Lesson From Hurricane Katrina

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina’s strike along the Gulf Coast in August 2005, several obvious lessons were learned for the benefit of the nation’s public safety communications centers:

Your ability to fully staff the comm center will be degraded by the effect of the disaster on your employees. Off-duty employees may feel compelled to evacuate the area with their families, and not return to duty. On-duty may leave work, and those who remain may not be effective while thinking about their loved ones in jeopardy.

After Hurricane Katrina, many dispatchers didn’t report back to work because they were either injured, taking care of their families, or possibly dead—they became victims of the emergency itself, and not just public safety workers assisting victims.

It is essential to develop a region or state-wide mutual aid program for staffing the comm center. Several states have “tactical” dispatcher programs that are becoming the model for dispatcher mutual aid programs.

The performance of the remaining staff will be affected by the incident, their emotional involvement and the stress. Employees who remain at work will suffer from the stress of working long hours without any amenities or emotional support for their personal loss (homes, mementos, family members, etc.).

There are numerous news reports of Gulf region dispatchers working nearly in tears, or breaking down while on-duty from the strain of the situation. The initial days of the incident may not include critical incident stress resources to assist the dispatchers with their feelings.

The scheduling, rotation and relief of your working dispatchers should be a primary concern during a prolonged, large-scale disaster. You should expect for dispatchers to work fewer hours immediately after the disaster occurs, to rotate them among assignments, and to provide stress-free relief periods for them, preferably at an unaffected location.

The communications infrastructure will be adversely affected. No matter how many pre-plans you make, some telephone, radio and computer capabilities will be degraded (no ANI/ALI, single channel radio, no access to law enforcement databases), or the systems will fail completely.

In New Orleans, the 800 MHz trunked radio system failed as remote receivers and transmitters lost power. A back-up transmitter atop the SuperDome failed when its generator stopped working—its radiator had been pierced by flying debris and all the coolant leaked out, overheating the generator and stalling it. The 911 systems in the region, dependent upon the local telephone networks, stopped working as central offices were either flooded or knocked out by power failures.

Portable radio systems and command posts provide the best defense against a wide-area disaster, when even adjacent agencies that normally provide your back-up services might be knocked out. You should have some type of satellite voice communications capability (Iridium, Globalstar), and procedures for manually handling unit status and incident dispatching.

Your communications facility may be damaged or at risk, and you will have to move to an alternate facility, with necessarily degraded capabilities. The effects of a natural disaster or other incident could be far-reaching in their ability to make your center uninhabitable: no power or phone service, flooding, physical damage, radiological or biological contamination, proximity to other hazards, etc.

Many comm centers suffered physical damage from Hurricane Katrina, but others were rendered unusable only because of flooding or no power. New Orleans relocated their 911 and dispatching operations to a hotel ballroom, and later to a docked cruise liner.

Your agency should have procedures for handling a full relocation of dispatching operations to a facility that was never intended as a back-up site. This would include installing the necessary radio, telephone and office equipment to handle the job, along with accommodations for personnel (chairs, tables, cots, sanitation, etc.).

The utility systems may not be available, both immediately and for an extended period. Your back-up power systems should be capable of handling basic functions during an initial utility power outage, but also for a long-term outage caused by infrastructure damage (down lines, poles and towers). Water, gas and sewer systems may also be affected, which will degrade your ability to sustain your staff during an extended emergency (no electricity or gas for cooking, no water for toilets, etc.).

The electric power network in the Gulf region was hit hard by the hurricane, knocking out power initially and for several weeks afterward. Natural gas lines were either shut off or damaged. Water and sewage systems were not operating because of damage to pumps, no electric power or flooding to facilities.

Besides the normal back-up power, water and gas you have normally arranged, your agency should be aware of sources of power available from outside the region, either from government or private companies.

The ability of the federal government is extremely limited in supplying assistance to public safety communications centers. There is no federal-level mutual aid program for comm centers, so you will have to depend upon neighboring agencies or states to provide trained dispatchers for additional staffing, relief and administrative duties. Several states have “tactical” dispatching programs that can provide staffing assistance. However, many of the cross-jurisdictional issues, especially across state boundaries, have not been standardized.

The concept of fire and law enforcement mutual aid is well established, both at the local, state and federal level. However, there is no provision for identifying qualified dispatchers throughout the country, and matching them with needy comm centers. The wide variety of operational procedures and computer systems, and foreign geography also makes it more difficult for dispatchers to report to an unfamiliar agency and to immediately begin effective assistance.

County and state-level mutual aid agreements must include communications center operations, including both standardization of procedures to some level, administration of employee lists, and management of resources before, during and after an incident.

You must have the ability to fully support your working staff for an extended period of time. Their home or apartment may be damaged to uninhabitable, or they may not have any way to travel back-and-forth to the location. They may not have clothes beyond what they are wearing. Those personnel who do stay to work may need a quiet place to sleep and shower, and be provided meals, clothes and sanitation supplies (towels, toothbrush, etc.).

In many cases, Gulf coast dispatchers had no homes to which they could return, and in any case did not have sufficient supplies of their own to sustain themselves for a prolonged period. They were completely dependent upon their employers to provides day-to-day living assistance.

County and state-level emergency operation plan should include provisioning supplies to keep comm centers staffed during and after a disaster, and for an extended period.

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Updated September 26, 2005