A horror-stricken nation has watched for the past week as Oklahoma
City
rescue workers pull the injured and dead from the rubble of the Alfred
P.
Murrah federal building. And as the grieving faces of parents and
spouses
invade our homes on the evening news, it has become easy to wonder,
could it
happen here? What would happen in Austin during a worst case scenario? Imagine
it’s the
middle of February, a few years from now, and instead of the fair
winter
weather we’ve enjoyed this year, the elements have been pounding
Austin. After
weeks of heavy rain, the upper Colorado River lake levels have risen to
dangerous heights, the creeks running through town are swollen, and
some
lowwater crossings are already flooded. Then, suddenly, over a 48-hour
period,
all hell breaks loose.
A torrential downpour forces the Lower Colorado River Authority
(LCRA) to
start releasing water from the lakes, flooding areas along lakes Travis
and
Austin, as well as Town Lake, while Austin’s creeks overflow their
banks. The
temperature drops sharply as the wind gusts up to 20-30 miles per hour,
tearing
power and telephone lines from their poles. The rain freezes into an
ice storm,
blanketing the roads and causing more utility lines to fall. A tractor
trailer
skids into the center median of I-35 downtown, spewing debris across
the
highway and closing both the north- and southbound lanes. A fire breaks
out in
a Southeast Austin apartment complex and spreads quickly. A train
hauling toxic
chemicals derails near South Lamar, threatening to spill its load.
At the worst point, nearly half the city is without power, hundreds
of homes
and businesses are flooded, water mains and home water pipes have burst
all
over town, and our streets and highways, slick with ice, are nearly
impassable,
with auto accidents across the city to prove the point. Two days later,
when
the sun comes out, the water recedes, and the mess starts getting
straightened
out, the news is miraculous: Not one person died in the worst weather
emergency
in Austin history.
The above may be an almost implausible worst-case scenario,
and the
non-existent fatality rate perhaps wishful thinking, but it’s a good
bet that
the folks in Oklahoma that day weren’t expecting a terrorist attack on
their
city either. Thanks to the city’s newly opened Emergency Operation
Center
(EOC), the prospects of the city taking such a hit and coming through
it
relatively unscathed are that much greater.
Long before that fateful, fictional day in February sometime in the
future,
representatives from city public safety agencies (police, fire, EMS)
would
already have gathered with other city and Travis County agencies and
officials
in a large room at the rear of the second floor of city hall on Eighth
Street:
Austin’s EOC. The Office of Emergency Management (OEM) would start
feeding data
to the assembled officials: creek levels, rainfall measurements, the
latest
weather reports. When the situation reaches crisis level, the mayor,
city
manager, and agency heads gather at the EOC and situate themselves
around a
W-shaped table along with their counterparts from Travis County.
Finally, the
mayor declares a disaster and assumes his role as
commander-in-chief.
If this were real life, one might find Mayor Bruce Todd and County
Commissioner Bill Aleshire sitting across from each other, ready to
bury the
political hatchet and direct a coordinated city-county effort to
evacuate
flooded areas, and then transport the evacuees via Capital Metro buses
to
shelter in a number of AISD schools. fire chief Robin Paulsgrove might
confer
with Public Works Director Matthew Kite to make sure there’s sufficient
water
pressure to fight the Southeast Austin apartment fire, then turn to a
team of
Fire, Police,
EMS, and railroad officials to ensure that the
derailment
doesn’t turn into a toxic spill.
Police Chief Elizabeth Watson might then tap Paulsgrove’s shoulder
with a
request for a fire truck at the I-35 tractor trailer accident, while
Travis
County Sheriff Terry Keel positions units at the north and south ends
of the
interstate to divert any traffic from the blocked highway. Decisions
are made,
resources allocated, and operations coordinated. Messages come in on
telephone,
radio, and computer, and go out in the same fashion. In the Public
Information
Office next door, live feeds to TV and radio keep the citizens of
Austin and
Travis County informed. What could have been a far worse disaster is
minimized
by centralized direction, coordination of efforts, and a battery of
predictive
systems, information banks, and communication pathways.
An Evolving Science
In the 1981 Memorial Day floods that left 13 people dead, the City
of Austin
did not have the sort of emergency management resources it does now,
according
to W. Steve Collier, director of the OEM. “There apparently was an
office but
they didn’t get involved in that incident, and they just weren’t too
active.
“In the early days of emergency management, the focus at
the
federal level was basically nuclear attack,” he explains. “There were a
lot of
people who were in these jobs who were retired military. We only get
maybe 35%
of our funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA], but
because
there was this federal tie and there were federal requirements, a lot
of times
they didn’t end up being too responsive to peacetime situations.”
Things are different now. Our new half-million dollar EOC (which
opened in
October) is not a place where Mayor Todd and the council can hunker in
the
bunker during a nuclear attack, if for no other reason than the
building
probably wouldn’t make it. “We would not be in good shape,” says
Collier. But
imagine almost any other calamity that could befall this Central Texas
region,
and the OEM has probably already considered the possibility and is
prepared to
deal with it.
Collier lists OEM’s prime emergency concerns as “flooding, tornados
and
windstorms, hazardous materials incidents, utility outages. There could
be a
whole variety of things.
“For instance, we’ve asked LCRA for a study and evaluation on dam
safety,” he
notes. “One question I have is: If there’s a dam failure, how high
would the
water get in downtown Austin and what kind of things can happen? The
chances,
for example, of Mansfield Dam just crumbling aren’t very high, but
there are
some failure modes that could let loose a lot of water, probably so
much that
it would come up not too far from here. So those are the things you
keep in the
back of your mind.”
Last summer, for instance, the EOC was keeping its sensors peeled for
grass
and wildland fires like those that have plagued California in recent
years.
“Conditions were really ripe for that kind of fire,” Collier
explains.
During the 1980s, the city’s still-nascent EOC was in the Brown
Building on
Eighth Street across from City Hall, but it finally had to relocate
when the
building was closed because it lacked the external fire escape required
by
code. (Ironic, considering that EOC is currently a division of the fire
department.) By 1991, the facility was operating out of Fire
Headquarters on
Festival Beach Road when it dealt with its largest disaster to date:
the
flooding in December of that year.
“We had a lot of hazardous material incidents,” explains Collier.
“Town Lake
came up, a barge broke loose and was floating downriver and we thought
it was
going to hit the dam. The airport had fuel tanks floating up out of the
ground
threatening to spill. We had water rescues, utility outages, and
sheltering
operations going on.”
With all that happening, the EOC’s cramped quarters at Fire
Headquarters
“obviously weren’t big enough to handle what was going on,” Collier
recalls.
When the city’s Computer Center was moved from the second floor of City
Hall,
OEM took over the space and renovated it into the current EOC.
Sim City 1995
R. Scott Swearengin, Assistant Director of OEM, shows me the SoftRisk
computer
program that helps his team quickly gather and disperse information
about an
area of the city where an incident may occur. He asks me where I live:
Travis
Heights. “Okay, let’s say a 747 decided to land in your backyard out
there.” He
takes the mouse and – boom! – wipes out the blocks surrounding my home.
“It
might be a tornado, flooding, or other hazard that takes over this
area. And we
want to know more about what the hazards are in that area.”
SoftRisk displays the nearest fire station, as well as such critical
public
facilities as schools, day care centers, and nursing homes that might
need
evacuation. With a click of the mouse button, the information about the
incident is faxed to the commander in the field and to any other
appropriate
party. During all this, the computer image is projected onto a screen
in front
of the command table for everyone to see. It’s much like the computer
game Sim
City, except it’s our city, for real.
In addition to the SoftRisk program, they will soon be hooking up
with a
NEXRAD system – “the next generation in Doppler radar,” explains
Collier – out
of New Braunfels, to monitor weather patterns. A large mounted map on
the west
side of the room monitors computerized rainfall, and stream level
measurement
systems operated by Stormwater Management and Public Works. Green
lights denote
rain sensors, red ones stream levels. When they start to flash, it’s
time to
boogie.
“We have rapidly reacting watersheds,” Collier notes. “You
need to
keep track of rain data, because by the time the creeks come up,
there’s
already enough water going into those creeks that it’s almost too late
to get
out there.” In the last 15 years or so, Collier estimates, some 100
people in
the Central Texas area have died after getting stuck in flooded,
low-water
crossings, making it a primary local hazard.
Each place at the command table has a special direct phone
line to
a division’s operations center. As well, there are fax and modem lines,
radio
equipment, and another computer that will hook up with the city’s 911
Computer
Aided Dispatch system at Police Headquarters. A bank of carrels at the
east end
of the room provides work space for city and county department
assistants, and
outside agencies like the Red Cross and the National Guard. A small
room at one
end of the center can serve as a 16-operator hot-line phone bank, while
another
warren at the other end allows amateur radio operators (HAMs) to come
in, hook
up with external antennae, and offer their assistance in an emergency.
TV
monitors enable everyone present to view news reports and live feeds
from an
incident, and the Center boasts a collection of maps and aerial photos
to aid
them in their work. If power goes out, a 250-kilowatt diesel-fired
generator
kicks in. At any time, the center can fit up to 50 people working on an
incident.
“People will come in here and think it’s Star Wars when they
look at
stuff on projectors,” Swearengin says. “But when you come down to it,
it’s some
technology, it’s some phones, computers, and a projector. There’s
nothing
mysterious about it. It’s just a place where we can all get together
and work
on things.”
To Protect and Serve
“So often, Emergency Management is confused with the crazy people
in the
basement waiting for something weird to happen,” chuckles Swearengin,
“when in
reality there is a lot of day-to-day coordination among the safety
forces,
maybe not the big one we all plan for, but those major events that come
along
from time to time that we all need to coordinate better on.” Even when
there
are no emergencies, OEM holds its own drills and works with other city
agencies
on their emergency procedures.
“Emergency Operation Centers are very common. Most major communities
have
EOCs, sometimes several of them,” Collier says. Austin’s OEM employs
five
staffers: two planners and a secretary, in addition to Collier and
Swearengin.
Both men have backgrounds in EMS work (Swearengin is also a longtime
HAM
operator), helping the Austin OEM follow the national trend of being
“customer
oriented,” as opposed to the more military approach of the Cold War
years.
Collier says his department runs on an annual $300,000-plus budget (not
including personnel costs), and has included Travis County in the
center “for a
pretty modest cost,” allowing for greater regional coordination.
Austin’s new EOC, says Collier, is “fairly advanced, at this point.
I think
we’ve been behind the curve, but we’re getting close to state of the
art.
Others have more support capabilities: showers, bunkrooms, multiple-day
food
supplies. Right now if we’re going
to be here for 24 hours or more,
we dial
out
for pizza.”
Although the EOC is something the city has but probably hopes it
never has to
fully use, it does stay busy. Generally, Collier notes, there’s at
least one
major incident a year (although the new EOC has yet to be used for one)
and
some 20 or so smaller activations as well. In recent months, the EOC
has been
involved in coordinating such basic tasks as road closures by helping
to
disseminate information to the media.
“It’s a very important function of the government that you only hear
about a
couple of times per year, but it still has to be there,” concludes
Swearengin.
Or, as Collier sums it up, “It’s low probability, high risk.”
This article appears in April 28 • 1995 and April 28 • 1995 (Cover).