Emergency Planners Discuss Storm Response

(Host) Each year, emergency planners gather in Stowe for a conference. But Vermont Emergency Management says this weekend's meeting is a chance to talk about what worked, and what didn't, in the emergency response to Tropical Storm Irene.

VPR's Patti Daniels reports.

(Daniels) Mike O'Neil is director of Vermont Emergency management. He says Irene came close to being a perfect doomsday scenario for emergency planners:  One of the computer networks VEM relies on was hit by a cyberattack the day before the storm. Then emergency officials had to evacuate their own command center due to rising floodwaters, but their alternate site at Vermont National Guard headquarters wasn't available.

O'Neil says his office is making changes based on what it learned during Irene:

(O'Neil) "The technology piece is extremely critical to us.  Just the way the state office complex was configured posed some problems for us because some systems we needed were not under our direct control. And that is being rectified as we speak, to harden the facility a little bit more than it was prior."

(Daniels) The state's official emergency response plan is several hundred pages long. And the basic template for a town emergency plan is 30 pages. But as floodwaters raced through southern Vermont, O'Neil says it was preparation, more than the documents themselves, that helped officials make good decisions.

(O'Neil) "Typically a plan is only as good as the first time you run into a wrinkle when you're in the field. So it's good to have the initial plans, but it's not something you guide your operation by on a moment to moment basis when you're in the emergency."

(Daniels) Paul Fraser is the emergency management coordinator in Jamaica, which was temporarily cut off from outside help during Irene. He credits the Windham Regional Commission for pushing him to work out a thorough emergency plan over the last year, and says that plan made a difference in how Jamaica got through the storm.

(Fraser) "The details, of course, were firmly generic. I don't think anybody was expecting the flash flood that hit us. When we plan these things out, we're thinking in terms of snowstorms and power outages."

(Daniels) But Fraser says the planning process prompted him to think through where to locate a command center and shelters, what resources to line up, and what technology would be reliable for communications.  

Fraser says many town officials in his region are paying new attention to what used to be a tired exercise on paper. And Mike O'Neil with Vermont Emergency Management says that's the kind of take-away they want to share at this weekend's conference for emergency coordinators.

For VPR News, I'm Patti Daniels.