Response policies guide actions undertaken during and in the immediate aftermath of a tsunami, storm surge, or other natural hazard events. The most immediate response is activating warning systems, evacuating residents, and activating the emergency plan (if there is one available). With sufficient warning time, it may also be possible to pre-position personnel and supplies that will be needed for recovery efforts in areas adjacent to those likely to be affected by the tsunami or storm surge.
Immediately following the passing of the hazard event, the scope of the disaster becomes evident, and response activities expand considerably. It is important for governmental staff and others to follow their assigned responsibilities according to the EOP. For emergency managers, the most urgent need is search and rescue. Locating victims and providing medical treatment needs to be accomplished as quickly as possible. Search and rescue teams also may be responsible for addressing dangerous conditions left in the aftermath of the disaster, such as dangling live wires and gas leaks. The emergency needs to be assessed and updated regularly as new information becomes available and the situation on the ground changes.
While many people and organizations are eager to help in search and rescue activities, numerous challenges occur during this tense period. For example, volunteers from outside the area might have a hard time locating victims or knowing the most urgent needs of local people or communities. Using real-time tools can help address this issue. Disaster victims and other local people should be encouraged to use Twitter, Facebook, or other social media to post search and rescue information. The GPS locations of these social media posts can then be used to create real-time crisis maps, which can help inform rescue personnel which areas to concentrate on. Lack of coordination among organizations from both inside and outside the locale might also occur, and this can waste valuable time – for example, by searching the same place several times for victims. To address this problem, large-scale disasters need an operations office to coordinate the rescue teams. An example of the challenges of search and rescue during the response to Hurricane Katrina is shown in Box 2, taken directly from the White House archives.
After Hurricane Katrina made landfall, rising floodwaters in New Orleans stranded thousands on rooftops, requiring a massive civil search and rescue operation. The Coast Guard, FEMA Urban Search and Rescue (US&R) Task Forces, and DOD forces, in concert with State and local emergency responders from across the country, courageously combined to rescue tens of thousands of people. With extraordinary ingenuity and tenacity, Federal, State, and local emergency responders plucked people from rooftops while avoiding urban hazards not normally encountered during a waterborne rescue.
Yet many of these courageous lifesavers were put at unnecessary risk by a structure that failed to support them effectively. The overall search and rescue effort demonstrated the need for greater coordination between US&R, the Coast Guard, and military responders who, because of their very different missions, train and operate in very different ways. For example, Urban Search and Rescue (US&R) teams had a particularly challenging situation since they are neither trained nor equipped to perform water rescue. Thus, they could not immediately rescue people trapped by the floodwaters.
Furthermore, lacking an integrated search and rescue incident command, the various agencies were unable to effectively coordinate their operations. This meant that multiple rescue teams were sent to the same areas while leaving others uncovered. When successful rescues were made, there was no formal direction on where to take those rescued. Too often, rescuers had to leave victims at drop-off points and landing zones that had insufficient logistics, medical, and communications resources, such as atop the I-10 cloverleaf near the Superdome.
The Department of Homeland Security should lead an interagency review of current policies and procedures to ensure the effective integration of all Federal search and rescue assets during disaster response.
As the tsunami or storm surge disaster unfolds, emergency workers need to help make sure survivors have access to water, food, shelter, medical care, and sanitation. Depending on the scale and location of the disaster, each of these needs may present significant logistical challenges. People displaced from their homes have no access to these essential needs, and even families whose homes were not destroyed may not have water (due to contamination or pipeline disruption) or food (due to supply chain interruption and loss of refrigeration from electricity outages). The number of injured may exceed the capacity of existing medical care facilities, and those facilities themselves may be damaged, destroyed, or without power in the wake of a tsunami or storm surge. Damage to water and sewage infrastructure may also create a risk of outbreaks of diseases such as cholera, which emphasizes the need for repairing critical infrastructure as quickly as possible.
In the early hours of August 27, 2020, Hurricane Laura made landfall as a category 4 storm on the coast of Southwestern Louisiana, near the Texas border. This coastal area is sparsely populated, with the town of Cameron (population around 400) close to the shoreline and in the direct path. The industrial city of Lake Charles (population 80,000+) sits just 30 miles inland across flat, marshy terrain with direct water connections to the Gulf. Laura hit Lake Charles almost directly, packing winds of close to 150 miles per hour and leaving a path of destruction. Lake Charles and neighboring Westlake are home to several oil refineries and chemical plants. Oil refineries must be shut down with the approach of a storm to prevent hazardous results such as explosions, fires, and leaks. A chlorine manufacturing plant did catch fire and leak gases into the air. Laura’s storm surge was predicted to be up to 20 feet, and the warnings used words like “unsurvivable” to try to convince coastal residents to heed the evacuation warnings. It appears that: 1. Most residents did heed the warnings, and 2. Laura’s measured surge did not reach the predicted height at landfall.
NOAA’s water level gauges available on the site: NOAA Tides and Currents - Inundation Dashboard [6]registered close to 10 feet at Calcasieu Pass. There were no operable gauges immediately east 0f the Calcasieu Pass gauge, so the actual maximum storm surge will be determined by analyzing high-water marks using field methods. This will probably reveal higher water levels to the east of the eye of the hurricane. There have been no drowning deaths reported to date, although 14 deaths have been attributed to Laura, with 8 of those due to carbon monoxide poisoning when gas-powered electrical generators were used in closed spaces. An additional 4 deaths were attributed to falling trees. There is no doubt that it could have been worse, but many harrowing tales are emerging. Perhaps the most vivid have been told by the fishermen who stayed with their boats sheltering in the bayous near Lake Charles, connected to Calcasieu Pass. These seasoned watermen feared for their lives and helped each other survive as they watched boats come apart and sink, even as they sat in port. Amazingly, everyone survived. Meanwhile, thousands of families evacuated ahead of the storm, heeding the mandatory evacuation orders.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has hit Louisiana hard, the state provided a system by which evacuees were provided shelter in hotel rooms, rather than congregate settings of traditional shelters. Baton Rouge and New Orleans were the two main destinations. In New Orleans, evacuees, some arriving by state-chartered buses, and others in private vehicles, had to register at a central location before being assigned a room. Phone and text numbers were made available to obtain information. Electronic message boards on the I-10 entering New Orleans displayed a number to call for assistance. By Monday after Hurricane Laura’s Thursday landfall, all rooms were filled, with more than the 9,000-person capacity in New Orleans having been reached. Other people found shelter with relatives, friends, or found their own accommodation elsewhere.
It is worth noting here that Louisiana’s emergency planning and response has had plenty of practice in recent years. In our case studies, we look at the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, almost exactly 15 years before Laura. In September 2005, Hurricane Rita also hit the same communities as Laura did 15 years later. Not only have the state, parish, and municipal government Emergency Operation Plans been refined and developed over these years, but the residents of coastal Louisiana have lots of experience in planning and response on a personal and family level. This does not diminish the trauma and hardship felt when displaced from your home, not knowing if it has been destroyed or not.
In addition to helping people get out of the way of a major hurricane, what does the immediate response look like when the state EOP is put into practice? The first step is to mobilize first responders from around the state to perform search and rescue in the affected communities. This includes many units, including fire-fighters, EMS and other medical personnel, and state agencies such as the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, with boats, aircraft, and helicopters available. On a federal level, the National Guard and the Coast Guard are deployed. In addition, non-governmental organizations including the Red Cross are on the ground to distribute needed supplies to survivors.
Typically, the hurricane leaves large areas without power. This is highly predictable, so power companies deploy personnel before the storm makes landfall and stage thousands of trucks and linemen from within the state and neighboring states to secure electrical lines and begin repairing them as soon as the storm has passed. In addition, other infrastructure such as water supply and sewerage must be repaired before a community is livable again.
Private citizens also participate in the search and rescue operations, with Louisiana’s fleet of private boats pressed into service by the now-famous “Cajun Navy”, who made their debut in 2016 after the devastating floods in Baton Rouge and assisted in Houston after Hurricane Harvey’s floods in 2017. Private citizens can also help by making donations of needed items and money to charities assisting those affected by the storm. The importance of charitable and non-profit organizations at these times cannot be overstated, as it takes time for government funds and relief to be released.
As in the preparedness phase of the emergency management cycle, emergency managers, rescue team members, and medical service providers must be sensitive to the cultural norms and religious laws of the victims to avoid adding further stress during disaster response. For instance, some cultures require unmarried men and women to live separately, so disaster emergency staff could create significant trauma by asking men and women to stay in the same quarters. Emergency workers could also cause stress if they provided pork products to strict Muslim or Orthodox Jewish victims, whose religions strictly forbid the consumption of pork. Racial and ethnic issues might also come into play during disaster response. Emergency shelters also need to be sensitive when sheltering people of different races and ethnicities. In these and other potentially difficult cultural and social circumstances, emergency managers, staff, and volunteers must be ready to coordinate among people with varying backgrounds, needs, and expectations.
In sum, all disaster responses require coordination, cooperation, and cultural sensitivity, but the complexity of, and challenges presented by, the response effort increases significantly with the size of the disaster. The case of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami – one of the greatest disasters of all time, with an enormous, unprecedented response required of the international community to address a disaster that affected numerous developing countries with varying languages, cultures, religions, and levels of development – demonstrates this complexity. Emergency response policies at all scales need to recognize and account for complexity.
Links
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crews_Damage_from_Tsunami_American_Samoa.jpg
[2] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
[3] http://irevolution.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/yolandaph-crisis-map-2.png
[4] http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/reports/katrina-lessons-learned/chapter5.html
[5] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SH-60B_helicopter_flies_over_Sendai.jpg
[6] https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/inundationdb/