By James Neal, Staff Writer
Enid News and Eagle
ENID —
The 2002 ice storm, like all large disasters, stretched the capabilities and procedures of all entities tasked with responding and providing essential services, from non-profit relief agencies and first responders to hospitals, utility providers and public works departments.
Over the past week, many of those organizations paused to reflect on the impact of the 2002 ice storm, and the lessons learned and changes made over the past 10 years that have improved their ability to respond to large-scale emergencies.
Robin Unruh, executive director of Cimarron Valley Chapter of American Red Cross, was a new employee of the Red Cross, working as an administrative assistant when the ice storm knocked out power 10 years ago.
“I was at home when I got the call that power had gone out in Garber, and we were starting to prepare things to respond,” Unruh said.
By the afternoon of Jan. 30, 2002, the ice accumulation of the previous day was bringing down power lines and knocking out electric service across the region. The Red Cross opened its shelter in Enid that afternoon, soon to be followed by 17 community shelters in the surrounding service area of Alfalfa, Blaine, Garfield and Major counties.
“The biggest thing was trying to find enough generators,” Unruh said.
She said the shelters relied on small generators to provide “spot service” until larger generators were provided by Garfield County Emergency Management.
Communication and coordination of shelter services proved to be another problem.
“The biggest problem wasn’t the roads,” Unruh said. “The biggest problem was the power being out and not being able to use our cellphones.”
She said those communication issues largely were overcome by face-to-face instructions and the volunteer services of the Enid Amateur Radio Club, which set up a ham radio network between shelters.
The first night after the lights went out in Enid, the local Red Cross shelter served “a couple of handfuls of people,” Unruh said. By the second night, the shelter’s occupancy had swelled to more than 130, as people without the means to cook or heat their homes took refuge with the Red Cross.
Even after utility workers succeeded in bringing the power distribution network back online, many residents still were without power because lines and power boxes had been pulled away from their homes.
The Red Cross shelter remained open for more than two weeks to serve those residents.
Lessons learned
Unruh said the task of providing shelter services for that long, while also providing food and supplies to outlying shelters, taught the Red Cross some valuable lessons.
The Red Cross now pre-stages much of its needed shelter supplies, like cots and blankets, to cut down on the required time and logistics of opening a shelter.
Since 2002, the Red Cross has established its Safe and Well website, at https://safe andwell.communityos.org, which provides reunification services for people in the shelter and concerned relatives.
Unruh said the reunification process used to be done manually or by telephone, which required a considerable amount of manpower, as concerned out-of-town relatives and friends tried to reach loved ones in the shelter.
The Red Cross now also relies on social media, particularly Facebook, to keep in touch with the public and spread information during emergencies. The Red Cross maintains a Facebook page at American Red Cross of Western and Central Oklahoma, and a website at okc.redcross.org, where the public can obtain information about ongoing emergencies and shelter services.
Unruh said those services will be valuable, even in the case of a mass power outage, since many people have access to smartphones and other battery-powered devices that can access the Internet.
In the event of an emergency, another useful resource added since 2002 is an application for smartphones and other devices that shows the location of Red Cross shelters throughout the nation.
Even with all the new technology and social media, Unruh said one of the most valuable sources of emergency information is a battery-powered radio. She said several local radio stations have added generator back-up power since the 2002 ice storm.
Hospital care
Local hospital officials report they were able to maintain essential services through the aftermath of the 2002 ice storm, but the incident still offered some valuable lessons learned that have led to improvements in disaster preparedness.
When the ice storm knocked power out in Enid, both St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center and Integris Bass Baptist Health Center faced the daunting task of keeping essential services running on generator power.
“When we had the storm, it was unlike anything I had seen before,” said Rick Little, construction supervisor at St. Mary’s. “The whole town went dark, and it was just dead silent.”
Little said St. Mary’s had four generators in 2002, and “most of the time we had all of them running.”
“For about 48 hours, it was a fight,” he said. “As that first night went on, we found refrigerators and a lot of other equipment that weren’t tied into emergency power.”
The hospital’s emergency power system has since been restructured to include that equipment, and to allow for power to be diverted between equipment and to isolate non-essential areas.
“We determined what our hazards and risks are for a storm like that, or another one like it, to determine our power needs and where we can best utilize that power,” said John Hestand, St. Mary’s facilities director.
Hestand said many of the hospital’s emergency response procedures have followed developments in national response standardization that came from lessons learned after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.
“Emergency preparedness has evolved over the last 12 years,” Hestand said. “The country has gone through a lot of changes, and that has rippled down to the hospital system.”
One of the major changes in hospital preparedness had been the development of the Hospital Incident Command System (HICS), a nationally standardized hospital emergency training and response system.
“We’re much more aware of events that happen across the country now, and we all learn from and share those experiences,” Hestand said. “There are very close ties in health care today, due to the emergency response structures built from the federal government down to the county.”
Brian Wilson, St. Mary’s human resources manager and emergency management coordinator, said there was no shortage of manpower to keep the hospital operating during the 2002 ice storm, and the ensuing power outage.
“When we have a disaster, we know our priority is to get to work, and we had a lot of people who stayed here and lived here to keep things running,” Wilson said. “We had the staffing we needed, and I don’t think that was an issue.”
Wilson said St. Mary’s has utilized federal funds through the Hospital Preparedness Program to purchase additional emergency equipment since 2002, including improved radio communications and a priority phone line.
St. Mary’s CEO Stan Tatum said regularly scheduled training sessions help flex the hospital’s emergency- response capabilities.
“Each type of emergency brings a whole different set of requirements for what you’ll need,” Tatum said. “With the drills we run, we use a different scenario for each drill to test those different capacities.”
Anita Luetkemeyer, director of public relations for Integris Bass Baptist Health Center, also credited good training for enabling hospital staff to keep essential services running during the 2002 ice storm and future incidents.
“Our emergency preparedness drills really do help to prepare us for this type of scenario,” Luetkemeyer said.
She said the hospital’s response to the 2002 ice storm “went rather smoothly in regard to taking care of patients.”
“I think that was mainly due to everyone’s willingness to pitch in and help out wherever they could,” Luetkemeyer said.
Bass Home Health Director Lori England, RN, said the 2002 ice storm posed some special challenges to caring for homebound patients.
“We did have some patients that were oxygen dependent, and we made arrangements for them to be transported to the shelters that were set up so that they were not without oxygen,” England said.
By the third day of the incident, home health workers were having trouble finding fuel for their vehicles, limiting their ability to make non-essential visits.
“We made a lot of phone calls the third day, because we could not get gas for our vehicles, but we saw the patients who absolutely needed a personal visit,” England said, “For those we could not see, we made sure they had some form of heat and light, or that family was taking care of them.”
Utility issues
Much public attention during and after the 2002 ice storm centered on utility companies’ ability to restore power following such a blow to power infrastructure.
Kathleen O’Shea, spokeswoman for OG&E Electric Services, said the utility provider has made extensive changes in the way it would respond to another mass power outage.
“We have made huge changes since 2002,” O’Shea said.
The biggest change in response procedures, she said, has been the 2008 creation of an OG&E Incident Command System (ICS), meant to streamline communications, coordinate response and maximize resources in priority areas.
“Literally, almost every department in the company has someone involved in the ICS ... it’s an all-hands-on- deck event,” O’Shea said. “It’s really an impressive system that works to ensure we can get power restored as fast as possible after a large outage. It allows us to coordinate our efforts and put people on the ground where they’re most needed.”
O’Shea said the ICS system allows OG&E to better coordinate mutual assistance with other utility providers, and to more efficiently call in and control out-of-state crews if needed.
“With the improved communications and coordination we have today, I think you would see a faster, better response than 10 years ago,” O’Shea said.
Becky Hodgen, director of public relations for the city of Enid, said the city significantly has increased its resources to respond to another ice storm, or other large emergency.
“We have much newer equipment, and more of it than we did 10 years ago,” Hodgen said, “so it will be safe for the workers and we will be better able to meet the needs of the city.” She said the city has focused in recent years on upgrading its fleet of backhoes, skid loaders and graders.
The city now also keeps a larger supply of road salt on hand than it did in 2002, and has strengthened its network of vendors for essential supplies.
“We work very closely with our vendors who provide large quantities of generators and other emergency supplies, and when winter weather approaches, we are in constant contact with them,” Hodgen said.
She said one of the best things residents and the city can do together to mitigate the risks of another ice-induced power outage is to keep trees trimmed away from utility lines and homes.
“We’ve done a really good job of encouraging our citizens to trim their trees,” Hodgen said, “and keeping those trees trimmed is key, so they don’t fall on your house or on your neighbor’s property.”
She said the city’s public works department offers pickup and removal of brush and tree limbs at no additional charge for city utility customers.
Emergency response
Mike Honigsberg, emergency management director for Enid and Garfield County, also has overseen significant changes in emergency response over the past decade.
Honigsberg was serving as the county emergency management director in 2002. At the time, Enid had a separate emergency manager. Honigsberg took over as Enid’s emergency manager in 2006, linking city and county emergency management in one office.
“We had never had to face what we had to face in the ice storm,” Honigsberg said. “We were lucky then that it was only really cold for one day of the event. It could have been really slick and hazardous for quite some time.”
As with most responding agencies, Honigsberg saw communications as one of the major obstacles in coordinating efforts during the 2002 ice storm.
Communications were powered by back-up generators at Enid’s Central Fire Station, but backup generator power was not available at the county’s seven communications relay towers.
Workers spent considerable time and energy shuttling fuel and portable generators to the towers to enable emergency radio communications.
“We didn’t have generators on the towers then, but we do now,” Honigsberg said.
The permanent addition of back-up generator power to essential services has been one of the major changes made since the ice storm.
“We found out where our weaknesses were in our water fields, and put in generators so we won’t have any shortages if that happens again,” Honigsberg said. “Pretty much anywhere vital services need electricity, we have generators now.”
Honigsberg said the city and county also have added “redundancy in a big way” on emergency response frequencies since 2002.
Aside from improvements in response infrastructure, the biggest improvements of the past decade have come in emergency response planning, coordination and training.
NIMS implemented
Much of that is due to full implementation of the National Incident Management System (NIMS), a standardized nationwide emergency response framework born of lessons learned from response to the 9/11 attacks.
“NIMS was in its baby stages in 2002,” Honigsberg said. “Now, everything in this county is NIMS compliant, and there’s much better continuity in how we respond, and in establishing who’s going to do what, when. It’s just a matter of response, and everybody knows how we’ll respond.”
Honigsberg said NIMS has helped establish standardization of response procedures, communications procedures and frequencies, personnel utilization and areas of responsibility.
“The NIMS system has made a significant difference in how we respond to any situation,” Honigsberg said. “With everything standardized, everybody knows what we’re supposed to do and how we’re supposed to do it, and that makes all the difference.”
Organizations involved in emergency response devote more time to training and preparing for large incidents than they did prior to 2002.
Honigsberg leads monthly meetings of the Enid Area Disaster Planning Group. The group is composed of “all organizations that would be involved in responding to an actual disaster,” including first responders, nonprofit relief organizations, city and county public works departments and elected officials.
Through table-top scenarios and field exercises, the group’s different elements plan how they will work together to respond to the next large incident.
“I just hope we don’t have another major event ... but eventually we probably will,” Honigsberg said. “You train for the worst and hope for the best. You hope it never happens, but if it does, you just deal with it and move on. We’re as ready as we can be with our available resources.”
