Local emergency planning hears about natural disasters

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At the Local Emergency Planning meeting for October, Darrell Wood was the presenter.
He has a military background and now works for Verizon. He travels around the country and restores communications after a disaster has occurred. They move into an area as soon as it’s safe to do so. They are often the only source for communications with their mobile command center. The local emergency teams use the Verizon command center until theirs can be restored. It is a satellite system and a stand alone facility. The team is also haz-mat certified and worked through the anthrax scares at the post offices in New Jersey.
“We go into an area where people have lost their homes and are suffering. We went on the fires in Colorado Springs. One fire burned right up to our Verizon building. We go in and clear buildings. The thing we learned from Sept. 11, 2001 was to trust your own procedures and protocols. Wear your respirators, there were a lot of responders who died because they didn’t wear their respirators. Trust your training and procedures and protocols. We have terrorist training about once a month. There are Syrian refuges who might enter our country. We have power plants here, we could be a terrorist target. Earthquakes could happen here, and have happened in this area. There’s at least one terrorist incident every week. In the shakeout exercise put on by FEMA, they know there are 3,000 hospital beds in Utah, in an earthquake scenario, local resources will be overwhelmed in a big hurry. If an earthquake happens out of the area, then refuges will come here. There must be medical supplies available. Does your family have a plan where to meet?
People get caught in situations without power and without water. Bridges could be unstable after an earthquake. Cities with larger populations will be harder hit. There could be a financial crisis and a human crisis.
“We have fault lines in our area. In California, they have a fault line and eight nuclear power plants are built there.
“Each state has a support team. An advance party response could be sent in 90 minutes. There’s an incident command that takes care of all the Superbowl security,” said Wood.
He went over all the lessons they have learned from the numerous natural disasters that have happened in recent years. After Hurricane Katrina, they learned you should never give out personal information, there were so many scams that cropped up after the hurricane. His group flew to Atlanta and then drove into the destruction. They saw long lines at gasoline stations. Keep your vehicles filled with fuel in case you need to evacuate an area quickly. If manual pumps aren’t available in an electrical outage, you won’t be able to get fuel.
In the Walmarts in the natural disaster areas, everything was gone in 30 minutes. Everyone goes into survival mode and will do what they can to survive and help their family members to survive. If you have a generator, don’t run it at 11 at night and keep the lights on. People will know you’re prepared and might take it from you. “We brought generators into the disaster area, there were bootleg generators for sale that went for $5,000. Use generators that can convert to propane. Keep portable bottles filled with propane.
In an emergency, they will bring up limited bandwidth for temporary communications. In this emergency of Katrina, 65 percent of local law enforcement left to take care of their own families. It may take up to two weeks, before any help comes, if then. You must be prepared to take care of yourself.
After the disaster, the military comes and they are first in command. They will pull in resources as fast as they can. They have Blackwater which is a private military and they are brought in. Wood told they had to be accompanied by two military personnel wherever they went. There were road blocks where you had to be authorized to go beyond. New Orleans is built below sea level. The city was flooded. “There was a body that lay in the road for four days, there just wasn’t enough help. It was a humanity crisis, people were dead and dying in the streets, You could hear gun fire every day, but we didn’t know what was happening. It looked like a war zone. The Superdome was a hazardous place to be, if you didn’t have anywhere to go, they sent you there, they didn’t have any power or water and it was 98 degrees in there, people were trapped in there, there were rapes and murders.
“The federal government isn’t big enough to take care of individuals. People were panicked and in survival mode. In our area, you hope those things wouldn’t happen, people have been taught preparedness, but you just don’t know, when the survival mode kicks in anything could happen. The military confiscated weapons, then the gangs moved in and robbed those people whose guns were confiscated. There were foreign troops that came to help, too from China and Russia.
“Rita happened a month and a half after Katrina. There was better staging. A bridge was going to be closing. There were 100 miles of vehicles waiting to get across that bridge before it closed. The FBI was there and they told us to follow them. They were flying down the road 90 mph and we couldn’t keep up and we lost them. The lines at the gas stations were crazy. Be careful and stick to your plans.
“Train derailments happen a lot. Evacuations are common and there needs to be a place where people can evacuate. Train derailments are very dangerous with chemical spills.
“With Ike there were curfews. Only the cops and the criminals were out after curfew. In some disasters people couldn’t feed their animals. They let them go and they ran the streets in packs and tore into everything and then the police had to worry about dogs. There were also supplies that didn’t get to where it was needed.
“During Hurricane Sandy the first priority they gave us was to bring up Wall Street. It snowed the second day after the hurricane hit. The utility trucks couldn’t come in because they weren’t union and the union workers held them out and people died. Lower Manhattan was flooded. The lower levels of buildings were flooded. Water and diesel mixed in the bottom of these buildings and caused explosions. It corroded copper wire. The next order of business was bringing up the election polling places so people could vote.
“Have cash on hand during an emergency. Fuel is scarce and it goes fast. We brought in diesel generators and powered the large buildings. No civilian services were available for two weeks, the citizens were on their own for at least two weeks. There were still tourists and we had to deal with them. We brought in a fracking unit to separate the diesel from the water in the buildings. There were trashed vehicles in the parking garages.
“Before the tornadoes at Moore, Okla. I was really down on humanity. But after the tornadoes, in Oklahoma, the people were there asking what they could do to help. It restored my faith in humanity. The tornado was three miles wide and six miles long. The tornado happened at 2:30 in the afternoon. The people were not in their homes or more people would have been killed. The homes were leveled. Nice brick homes destroyed. Now they are building storm cellars in their driveway. An elementary school was destroyed and a teacher and two students were killed. It ripped everything. Total houses were ripped from their foundations. It looked like a war zone. People dropped off water and food everywhere. I expect that people here would be helpful in the event of a disaster.
“Be prepared, use wisdom if caught in some of these events. You will suffer, no one is coming to help.
“Verizon will donate services and they are available to help. Contact me and my company and we can help. We are at the disposal of the customers. We have a total incident command system,” said Wood.
Wood recommended everyone have a Go bag ready to thrown in their vehicle and go.
Capt. Kyle Ekker said during the Crandall Canyon mine disaster the local people were very supportive.
“If you’re prepared, you are more proactive and you are able to help others. Is your county ready, if there is an influx of people from the north, should a disaster happen up there,” said Wood.
The meeting was opened for questions. Why did they take the guns away? Wood answered that the mayor said no armed citizens. Who takes care of curfew enforcement? The military is in charge of enforcing curfew.
Capt. Ekker thanked Wood for coming to LEPC and for raising questions about preparedness.
The sheriff’s office will have CERT trainings at the sheriff’s office for all towns that are interested.