Increases in heat waves, increases in arctic temperatures, rising sea levels and increases in intense precipitation events means there’s an increase in extreme weather, like hurricane activity. With a higher base of sea level and a warmer atmosphere – which has more energy – there is the potential for more violent storms. This increase in intense weather means the potential for more disruptions in service and emergency response.
The recent hurricanes Harvey and Irma created varying levels of challenges for areas in the south and southeast. Several agencies impacted, share how they prepare for extreme weather, how they handled Harvey or Irma and what they learned from the experience.
Plan, Practice & Prepare
While everyone stressed having a plan and practicing are of the utmost importance, the relationships that come from the practice throughout the year is key. Those relationships are with contractors you may work with, as well as the organizations you will be working with during the response.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County has an emergency manager that works out of Houston TranStar, a partnership of representatives from Metro, the city of Houston, Harris County and the Texas Department of Transportation.
Metro President & Chief Executive Officer Thomas C. Lambert said the preplanning they do and that relationship of working with their partners every day, as they get into emergencies, that preplanning and those relationships work well.
“All of those plans are practiced throughout the year,” he said. “We continue to update them as we need to and then we make sure before we need to get into an emergency, as we did with Harvey, we have staff basically going through checking off everything we need to be doing.”
“My recommendation to railroads would be, do your preparation plan at the beginning of hurricane season and review with your contractors every year,” said South Florida Regional Transportation Authority/Tri-Rail Safety and Security Director Allen Yoder. “Make sure everyone’s aware of your processes and procedures for not just preparedness, but also the recovery part and have a plan going forward to recover your system and get back on track.”
Katharine Eagan, Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority chief executive officer, said they do a hurricane tabletop exercise every year, with a lot of information sharing with peers throughout the year. “You never know when you’re going to have a storm or when you’re going to have to prepare,” she said.
Palm Tran Executive Director Clinton B. Forbes said while they, of course, have a plan, no plan is exact enough to tell you what to do.
Ashlie Handy, media liaison for Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority, mirrored that sentiment when it came to Hurricane Irma. “We have a hurricane plan that we update every year and we go through every single page … but something about this hurricane was that we could not prepare for this – this changed every day.”
LeeTran Deputy Director Fixed Route Paul Goyette also said this storm was storm was quite different of the ones he’s been through at LeeTran. “We can say be prepared as much as you can, but really being prepared, having your emergency management staff, if you will, at your office … you’re doing tabletop exercises with the emergency management center so you have this relationship in communication, back and forth; you understand what they’re expecting of you and they’re understanding what you can deliver.” He added, “There’s a limit to what you can deliver, especially as the window closes.”
“In this case, we had a category 5 forecasted to come to southwest Florida,” said Robert Southall, LeeTran maintenance manager. “You have to prepare for that. If it’s down-rated to 3, fine, you’re way ahead. But you’ve got to be prepared for the worst.”
Your Pre-Storm Checklist
When it comes to hurricane preparation, securing and protecting the infrastructure and ensuring you have fuel are two areas of focus.
Southall said he started more than a week before the storm came and his first concern was fuel. “You can’t wait until 2 or 3 days before because everybody wants their fuel supply.” Five to 7 days before the storm, LeeTran had its fuel topped off. “You can’t operate without fuel and you aren’t going to get anything after the storm comes in,” he said.
Eagan said they looked at fuel delivery seven days in advance, paying extra attention because by their standard operating procedure, they like to be at 80 percent of tank capacity at the start of hurricane season. With one tank down due to a superficial leak and one with a valve issue, she said they were paying close attention to fuel.
Following on the tail of Hurricane Harvey, Eagan said they couldn’t get fuel delivery as the shipping and refining had been disrupted. HART gets delivery before commercial, but after first responders, she said.
Florida was running out of gas. The Monday before Hurricane Irma HART didn’t get a delivery. On Tuesday they got half a tank and by Wednesday, she said they were going into overdrive. “We were calling on all our contracts and we got a delivery at like 3 in the morning on Thursday,” said Eagan. “By the time the hurricane hit, we were in good shape, but we really had to work that week.
“It was a collaborative effort between our maintenance department making sure that we were ready to go and maximizing our combined CNG fleet … and our procurement team driving everyone crazy all over the state trying to get shipments in,” Eagan explained. In order to preserve as much diesel as they could, they were using every CNG bus they could.
“Something to be aware of,” Eagan concluded, “even if you think you would normally have three days before a hurricane, the supply was hit.”
The state closed down a day or two before the storm hit, so if you didn’t have gas by Friday, you weren’t going to get it. That is relevant, because the evacuation kicked off on Saturday. There was overwhelming support from around the country, including ambulance crews from Tennessee and Georgia. “And they needed to get gas,” Eagan stressed. But they couldn’t find gas. “We were able to authorize using our diesel to those out-of-state ambulances.”
When evacuation routes were kicked off, the footprint was small enough that HART could do it all with its CNG buses. “We didn’t need to touch our diesel,” she said. “We became a really great resource at that point.”
Palm Tran Operations Director Shawn T. Smith also talked about setting up fuel deliveries in advance. With three different facilities they operate out of, they make sure they have fuel for the diesel vehicles and gasoline for paratransit service.
Securing Your Assets
LeeTran has three transfer centers and its large facility, which is 60,000 square feet and on about 24 acres. Anything that could become a projectile is either secured or put in storage. Southall stressed the importance of starting plenty of time in advance because as the storm comes, there are so many other demands being put on the system, such as getting vehicles requested and possibly having a reduced staff as they are taking care of their families or evacuating.
The fuel dispatchers were covered and the power to them was shut down because of the electronic circuit boards in them. They turn off the power to anything not in use, to help in taking the load off the generator and for safety-sake. “You never know in the course of a storm, where equipment could just be running constantly,” Southall said. “If you’re not watching, it could burn something up or damage something; it could be pretty costly.”
The entire facility is secure, as far as overhead doors are operating properly, everything is in good operating condition. During the storm, Southall said, “You wouldn’t believe the suction on those doors.”
At Tri-Rail, Yoder said their preparations are relatively simple. They have a station maintenance contractor that starts securing loose items at stations and a contract operator that starts securing the yard as they start monitoring the storm, about a week out.
Yoder said, “As the storm approaches, depending on the track of the storm and the severity, we might make decisions to evacuate equipment from the area.” He added, “We haven’t done that in a long time. Normally we’re just sheltering in place.”
For the Corpus Christi Regional Transportation Authority, Director of Marketing Kelly Coughlin said this experience was different for us as it was their first year of having their new administration building, as well as now having a split administration building and operations building.
“Usually every year we have all gone into the operations building and all stayed together,” she explained. “We thought since this was projected to be anywhere from a category 3 to a category 5 hurricane, we actually split up assets, including people.
“We made sure each building had satellite phones and we made sure each building had non-perishable food items before and during the storm.”
CCRTA also divided up its buses around the city to ensure it wouldn’t lose its entire fleet if one area had devastation.
PSTA also split up its fleet. “Once they started evacuating specific zones and they were mandatory with a deadline, that’s when we had to have a meeting to say, ‘OK, we have to get our buses out of here,’ because our buses are in that zone,” Handy said. “It was a beautiful sight,” she said, “probably a sight people have never seen here, just seeing 200 buses in a line driving on the road. It’s like an apocalypse.” She added, “To see the bus yards completely empty was very eerie.”
Following the hurricane, Handy said PSTA buses were fortunate to come out shining and with a fresh car wash. “They were fine,” she said. “And it was because of that planning that we had done ahead of time.”
She explained that the first draft of a plan and challenges identified, included that they didn’t have a plan to move the buses away from the bus yard. To be evacuated from Zone B would mean something is coming straight at them and once they saw that was coming, they determined higher ground locations to keep the fleet safe.
After Superstorm Sandy, Eagan said everybody in Florida thinks a lot about moving their vehicles to higher ground. And with Hurricane Harvey happening just prior to Irma, she mentioned how the folks from Houston Metro had been putting out a lot of great information in what they were doing.
“Our director of transportation had been working through APTA [American Public Transportation Association] and some other industry groups to talk to folks,” she said. “We were able to learn pretty quickly from Harvey, some of the things that had worked for them.”
Houston’s Lambert joked he would like to take full credit, but that it was his staff’s planning that took care of Metro’s assets. “We’ve had in place for several years our emergency plans. We know we have facilities that will flood,” he said. “They really exercised something we had not done before and that was relocating about 120 buses out of our Kashmere facility. We were pretty confident it was going to flood and they took those buses out of that facility and parked them on one of the HOV lanes that is elevated.
“That’s 120 buses that we brought back into service very quickly after the storm had passed,” Lambert stressed.
“That was part of their flexibility and adaptability of executing things in their plans that we had not done before.”
He said they had also learned from floods they had about a year ago, that they needed more high-water vehicles. They bought a 2-1/2 ton retired military truck, the Deuce and a Half. This year, for the first time ever, Metro worked with their colleagues at Harris County Transit and identified 14 school buses that were pulled into service for operators to assist in evacuations as part of rescue operations.
A common sentiment of emergency response, “The plans were adapted to changing conditions,” Lambert said. “We had never seen anything like Harvey.
“Harvey was something that came in, stayed around, stayed around and stayed around again. We had 50 inches of rain that was not isolated in one part of our region; it really impacted the entire region.”
Lambert stressed, “We kind of adapted on the fly, things we needed to do based on real-world changing conditions.”
Palm Tran’s Smith said they start with anything not secured or tied down around the facility is put in storage and their buses were positioned with oldest on the outside, newer on the inside, in case there is some damage. To prepare for staying in place, they set up food, water and a communication tree in case the phones go down. Everybody gets a handheld radio.
As far as preparation of LeeTran’s vehicles, Southall said they corral the vehicles in a way that the wind isn’t going to be pushing on the doors. The windows are closed and everything is secured on the vehicle and they also put those vehicles together so the windshields aren’t facing into the wind and doors aren’t facing into the wind.
“We were pretty fortunate because we didn’t have any vehicle damage to any of our vehicles on the property,” Southall said. He added, “Keep them away from trees, light poles, anything that could possibly fall on the vehicle.”
Emergency Preparedness and Your Employees
With public transportation and its frontline employees being critical to the mobility of a community following a storm and emergency conditions, it’s important for employees to get their personal lives in order so they can focus on helping get the community back up to normalcy.
The recent hurricanes Harvey and Irma created varying levels of challenges for areas in the south and southeast. Several agencies impacted, share how they prepare their employees for extreme weather, how they help them recover.
Palm Tran Executive Director Clinton B. Forbes said as they start tracking the storm, they encourage employees to get their personal lives and homes in order well in advance. The county administrator has slated all county employees as essential. He said, “All of our employees, the 630 that we have, are essential personal.”
Building a Sense of Security
There was such a long span of time since a storm of similar proportion for LeeTran that LeeTran Deputy Director Fixed Route Paul Goyette said it was more challenging for their folks. Due to the magnitude of the storm, some of the employees were genuinely concerned for themselves.
Ensuring employees feel they’ll be OK and know their families are OK is important so they can focus on emergency response.
Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority Chief Executive Officer Katharine Eagan understood that first hand. The projection was a category 4 storm coming straight to Tampa. Her family didn’t have gas, they weren’t going anywhere, they weren’t getting out of the state, so she said they made the decision that her family would go to a hurricane shelter as she would go to the emergency operations center.
“As a mom, that was a horrible decision,” Eagan said. “But let me tell you, as soon as I knew my kids were safe, I could really focus on supporting our transportation.”
She also said it made a big difference to the community that when she would do briefings, she could tell people that her family had checked in to a shelter. Eagan said she heard back from so many people that their family didn’t want to go to a shelter, but then heard her family was there and knew it would be OK.
“I think the first briefing was held Sunday morning and I said something to my family at the end of it, looking at the cameras,” she said, “I’ll see you after the storm.”
To make sure employees take care of their families first and foremost, agencies provide awareness information, from reminding employees to put on their shutters, to talking about preparations for prolonged power outages, including stocking up on non-perishable food, ice, coolers, medications, and to pull out cash in case you are unable to use ATMs or credit cards.
South Florida Regional Transportation Authority/Tri-Rail Safety and Security Director Allen Yoder said they put out a long list of preparations far enough in advance. As it gets closer to the storm, Tri-Rail policy is service is suspended usually a day prior to the storm as they won’t take passengers to work in the morning if they can’t get them home in the evening. “So we’ll make a decision sometimes, it’s still calm outside,” he said. “The storm’s out there, but you don’t see the effects of it until later that day … our employees are released early so if they need to, they can take care of those things.”
Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County President & Chief Executive Officer Thomas C. Lambert said while they do hurricane planning every year, they remind their employees the steps to take care of their homes and families. “That’s all part of our thought processes before we ever get into an emergency.
“We remind people that they have to do emergency kits and take care of their families,” he stressed.
Several agencies mentioned hotlines for employees. They’re kept up-to-date with the changing conditions and information that can get pushed out to employees. They are also kept informed on when they need to start coming back, as well, to being recovery operations.
Forbes said they have contracted with Everbridge, an emergency mass notification system. “It texts all of our employees and gives them immediate information on what we’re doing,” he said. “That worked very well for us.”
Employee Recovery
Agencies have a variety of ways in helping their employees during and following an emergency.
Ashlie Handy, media liaison for Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority, said they met with their CFO and she gave the OK to make sure all of its employees were paid early. With a lot of employees living paycheck to paycheck, it could be near the tail end of what was left.
Handy said, “It’s very stressful, especially if you want to get your family out, start buying supplies and you don’t have money to do that, so I think that was really amazing that we definitely thought about our employees first.
“We had our finance department stay here overnight to make sure every single person was going to get paid and had that money, had that security money to go and leave if they had to … they could make those decisions and take care of themselves before anything else.”
Employees were also told if they had to leave, to go ahead and do that, there were no repercussions for people that couldn’t show up.
At Metro in Houston, the board approved an opportunity that allowed employees to sell back a certain number of vacation time to give them some funds to help with recovery efforts. Employees could also donate vacation time to some of their colleagues that needed that time to recover. Lambert said, “We’re trying to do everything we can to be supportive of our colleagues that sustained damage and to help them get back to normalcy as fast as they can.
Several staff from LeeTran had major damage to their homes and some are still waiting for adjusters to come out or a contractor to come out. Goyette said, “If someone has a challenge at home or they can’t have a place to go back to … you’re making exceptions for those folks. We try to help them out in any way that we could so that they could continue to come to work to help the agency, to help the county get back on its feet.”
He said there are a lot of things to think about, besides just being the responder. “You can’t respond if you don’t have basic life needs: shelter, food, water. You have to think about that and be prepared for that at your agency and how you’re going to help out your people.”
Corpus Christi Regional Transportation Authority, Director of Marketing Kelly Coughlin said there were some employees who lost everything during the storm. “They have come through and they can conquer anything,” she said. She added, “We’ve been really inspired by the fact that, not only have our friends and family in this community come together, but our transit community has really reached out to us and these employees who lost everything. We’ve been really thankful for that. They’ve sent clothes, money, everything they could to make sure our employees could maintain well.”
Lambert agreed. “I really appreciate the South West Transit Association, the Texas Transit Association, the American Public Transportation Association and all the individuals and organizations that contributed … that went out to transit employees in Texas, Florida … and Puerto Rico.
“We had about 500 employees at Metro out of about 4,000 that sustained some degree of damage.” He stressed, “The efforts of APTA, SWTA and TTA to help support them, we are very, very thankful and appreciative of that.”
Weathering the Storm
The recent hurricanes Harvey and Irma created varying levels of challenges for areas in the south and southeast. Several agencies impacted, share how they how they assisted their communities with evacuations and what they learned from the experience.
Timing is critical for the evacuation, process. As Ashlie Handy, media liaison for Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority explained, if you don’t respond soon enough, you are potentially leaving people behind or leaving vehicles behind to get destroyed and if you act too soon, the hurricane could shift and completely miss you.
“We were being really, really careful,” she said. “Seriously, hourly meetings to see what the latest updates were to see how we could adjust our plan. We were adjusting plans all the way until the hurricane was almost here because … the projections weren’t giving us an exact time when it would hit and where it would hit.”
Corpus Christi Regional Transportation Authority found some challenges in helping in evacuations that were called too late. The city and county call on CCRTA to do evacuations but their expectation was CCRTA could do evacuations as the waters were beginning to rise.
Director of Marketing Kelly Coughlin said, “We learned we’ve kind of had to do some re-education with our local neighbors … We have low-floor buses that kneel, which is great on a day-to-day regular basis and you have passengers with ADA requirements, but not so great when you’re in low-lying water and it’s rising.
“The education experience has helped since then and the city and county have been much more able to work with us on how we’re going to do our evacuation plans in the future,” she said. The plan will evacuate the low-lying areas first, get those people out safely, and then work their way to the higher-plain levels so the vehicles aren’t getting caught in flood water.
A takeaway from LeeTran’s evacuation efforts was to make sure your special needs groups and their coordinator is well connected with the coordinator at the agency so that you can evacuate the people with special needs, well ahead of time. LeeTran Deputy Director Fixed Route Paul Goyette said, “A lot of these folks weren’t signed up ahead of time … that presents a new challenge to the agency because you have to get them on to the system and … and there’s a little more work involved and you get new people thrown into the mix.”
Lee County Government Communications Specialist Timothy Engstrom said from an operational standpoint, one thing that set this storm apart from anything they’ve done in the past was that this was the largest sheltering operation Lee County had ever undertaken.
“We immediately returned to LeeTran and said we need to get folks to shelters that don’t have any other way to get there and Paul [Goyettte] was at the EOC and we immediately started finding ways. We waived fees, we said, ‘Get on a bus, we’ll get you to a shelter,’” Engstrom said. “For the size of the operation, that was a big undertaking. No one batted an eye.”
It was also the first year that LeeTran ran new shelter routes. Goyette said, “We had designed all of our routes to become shelter pick up routes so we didn’t have to have specific ones and we used shuttles from transfer points.
“This was the first time that we implemented that process … overall it worked really well. The drivers and the maintenance people did a good job making sure that we were supported to get the effort out there.”
PSTA’s Handy said getting their partner agencies out was their focus early on. “We had to make sure all those partner agencies that we work with, the human health, the assisted living facilities, that we were really there for them … getting those people out ahead of time.”
They ran into hold ups as the storm progressed. A lot of assisted living facilities didn’t see the emergency in getting out because it looked like it was headed to West Palm Beach, not sure where it was going to hit, so they would postpone their evacuation until the last minute on Saturday.
“We had to re-adjust again, to go back and fit them in and get them out because they turned down the evacuation before that,” she said.
Once the EOC is evacuated, she explained, PSTA goes into “hurricane mode,” and as buses go down the streets, people can flag the bus at any point, any safe location, and the bus will stop, pick them up, and take them to an evacuation shelter. There are 10 evacuation shelters on PSTA’s routes, so once EOC became activated, they were deploying buses to get people to safety.
Mandatory evacuations are done by zone, so as that’s done, Handy said PSTA focuses on those zones. Zone A was first, and then the second day was Zone B, which is where PSTA is located.
“Once they started evacuating specific zones and they were mandatory with a deadline, that’s when we had to have a meeting to say, ‘OK, we have to get our buses out of here,’ because our buses are in that zone,” Handy said. “It was a beautiful sight,” she said, “probably a sight people have never seen here, just seeing 200 buses in a line driving on the road. It’s like an apocalypse.” She added, “To see the bus yards completely empty was very eerie.”
Following the hurricane, Handy said PSTA buses were fortunate to come out shining and with a fresh car wash. “They were fine,” she said. “And it was because of that planning that we had done ahead of time.”
She explained that the first draft of a plan and challenges identified, included that they didn’t have a plan to move the buses away from the bus yard. To be evacuated from Zone B would mean something is coming straight at them and once they saw that was coming, they determined higher ground locations to keep the fleet safe.
As the storm was approaching, the Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority was getting all of the necessary steps in place, as well. Chief Executive Officer Katharine Eagan said finance was talking to them about petty cash and getting ready for payroll, operations was talking about getting the fleet stored away on higher ground and IT was making sure everything was backed up.
“We were over-communicating and every department was filling,” she stressed.
As the storm was getting closer, schools were shutting down so the city could get the students out and prepare the schools, as they are also the hurricane shelters.
They did a flexible leave policy for hourly staff and for the bargaining staff.
HART kicked in a Saturday-level of service the Friday before the storm so it only needed half as many operators. “That let a lot of folks get home and get their houses ready for the storm,” Eagan said.
“Looking at the indication that we had, this was going to be a category 4 storm when it hit us,” she said. “I pushed this out on my twitter, too, ‘If you feel that you need to go, just call and make sure we know; there’s not going to be discipline.’
“I didn’t want anyone to feel that if they called in to say, ‘I am terrified, my wife is terrified and we’re leaving to go to Georgia,’ that they would get in trouble. Going to a Saturday level meant needing fewer people.
HART implemented evacuation routes at 7 a.m. and ran until just after dusk. With an unprecedented storm for the area, around 20,000 people went to shelters. And that meant, the four shelters HART serves were filled up almost immediately.
Eagan said, “Props to our operations and our dispatch teach because on the fly, they were diverting routes. Instead of four shelters, we served 40.”
It wasn’t just people and their pets that were being evacuated by transit agencies. When there’s a mandatory evacuation in order, some pets get left behind and animal rescue and shelters work at making room in their facilities to house animals they would pick up off the street.
Clinton B. Forbes, Palm Tran executive director, said, “We began to make contacts with shelters … and they needed a way to get those animals out of current shelters to the airport and on the plan and to these other locations. We stepped up at Palm Tran and provided our buses, which moved more than 200 dogs and cats from the animal resuce shelter to Palm Beach International Airport.
“It took us two days to help in that effort and get our four-legged friends to shelter.”
Tracking the Storm
As people are sheltered in place during the storm, transit staff continues to work and watch its progress.
In the case of LeeTran, it had to accommodate safe storage of vehicles and equipment at its facility, as well as other items that were brought in. Goyette said, “Our transit agency actually became a shelter for the Lee County Emergency first responders and the national responders.” That included ambulance responders and national recovery people using the facility for two to three days, 24/7.”
The local county sheriff didn’t have a hardened facility to go to, so they went to LeeTran.
“We had one of the SWAT teams in our building, as well, which gave us some comfort at night,” he said. But added, “It was a challenge. It was a challenge to have K9 dogs and SWAT people and police personnel from different divisions and different departments.”
It included storing the sheriff’s two large boats, a SWAT vehicle and other trucks the sheriff department brought in.
Maintenance Manager Robert Southall said he and others stayed there 24/7, walking the area constantly to make sure there was no breach in the building itself or that anything happened. “It was quite an adventure,” he said, “just to make sure everything’s secure and to make sure everyone staying there, they’re OK and feel secure.”
HART’s Eagan shared what it was like staying at the EOC. The dorm had 8 beds, a shower facility and then the overflow had cots. Most people would catch a few hours of sleep each night but with the limited space, knew others needed that space, as well.
When the county opened the EOC, Eagan said they began staffing that with their safety chiefs; the director of safety and manager of safety rotated 12-hour shifts.
Ensuring employees feel they’ll be OK and know their families are OK is important so they can focus on emergency response and Eagan understood that first hand.
The projection was a category 4 storm coming straight to Tampa. Her family didn’t have gas, they weren’t going anywhere, they weren’t getting out of the state, so she said they made the decision that her family would go to a hurricane shelter as she would go to the emergency operations center.
“As a mom, that was a horrible decision,” Eagan said. “But let me tell you, as soon as I knew my kids were safe, I could really focus on supporting our transportation.”
She also said it made a big difference to the community that when she would do briefings, she could tell people that her family had checked in to a shelter. Eagan said she heard back from so many people that their family didn’t want to go to a shelter, but then heard her family was there and knew it would be OK.
“I think the first briefing was held Sunday morning and I said something to my family at the end of it, looking at the cameras,” she said, “I’ll see you after the storm.”
Communication is Key
When the zone that the PSTA facility is located in was under mandatory evacuation, the team decided to bring all of the first-floor computers up to the second floor. Employees spent hours getting all of the computers bagged, everything labeled, moved, and then it was decided it would be better to shut down the network than to have a water event that would damage the network.
“We didn’t think about it when we shut down the network, but we lost all of our communication,” said Handy. “We lost our website, we lost our phone lines, we lost our hotline. All the places we were directing our riders to go to for information, were gone.”
That’s when she and PSTA Digital Marketing Manager Alissa Kostyk worked around the clock corresponding with media and responding on social media. “We basically said, let us take the wheel because social media is still here and people know to go to our social media.
“We had to rely on our social media channels to convey to our entire county what we were doing, moment by moment, that they were going to be OK.
“Alissa was seriously around the clock because we had to shift all communications solely on to social media.”
Another agency experiencing communication challenges was when there was an AT&T outage was South Florida Regional Transportation Authority/Tri-Rail.
Safety and Security Director Allen Yoder said the hurricane hit Monday morning and on Wednesday, AT&T had a glitch with its power box that shut its service down. As they were trying to get their service back up and running, they lost all of their phones.
Tri-Rail Public Information Officer Bonnie Arnold said while they used social media throughout the whole hurricane. They were responding to people’s questions and firing out information as it became available.
Yoder said, “We didn’t have social media or any kind of thing like that when [hurricane] Matthew hit.” He continued, “When you talk of building good will and those relationships, we were able to do that in a new way for us. We found that we reached thousands of people that way.”
Goyette at LeeTran said, “I can’t stress enough about communications. It’s paramount between your contact people and emergency ops and your transit agency folks.
“You have to have somebody that can really make quick decisions at the agency and you have to have somebody at the emergency ops center that can take information, decipher it real quick, and then turn that into logical information fort the person at the transit center to understand exactly what they’re going to do. And then of course document everything you do.”
Houston Metro’s Lambert said it was important that they had a very good communication flow and leadership to respond to the storm. “We have staff that was assigned full time to Houston TranStar, the regional transportation emergency management center. So we had people in direct conversations with Harris County, Homeland Security and emergency management.” They also have staff assigned full time to the Houston Emergency Center, where they can coordinate with all of the city of Houston departments.
From the media standpoint, Metro’s media and social media personnel were part of the joint information center, that was operated out of Houston TranStar. And Metro’s chair was working with Mayor Turner at the Houston Emergency Center, doing daily briefings by the mayor and daily briefings by the judge of Harris County. Lambert said all of Metro’s information was being pushed out in those briefings, as well.
As Metro began bringing service back on, they worked with the joint information center to make sure they were pushing it out to their media and public sources. Jerome Gray, vice president & senior press officer at Houston Metro, said there were several hundred different outlets that they were pushing out information to about the level of service.
Lambert said Mayor Sylvester Turner and Harris County Judge Ed Emmett worked together to make sure the community responders were all focused on rescue, recovery and now all focused on bringing the community back to normalcy. “These things don’t happen without strong leadership,” he said. “And they demonstrated that.”
For CCRTA, having personnel split up between four different buildings proved to be a challenge. They had people in each of their two buildings, and sent staff to the county EOC and the city EOC. “Communication was key and it was critical,” Coughlin said.
“Going forward, we have enlisted with an emergency response-type software and we’re going to be using that to be able to send quick notifications, quick mass phone calls – it has the ability to call everybody with the push of a button that we need on the conversation, instead of trying to make sure people have the correct numbers or the correct line or whatever the case may be.
As the storm was going through the area, some of the channels went down but one of the local channels did a unique streaming service that CCRTA was able to communicate with them on the spot.
“We really respect how that news team operated and we really hope the others go that way in the future,” Couglin said. They switched from their regular cable, moved to satellite and streamed it over the Internet. “So if you lost your power, cable, anything, you could technically watch it on your cellphone reception.” She added, “That helped a lot of people.”
Getting Your Service Up After a Storm
Several agencies impacted, share how they recovered and how they helped the communities they serve get back to normalcy as quickly as possible.
The recent hurricanes Harvey and Irma created varying levels of challenges for areas in the south and southeast.
LeeTran Deputy Director Fixed Route Paul Goyette said the post-storm recovery effort is something a lot of transit agencies have been asking him questions on. If you haven’t experienced it, knowing how to get your service back up and running can be daunting.
Goyette said you’re going to have to go out and look at your routes when it’s safe to do so. “You’re going to have to send scouts out there to make sure the roads you operate on are passable so you can at least get your fixed-routes back out there.”
For paratransit services, he said it’s a completely different challenge, as you’re going down side streets, it’s door-to-door. He said, “You’ve got to make sure their houses are safe before you take them back. If you take somebody back to their home … you have to be prepared.” He added, “It comes back to communication and coordination with your local emergency operations center. I can’t stress that enough – we work completely in unison.”
For Palm Tran, Executive Director Clinton B. Forbes said once winds go to under 40 mph, there’s an assessment. They also send out the message to their employees alerting them to get ready to report to work as they will soon begin the recovery phase to get people from the shelters, back to their homes.
The assessment takes place when the sheriff’s office and county engineering drive the streets of Palm Beach, looking for downed power lines, major debris in the roadway. “All of that has to be checked and corrected before we can put service back on the road,” Forbes said.
Hurricane Harvey made landfall on August 25 and continued to hit Houston with massive winds and rainfall until August 29. Once the storm subsided in Houston, Texas, Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County (Metro) began medical-related paratransit services.
Jerome Gray, vice president & senior press officer at Metro, said they started the medical trips on Wednesday, August 30. They started bringing back bus service the next day. About 50 percent of the bus service was brought up on Thursday. The remainder was up by September 5.
“There were probably four or five routes where we had to have detours, because they were in neighborhoods that were severely impacted flood areas,” Gray said. “We tried to create routes that accommodated as many people as possible in those areas.”
When the Army Corp. of Engineers released a damn, those were the neighborhoods that were severely impacted. Metro President & Chief Executive Officer Thomas Lambert said, “We couldn’t get across the roadway system.
“They [the service planning team] had to adapt our service plan and basically set up two distinct routes, one south of the flooded area and one north of the flooded area and do all the things that we needed to do, to get that information out to our customers,” he said. “There was a lot of boots-on-the-ground activity associated with that.”
He stressed, “The lesson we learned from there is, making sure we can adapt on the fly to changing conditions and that's evidence of the organization.”
Something that helped in recovery was the fact that about two years ago, they had redesigned the entire bus network, so that is now more of a grid system, as opposed to forcing everyone to go to the downtown.
“That actually served us well,” said Lambert. “And I want to paraphrase this a bit because no storms are the same.
“In 2008, after hurricane Ike, two days into recovery we could only bring up about 11 percent of the routes back to operations. After Harvey, two days after that, we brought up about 50 percent of our service back up.” He explained, “We think the nature of the redesign bus system and that network allowed us to bring things up quicker. That was a lesson for us to learn.”
After Hurricane Irma, in the Tampa area, Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority had created a make-shift transfer center to evacuate people and then to get people back home.
Initially they were doing transfers at a mall in an eastern part of the county, but mall management kicked HART off because there were too many buses.
“My team scrambled and they found a great partner with the Florida State Fairgrounds and we were able to create an immediate pop-up transfer location at the fairground,” said HART Chief Executive Officer Katharine Eagan.
Following the storm, the school district ran yellow school buses from every school that was a shelter and brought people to the default transfer center at the fairground and from there HART got them back on the evacuation routes.
Monday after the storm the call was out to the staff to come to the evacuation center. Eagan said by an hour of the roads being open, they already had 10 to 15 bus operators there, ready to run service. “That’s how quickly our folks came back.”
On Monday they ran evac service and then on Tuesday they ran a Sunday service. Eagan explained, “It was too difficult to tell people you’re running 1, 4, 6 but not 12, so we went with Sunday service. Wednesday we did a Saturday service level and by Thursday we were back to full service.”
Damage Assessment
Another big part of the post-storm recovery is assessing the damage to your assets. Robert Southall, LeeTran maintenance manager stressed you have to document everything and take pictures.
“You’ve got to get your emergency POs in place,” he said. “Try to recover as much money as you can from FEMA – and that’s quite a task right there.
“We don’t have all of our quotes post-storm, but that’s a whole other undertaking that uses a lot of resources and time.
When it comes to working with FEMA, Eagan said something they would do differently next time is to start working really early on the FEMA reimbursement portion. “When I was at the county center, I heard people talking about how difficult it was,” she said.
With out-of-state vehicles getting fuel, there was a lot of coordination that needed to happen. “There was no easy way to do it,” Eagan said. “There were a lot of lessons learned about setting these partnership agreements ahead of time.”
Forbes mentioned Federal Transit Administration Deputy FTA Administrator Jane Williams called during the storm to offer any assistance they needed in respect to FEMA.
“And that was just the first call,” Forbes said. “She called, I think, every property. And, our regional administrator, Yvette Taylor, also called.” He continued, “Yeah, the paperwork is always somewhat laborious, but it has to be done. But, it was great to hear her voice on the end of the line offering assistance at the federal level.
Final Takeaways
“Every storm is different.” - South Florida Regional Transportation Authority/Tri-Rail Safety and Security Director Allen Yoder
He said during Hurricane Wilma they had a lot of infrastructure damage – signal masts, gates, things that were destroyed. It took that longer to put that back together, but at the time, that was under CSX ownership.
“This time we lucked out,” Yoder said. “We didn’t take a direct hit, but we took a lot of wind and had a lot of trees down at our stations and across our tracks, which took several days to clear.”
“These things don’t happen without strong leadership.” - Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County President & Chief Executive Officer Thomas Lambert
“Mayor [Sylvester] Turner and [Harris County] Judge [Ed] Emmett worked together to make sure the community responders were all focused on rescue, recovery and now, all focused on bringing the community back to normalcy.
“The other thing we learned … we are going to buy some more high water vehicles, we’re going to make sure something that we can do a better job of status tracking of what is going on because you’ve got a fast-paced environment going on so we’re going to look at some systems supports and some technology to track some actions better.”
“We recognize that we’re essential to this effort.” - Palm Tran Executive Director Clinton B. Forbes
“Our vehicles help get people … to the safe zones,” said Forbes. “That’s a massive effort that we initiate before the storm hits.” He continued, “We play such a vital role pre and post hurricane. It’s important to describe how vital the public transit agency … is to the evacuation and the recovery of a community.”
“If they [employees] know they’re going to be OK, then they’re going to want to come in and help and do their part.” - LeeTran Deputy Director Fixed Route Paul Goyette
“Some of the lessons learned for me, were to make sure that my people were better informed and better prepared so they could assist the effort,” Goyette said. “Preparing people for the worst but hope for the bet and really drill on it throughout the year.”
“You never know what to experience until you’re experiencing it.” - Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority Media Liaison Ashlie Handy
“We had hurricane plans. But plans were made, changed, adjusted, and re-adjusted almost hourly,” she said. “We had interdepartmental communication which was amazing and people working together that typically don’t sit together day to day, which was also really great.
“We had people sleeping here, working around the clock. This was really a team effort. We had people staying here and sleeping here because they wanted to make sure if there was someone left behind, that we were going to go get them.”
