Hurricane Response

The Essentials Newsletter, Thirtieth Edition

In an article published on September 26, 2024, in the Wall Street Journal (written by Joe Barrett, Deborah Acosta, and Ginger Adams Otis) regarding the imminent landfall of Category 4 Hurricane Helene:

Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell said Thursday afternoon that…residents in the storm’s path should listen to their local officials. She said there were emergency personnel in place across the states and that [President] Biden has approved emergency declarations for Florida, Georgia and North Carolina.

[Florida Governor] DeSantis said Wednesday that thousands of power and utility linemen were preparing for the storm’s arrival. He told residents to be prepared for power outages and warned them to obey evacuation orders, especially those living in areas at risk of storm surge.”

The wind alone generated by this particular hurricane is expected to reach 140 miles per hour, a rate that is difficult to wrap my mind around. It must sound and feel like a freight train at top speed bearing down on you. For those in Florida and the other states expected to be impacted, I hope and pray all survive and that the damage is manageable.?

In this edition of The Essentials, I’ll discuss what I know of the “behind-the-scenes” efforts to respond to major storms such as hurricanes and the lessons critical infrastructure (CI) sectors have learned, and continue to learn, about such response. Before I do so, as you may have come to expect of this newsletter, I’ll take a brief detour to look back at the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history, the 1900 Great Galveston hurricane that landed in Galveston, TX.?

According to Wikipedia, this hurricane “left between 6,000 and 12,000?fatalities in the United States; the number most cited in official reports is 8,000.”?This is even more jaw-dropping when put in the context of the total population of Galveston, which was just 38,000 at the time. This hurricane was subsequently categorized as a 4, with no warning and a devastating water surge.?

My father was born and raised in Houston and Tyler, Texas, and growing up, I visited Houston often to see my grandmother, Patsy Ditto, and my extended family on both my father’s and mother’s sides. We would periodically head to Galveston for a boat ride or to spend some time on the beach. Over the years, I heard about “the great hurricane” that devastated the original town of Galveston, but it wasn’t until I read Erik Larson’s book, “Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History,” several years ago, that I fully appreciated the significance. Larson published his book in the year 2000, 100 years after the Great Hurricane, but his research and writing give the events a timeless feel.

Larson focused on the true story of Isaac Cline, the U.S. Weather Bureau’s resident meteorologist in Galveston who failed to understand nature’s warning signs until it was too late.?And that leads me back to more recent times. While our understanding of hurricanes has improved exponentially through satellite monitoring and ongoing data analysis, the specifics can still vary on both sides of the equation – some do not end up being as significant as initially predicted while others end up more so. Having said that, improvements in detection, monitoring, evacuation processes, and building and infrastructure strength have combined to minimize fatalities from hurricanes, for the most part. Hurricane Katrina is a glaring exception to this downward trend, with close to 1,800 people having lost their lives to it in 2005, about half of those in New Orleans, according to history.com . Sadly, the levee infrastructure in New Orleans was insufficient, evacuation planning was lacking, and post-storm response was mismanaged. Many lessons have been learned from the Great Galveston Hurricane and Hurricane Katrina, among other major hurricane events throughout the years, about how to prevent loss of life as much as possible.?

But it was Superstorm Sandy – a major cyclone and Nor’easter combined that caused unexpectedly serious damage to the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic in late October 2012 – that spurred several CI sectors to seek better alignment with each other and the federal government to improve severe storm response and recovery. Floridians and other southerners may at this point be wondering why the focus on a Northeastern/Mid-Atlantic storm when they have taken the brunt of most major hurricanes in our history. But that’s the point. The Southeast is more prepared and they have been upping their game for many years – hardening of electric utility assets (steel poles, etc.), extensive planning and pre-positioning utility workers from other states that are available for what is known as “mutual aid” (more on that later), and lots of coordination amongst emergency workers and CI sectors via emergency operations centers, typically run out of the governor’s office.

Contrastingly, Superstorm Sandy hit areas that typically don’t get that kind of severe weather (other kinds, but not that kind) and they were not as prepared as their southern brethren are. The storm hit toward the end of the season and, while it was being tracked from its inception, through the Caribbean and Northward, it took an unexpected and devastating turn into New Jersey when it met that cold Nor’easter (according to Brittanica). While 147 people lost their lives from this storm, the infrastructure damage cost close to $72 billion and the logistical challenges to ensuring normalcy was restored from an infrastructure perspective were significant.?

As a senior executive at the American Public Power Association at the time, I was involved with or privy to many of the high-level discussions happening in the industry and government to facilitate response, especially to get electricity restored. As I recall, there were challenges related to electrifying gas stations to ensure transportation fuel, there were challenges related to workers and labor union versus non-labor union coordination, there were logistical challenges related to housing electric lineworkers, there was some red tape from the government related to moving crews and equipment, there were concerns initially about ensuring that financial services were available to both citizens and CI sectors, and the list goes on and on. The good news is that President Obama and his senior leaders at various agencies encouraged communications and brought in the CI sectors as partners to help resolve these challenges.

In the electric sector, we began to partner more heavily with each other – the various business models, such as rural electric cooperatives, public power utilities, and investor-owned utilities, enhanced their own internal coordination, and cooperation amongst each other, thereafter.?We also enhanced our relationships and communications with other CI sectors, such as the telecom and financial services sectors, and, of course, we coordinated more deliberately with the federal government. In the electric sector, those efforts resulted in a reworking of our “sector coordinating council,” to interface with the Department of Energy in advance of and during these storm events and to better coordinate on other national level matters impacting the sector, such as cybersecurity. More work is needed to break down silos amongst various impacted sectors, but progress has been made in the intervening years (over a decade now!).

Which brings me back to current day, with Hurricane Helene having just hit Florida and many areas of the southeast. With this storm now in the forefront, I want to leave you with a glimpse of how the electric sector manages hurricane response:

1. Hurricane landfall confirmed from weather services (several days out). Utilities in impacted regions institute planning procedures, including calling on “mutual assistance/aid” from fellow utilities outside of impacted regions and based on existing contractual arrangements.
2. State/regional/national mutual aid working groups meet to coordinate and to initiate actions developed in pre-planned “playbooks,” which include pre-positioning utility crews, ensuring crews have housing and food while onsite, and pinpointing available equipment.
3. Calls begin between electric sector leadership and the federal government, typically the Department of Energy, but others may be brought in.
4. In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, local utilities coordinate heavily with emergency responders on the ground to ensure that electric infrastructure can be safely traversed by such responders. Transportation and other workers remove debris from roadways and rights-of-ways, and utility crews move in to assess damage and begin to rebuild infrastructure. Where needed, drones may be deployed to take pictures and assess damage in places where it may be difficult if not impossible for crews to access. This may entail needed waivers from the Federal Aviation Administration, which can be brought back up the chain to the national conversations mentioned under item #3 if needed.
5. State/local emergency operations centers help with cross-critical infrastructure sector coordination, with lead staff from government agencies, emergency responders, electric and water utilities, telecom providers (usually), the transportation sector, among others, onsite 24/7 until the immediate aftermath is managed.
6. As utilities assess damage and realize their own needs, they will engage in the calls that have been convened at the national level and where additional resources may be brought to bear from neighboring utilities or red-tape cut through by government agencies at the federal level. For example, some utilities may have access to portable, large diesel power generators that could be positioned to support communities while other utility infrastructure is being repaired/rebuilt.
7. Utilities restore power to all homes and businesses that can receive it as soon as possible and/or continue to repair any major lines that are damaged.?Large transmission lines and large power transformers often take longer than localized distribution-level poles and wires to repair if significant damage is done.
8. Outside crews are released to return home.
9. Mutual aid groups, trade associations, and governments engage in a “hotwash,” a term for after action discussion to apply lessons learned to future events.

But, of course, it’s the “on-the-ground” organizations, and people, who undertake the actual response and recovery from major storms/hurricanes. While there will always be an ongoing process-improvement feedback loop, to be clear, response has improved over time, even as we see major storm frequency on the rise. As I finish writing this newsletter, Hurricane Helene has moved through Florida into Georgia, and I continue to pray for people’s safety.? My brother- and sister-in-law and my niece and nephew are okay in Tampa -- and I hope you and your loved ones are okay as well.?