there are plans in place when it comes to winter weather.”
There is some precursor of notification in which the unified command group gets together to discuss what issues need to be addressed.
“It’s hard to plan for some impacts that you’re not aware of,” Jump said of the winter storm. The command staff was aware of the coming impact, and each agency prepared accordingly as their experience tells them to. People made sure that public works equipment was functioning, that there would still be an effective police and fire response and an effective medical system.
Not only did the various agencies prepare for the coming winter onslaught, he said, it was also important that the public be made aware of the situation. “It’s a huge portion of the emergency management business is communication, not just laterally amongst your peers who are trying to help you solve your problems, but outwardly to the citizens, who you are ultimately trying to help and protect,” he said.
“Because that helps us out. Everybody who trickled a faucet, wrapped a pipe … it does help us in the grand scheme of things in this mass puzzle that we’re trying to solve.”
OHSEP’s emergency operations center became operational around the clock, with representatives from various other agencies and volunteers who could be called upon to solve problems as they arose.
Power was a concern considering the icing that occurred, but thankfully, that did not become a very serious problem, apart from a few isolated outages.
Water, both potable and non-potable, became an issue early on with our medical community, Jump said. “When you take away non-potable water from those facilities, when you have major breaks in the water system, that affects those institutions. They can’t heat themselves.
“That brings us to a point where we figure out as a community how to solve that problem for those medical institutions, or we’re going to have to evacuate a hospital,” which is no small feat.
Each medical institution has power loss and water outage plans, “and so they start to work through that stuff.” But the water loss problem was system wide. “That’s where we come in as planners. … We started very early on, realized the medical institutions were going to have to keep running… and get non-potable water to each institution to be able to keep their boilers running so we can keep the heat up.”
Potable water also had to be brought to those institutions as well so they could maintain a level of cleanliness to remain a medical facility.
Jump said when his agency holds its “after-action review, “ in which the actions — “the good, the bad and the ugly” — are reviewed, it will be better prepared to roll out tanker trucks to deliver water to institutions that need it.
Were there any shortcomings that occurred that, upon hindsight, could have been handled differently so that the agency can be better prepared when the next winter storm strikes? “Always information flow,” Jump said. “It’s sad to say that any exercise, any disaster, communication is always the point of failure. Not that we failed in any way, shape or form, but sometimes people are solving problems that you’re not aware of, or there are problems that the general public perceives that you should be solving. Sometimes if you don’t know there’s a problem, it’s kind of hard to solve it.”
Northern states are better prepared to handle such intense winter storms than the South because they occur much more frequently. Even though such storms are rare here, last month’s storm proved that they can, indeed, happen. Is there any way that our communities can obtain better equipment to handle the problems that could occur in future storms?
“One hundred percent,” Jump said, “and those conversations are taking place. I was on a call yesterday with the Caddo Parish Commission to talk about the exact same thing: How can we, as a group of leaders, be better prepared for this the next time it comes?”
The money it takes to pay for sand, brine solution and properly equipped vehicles comes from the taxpayer’s budget, “so we have to balance that stuff, and I think that we will address it in our future planning to deal with any kind of winter storm coming. Are we going to address it at the same level that Michigan is? Probably not at that same level,” he said. Caddo Parish Sheriff Steve Prator said,
Caddo Parish Sheriff Steve Prator said, “There has to be a middle ground because we can’t afford to have snow equipment that sits for six, seven, eight years and we have to maintain it and not ever use it, then all of a sudden we need it. We don’t have that kind of money in our community to do that.”
Public works did a good job, he said, and thinks will do a better job the next time.
“Conversations always take place, no matter what we’re dealing with. Flood comes, flood goes, we go through the process of getting reimbursements for our response because it was declared a disaster, and out of that, we’ll change something. … So 2015, 2016 comes, we realize that we’ve got an issue with the Red River, so we establish a flood technical committee. …
“Like with this winter storm, we established a committee to mitigate the problems. … That will happen with this winter storm. We’ll get together, we’ll have our meetings, the good, the bad and the ugly. What can we do to sharpen our response?”
Of the lessons learned during the winter storm, Sheriff Prator said, “One of the biggest problems we had as a city and parish, we need to invest in some sort of snow and ice removal equipment. That would help some. All in all, I’m very proud of the way that everyone was able to respond — it was an emergency. The volunteers helped fill in where we couldn’t — we can’t be everywhere. We got them over three million bottles of water and did the things we did to coordinate that end of it.
“All in all, it was OK. We learned things that we’ll do better next time.”
THIS ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED IN THE March 5 ISSUE OF FOCUS SB - THE INQUISITOR.