South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
DOJ coordinated efforts from Hyatt during storm
Inside a conference room at the Hyatt Place near Orlando International Airport, up to 25 federal agents were working at any given time, keeping tabs on
19 quick-response teams in communities throughout Florida impacted by Hurricane Ian.
Dry-erase boards were posted along every wall, with many detailing where the teams were stationed — mostly in Ft. Myers, where Ian had its biggest impact. Teams had been set up there days before the storm made landfall. By then, makeshift hospitals had been established wherever they could, with security and search-and-rescue teams ready.
In Orlando, where the storm passed with lesser strength, Emergency Support Function #13, or ESF-13, was ready for anything.
“Usually we’re out catching bad guys. This is about helping the community after a disaster,” said Jim Balthazar, senior special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the agency that since
2008 has coordinated
ESF-13 for the U.S. Department of Justice.
What happens inside that conference room, ESF-13’s incident command post, is what many in the public don’t see as the 330 agents from 13 agencies under the DOJ work on the ground following natural disasters.
Made up of agencies like the IRS and the Bureau of Land Management along with more traditional law enforcement bodies like the FBI, ESF-13 provides security for teams offering medical assistance, run by Health and Human Services, and search-and-rescue missions overseen by the Department of Homeland Security. Those teams make up ESFs
8 and 9, respectively. “These teams come in
from all over the country, and we go as force protection for them,” said Special Agent Dan Marchant, of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “They can’t set that up without security there while they do their work.”
A board labeled “Incident Action Plan” details where every team will be stationed and what their assignments are. Their movements are monitored and noted by the 25 working in the room, many retired law enforcement working as contractors for the DOJ.
“It’s our entire operation in one document,” said Special Agent Bob Patrizi, regional law enforcement coordinator and incident commander for ESF-13. “It includes safety concerns, weather patterns — it’s everything.”
Many at the command post and in the field had just completed missions in Puerto Rico, where Hurricane Fiona reopened wounds caused by Hurricane Maria exactly five years earlier. Most also have
worked through countless other disasters, like wildfires.
To many, the scope of Ian’s impact — billions of dollars in damage, at least 89 lives lost and hundreds more displaced by the winds and flooding — is comparable to Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
“It’s probably the biggest storm I worked since Harvey, and my biggest as a coordinator,” Patrizi said.
Harvey, which made landfall in Texas and Louisiana as a Category 4 storm and caused more than 100 deaths, prompted several changes to how ESF-13 operates. According to an inspector general report assessing the federal response to the storm, communication breakdowns and a lack of situational awareness ahead of the storm hampered the initial federal response.
The report also noted a need for policy that more clearly established roles and missions while avoiding duplicating efforts between agencies.
“There was an initial period of confusion and delay, lasting about 1 day, which resulted from a lack of knowledge about each other’s response functions and the relationship between the [senior federal law enforcement officer] and ESF-13,” the report said. The ATF, in a letter responding to the report, said it had since provided comprehensive training to improve its response.
“With Harvey, we were more spread out and with the communications channels and the number of people working, it was difficult to coordinate what was going,” said Rob McCloy, ESF-13’s national coordinator who visited the Orlando command post Tuesday. “... Now it’s more efficient. We know where everyone is and what they’re doing at all times.”
Another board in the conference room was set up to list areas of improvement from its Ian response. On Tuesday, that board was mostly blank. But even as the operation is said
to flow more efficiently, ESF-13 had to request more agents three separate times to respond to Ian, which Patrizi said was “more intense than we anticipated.”
“A lot of times the hurricane doesn’t go where we think it’s going or it weakens before it strikes,” Patrizi said. “We would rather err on the side of being prepared.”
There’s no timetable for when these teams will leave Florida, as state and federal authorities continue coordinating relief in Ian’s aftermath. Efforts to help Ian’s victims and their communities recover from the damage are ongoing as others continue searching and counting the dead and injured.
For now, the focus is only on the mission.
“However long it takes,” McCloy said. “When the last team completes their mission, that’s when we will go.”