emse232

Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management

Crisis and Emergency Management

April 2008 Volume 14 - Number 3

Perspectives...

My Perspective

By Justin Timothy Solobay

Hurricane Ivan made landfall at 2am on the continental U.S. Wednesday, September 16^th, 2004. The category three storm system generated 120 mph winds and produced a significant storm surge that pounded mainly the gulf coast region. The town of Orange Beach, Alabama is on record with the National Weather Service as being the primary point of entry into the country for the storm. As Hurricane Ivan tracked inland, it weakened rapidly to a tropical depression at a somewhat faster than average rate.

However, the storm system maintained its moisture composition and produced significant rain fall totals in the regions just east of the Mississippi, and up into the Ohio valley.

I personally was returning home form morning classes at California University of Pennsylvania, located in southwestern PA, where I was in my last semester as a meteorology student. During my twenty plus mile drive home, I was privy to numerous vehicle accidents on the interstate as result of the torrential downpour. Arriving into my hometown of Canonsburg, PA, I immediately drove to my firehouse and began preparing for incidents soon to develop as result of the flood producing condition.

Over the course of the next 36 hours, my firehouse responded to over 75 - 911 calls for assistance. The pleads for help ranged from flooded basements, to home explosions as a result of basements collapsing under the intense weight of saturated soil and severing home gas lines. Before nightfall that evening, the Washington county 911 system became overwhelmed and calls for assistance stopped being dispatched. For a period of time, we were solely reliant upon citizens flagging down apparatus in the streets to tell us there neighbors house was flooded up to the second floor, and they we still inside.

As the State Emergency Operations Center was stood up, calls began to be dispatched again in the normal manor. However, the work force now experienced a surge with numerous outstanding calls. As we become immediately inundated and overwhelmed with calls, I established an ad hoc excel database to track progress. Being that I was the only “tech-savy” person in the department, I was taken off of response and went to solely managing our resources and tracking our assets.

Hurricane Ivan not only demonstrated the failure of the communications network, it also demonstrated the success of flood plane mitigation. Some twenty five years ago, the borough in which I reside received federal grant money to deepen a transient (no lakes or pooling areas) waterway dividing the borough in half. Most residents that experienced flooding conditions in my immediate area were victims of soil oversaturation and not a river system that overran its banks. However, in the neighboring community who had not been a beneficiary of the waterway dredging, homeowners were victims of a fast moving river that immediately overran its banks and in some instances, completely demolished their house.

Lessons learned from this incident were never formally observed or recorded at the local or county level. A personal view of the failures in this disaster (and lack of motivation to generate a LL) are rooted in causation that Pennsylvania is a commonwealth state, with each city, borough, and or township are entitled to their own system of providing government services.

Although I have moved out of the southwestern PA area, I continue to feed back information on the progress made by others, specifically the state of Virginia, also a commonwealth state. The state of Virginia, in my mind, has a recipe for success by regionalizing their government provided services at the city, county, and state level. Acknowledging that this system is not without flaw, I believe it to be a model to mimic for the state of Pennsylvania to potentially avoid the failures experienced during the 2004 Hurricane Ivan disaster.