New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
City prepares for the worst with response exercises
NEW HAVEN — Hope for the best, prepare for the worst — that’s what members of the city’s unified command team practiced Wednesday morning as they fought a fictional hurricane.
City employees, emergency personnel and others sat in front of computer monitors in the Emergency Operations Center as they participated in the 2018 Governor’s Emergency Planning and Preparedness Initiative exercise.
In such a severe weatherrelated incident like the fictional Hurricane Cora, Rick Fontana, director of operations for the Office of Emergency Management, said they utilize everybody’s expertise, whether it be fire and police or Public Works and the parks department.
“We know it works when people can communicate with one another,” Fontana said. “We try to have everyone operating as a unified command so there’s never that lacking of a subject matter expert in a particular field.”
As members of the unified command team, Fontana said everyone comes together to make decisions. For City Engineer Giovanni Zinn , he said he’s most concerned about infrastructure and flooding.
“We do a lot of analysis on the areas that will flood versus not flood. We have a new (geographic information system) that lets us fine-tune pretty easily what the potential flooding could be,” he said.
With that analysis, Zinn said the Engineering Department then can provide Public Works and other departments with information about what roads to shut down and when.
Despite the strengths of the unified command team, the city still makes mistakes. During Tropical Storm Irene, Fontana said the city had counted on the Red Cross to open its shelters, not expecting the humanitarian organization to be inundated. Instead, city employees had to open its shelters themselves, something Fontana said they weren’t prepared to do.
He said the Red Cross was stretched thin during the tropical storm, not having the necessary resources to undertake opening multiple shelters throughout Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont.
“They didn’t have enough assets. We learned that lesson the hard way when we had nobody to open shelters and run them,” Fontana said
Due to those missteps, the city has learned and improved the way it will handle future storms. If the city had to activate and open its shelters, it could do it with city personnel, according to Fontana.
“We have not always made right decisions. We’ve made some wrong decisions, and we’ve learned after making a bad decision. We’ve learned our lesson, so we don’t do it in the next storm,” Fontana said.
If, for example, Hurricane Cora was real, Fontana said he believes the city would be adequately prepared to face anything the storm threw at them, such as a utility truck running off the road, hitting a group of pedestrians and causing multiple causalities.
In this incident, Fire
Chief John Alston said the fire department would use vehicles designed to drive in flood conditions and rescue the injured. The department would then coordinate with American Medical Response to set up a secondary location at higher ground, where the ambulances would then transport the injured to area hospitals. From there, he said the families or next of kin would be notified.
If those injured were students from Yale University or Southern Connecticut State University, Alston said he would reach out to a liaison officers to notify both universities’ representatives at the EOC. Subsequently, he said the public information officer would provide an update to the press when it was appropriate.
“The reason we practice is to identify areas of weakness, but it also gives people the opportunity to test, not only themselves, but test tools we have for communication, not just from a local standpoint, but a regional and statewide perspective,” Fontana said. “We need to understand the resources that are needed, the emergency response, the preparedness and mitigation steps, all from a local standpoint, and really to make sure New Haven is ready and can handle what comes her way.”