Hurricane season, pandemic coincide
Possibility of storms adds to concerns of emergency officials
Dealing with multiple disaster threats at the same time is nothing new for Francisco Sanchez.
As a 15-year emergency management veteran for Harris County, Sanchez understands the anxiety tugging at local officials wary of preparing for possible hurricanes while also dealing with the everyday reality of the coronavirus pandemic.
Sanchez also appreciates the instinct that some emergency management officials have to be as detailed as possible in anticipating all sorts of disaster scenarios when social distancing may still be recommended. But as counterintuitive as it might seem, details, he said, can be the enemy of the good when it comes to hurricane preparation.
“Whether you’ve done one disaster or dozens, you know that no plan fully survives its encounter with reality,” said Sanchez, the deputy coordinator for the Harris County Office of Emergency Management. “Develop concepts of operations that allow you to be
flexible and scalable. It will allow you to cover more ground at a time where time is scarce, planning resources are scarce and response resources are scarce.”
The 2020 hurricane season, which starts Monday, is poised to be significantly different than prior years given how the coronavirus outbreak has altered everyday life, including basic disaster planning. The stay-at-home orders that were in place prior to May 1 as well as current social distancing guidelines have forced many emergency management officials to scale back and adjust their typical hurricane season outreach.
Cities and counties that held annual town-hall meetings dispensing advice on evacuation planning and hurricane kits are now planning to do so virtually. First response agencies are adapting rescue protocols to include personal protective equipment. Medical centers and hospitals have to grapple with the possibility of having to evacuate coronavirus patients from hospitals. And residents are being advised to put together hurricane kits now so as not to inundate retail stores with large crowds in the days ahead of a storm.
“Restock that hurricane kit — now is the time to do it when we can maintain that social distancing very easily,” said Jeff Lindner, a meteorologist with the Harris County Flood Control District.
Local-federal relationship
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last week forecast 13 to 19 named storms for the Atlantic hurricane season that starts Monday and ends Nov. 30. Of these, six to 10 storms could become hurricanes with winds of at least 74 mph, including three to six major hurricanes with winds of at least 111 mph, classifying them as Category 3,4or5.
The first storm of the Atlantic season might develop this week when Tropical Storm Amanda, an East Pacific disturbance that made landfall near Guatemala on Sunday morning, could move into the Gulf of Mexico after dissipating in Central America. If Amanda’s remnants move back over water, conditions appear likely for redevelopment of the system, according to the National Weather Service.
What hurricane season means for the Houston region is largely educated guesswork. The region tends to receive a direct hurricane hit every 12 to 15 years, the last being from Hurricane Ike in 2008.
Hurricane Harvey in 2017 made landfall closer to Corpus Christi and then traveled to the Houston region, dumping more than 50 inches of rain on parts over several days, leading to catastrophic flooding.
But dealing with the perennial natural-disaster threat has provided state and local officials with valuable experience that many hope will give them an advantage in the event of a major storm this year. The state’s General Land Office, for instance, forged strong relationships with key federal officials in order to expedite aid and disaster-response resources from Washington.
“We’ve had fairly robust communication ongoing since Hurricane Harvey, so there isn’t a need to really step up additional communication because it’s already there,” said Brittany Eck, a spokeswoman for the General Land Office.
“We have these existing relationships that we’ve been building over the last few years.”
Harvey’s devastation also prompted Harris County voters to pass a $2.5 billion flood infrastructure bond in 2018 designed to protect the area from future storms. Much of that work, which includes more than 200 active construction sites building detention basins, channel improvements and home buyouts, has continued uninterrupted, according to the county flood control district.
Earlier this month, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo unveiled a stormwater detention basin that will help control the flooding of White Oak Bayou.
In lens of pandemic
Smaller cities and counties are taking Sanchez’s advice to focus on meeting critical needs leading up to a hurricane. In Galveston, that means ensuring that the list of vulnerable, mostly elderly residents who registered for the city’s “need a ride” program is updated and that they can be evacuated with plenty of time to maintain adequate social distancing.
“It’s going to take us a little extra time to load those folks and to check their temperatures and to make sure that everything’s done properly for their safety,” said Mark Morgan, Galveston’s chief of emergency management. “We’re thinking we may need to move our evacuation timeline up 12 hours for that reason.”
First responders involved in rescue and evacuation operations during a hurricane will likely be outfitted with personal protective equipment such as masks and gloves. However, Alan Spears, deputy emergency management coordinator for Fort Bend County, emphasized that saving a life during a hurricane would be prioritized over maintaining a safe distance due to the coronavirus.
“The bottom line is if somebody’s house is about to flood, and if we know, say, a neighborhood or somebody on the river is about to flood and we order an evacuation, the last thing we’re probably going to worry about at that time is going to be COVID,” Spears said.
Some area hospitals began planning for this dual-threat disaster scenario well before the coronavirus emerged. The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston started discussions two years ago around hypothetical situations involving a virus that limited the number of available beds at receiving hospitals during a major storm. The Seton Family of Hospitals in the Austin area would be first in line to receive evacuated patients from UTMB, but if beds at those hospitals are full, there are 11 other hospitals in Texas that have the bed capacity.
“In the past two years, we’ve actually been taking real patient census numbers and running them through this process to find a receiving hospital for (evacuated) patients on a given day,” said Mike Mastrangelo, UTMB’s director of institutional preparedness.
Sheltering is another major piece of hurricane response that will have to be adapted to coronavirus conditions. The Texas Division of Emergency Management has been working both with local officials and not-for-profit and private shelter providers to prepare hurricane shelter hubs differently, with enough space for social distancing and frequent sanitation. That work includes identifying alternative “noncongregate” shelters such as hotels, camp sites and college dormitories rather than having residents evacuate to farther-flung towns and cities, potentially bringing the virus with them.
“If people have to leave their home and shelter somewhere else, our preference is going to be that people do noncongregate settings,” Sanchez said.
Communicating all of the various shifting disaster protocols to the public will be a challenge, Sanchez said. But one upside of more people working from home is the uptick in audience numbers for the Harris County Office of Emergency Management’s virtual briefings, he said. Working remotely has been a learning curve for county staff, but Sanchez believes it could prove beneficial if a storm hits unexpectedly with county workers scattered at various locations.
“For us, virtual (meetings) was a learning curve but something we were able to sort of address,” he said, “and I think certainly in disasters moving forward, pandemic or not, I think those lessons will be valuable.”