Kenneth Miller - Director of Public Works (retired), Village of Mundelein, IL:
Being prepared for a long-term emergency and recovery operation should be done at the same time, right from the beginning. It's important to do that so that you have efficiency and fluency as you move from the response to the recovery operation mode of your event.
You need to document everything. FEMA, insurance companies, even the constituents within your own community, will want to know what was done, when it was done, and how much did it cost to do it.
Try to establish formalized mutual aid agreements and other agreements for other resources that might be needed in an event- especially events that may be more prone to your area, such as near rivers.
Documented agreements are the only way to be reimbursed by either the insurance or FEMA. So it is vitally important to put somebody on documentation from the start, right through the finish.
Review what went right, what went wrong, and be honest about it. Make the changes you can and understand that there are some things that you truly cannot plan or work around.
Most of all, I would say, understand and keep reminding yourself and others as you need to that this too will pass, just like every other bad day. All you can do is focus on making tomorrow better from the lessons you've learned today and yesterday.
Gregg Varner - Director of Solid Waste (retired), County of Charleston, SC:
In 1989, Hurricane Hugo came across the state of South Carolina. Those of us in the local jurisdictions—I was with the City of North Charleston—we spent a good bit of time working with the County of Charleston for managing debris. And we were all a little bit unskilled, you might say. We hadn't had a whole lot of training, but we did get our hands on debris management guides and work through that kind of thing.
The importance of thinking about it from a recovery perspective is when Hurricane Hugo came through, after the cleanup effort was completed, an awful lot of building materials and some tree debris went in the landfill. What we discovered, when it was all said and done, is that the Charleston County Landfill had actually used up 20 years of landfill life as a result of that hurricane coming through.
So, in thinking about recovery, knowing that for us in public works, debris management is a major recovery issue, you've got to ask yourself, "What's the life of my landfill?" Because one hurricane like Hurricane Hugo, taking 20 years, could eat up your landfill life. So, where do you go from there?
John Pennington - Director, Department of Emergency Management, Snohomish County, WA:
One thing for public works entities to remember is that planning is actually becoming a required element of emergency management in order to receive future federal funding.
A good example of this is the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 which required that emergency management departments or jurisdictions develop certain plans before they could receive federal funds after a disaster event. And, slowly but surely, it appears that the federal government is moving the direction by which public works, emergency management, and other critical departments in local state governments are going to be required to continue planning and enhance their planning to be able to receive future federal funds including recovery planning.
Kürt Blomquist - Public Works Director, City of Keene, NH:
In 2005, the city of Keene, we had flooding in our downtown area. Over forty percent of our areas were under four to six feet of water. One of the things we learned in that process was as soon as we started the response, people started asking the questions about what are we going to do with our stuff, our damaged goods? We started talking about, well, what are we going to do with materials that are left beside the road? How are we going to help our residents in beginning the cleaning up? And that process began literally within hours of the EOC activating.
Since that point, we sat down as a department and developed recovery plans, because we've recognized that we need to know, and people need to know, what's going to happen. Whether it's removal of organic debris, trees, limbs, those kind of materials, or if it's going to be materials from houses—grandma's sofa—anything that folks had in the basement.
For at least us in public works, it is a huge, huge operation, and having the right people, at the time that these efforts start, is critical. We've had to identify contractors that have certain capabilities and we have communications with them now that if we get into a situation, they would be available. We've worked with our local hauling company to make sure that they would be available and be willing to support us first in providing packers and other things like that.
This really came home recently with Hurricane Irene. We were very fortunate that we were not hit significantly. But, we had activated our actual recovery and our clean-up plans even before the hurricane hit the area.
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