Jackson County, Miss., had a great emergency plan worked out. But when Hurricane Katrina left it devastated in late August, no one could find it, said Chris Suter, deputy fire chief of the San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District.
Suter spoke recently to the Rotary Club of Danville about his recent trip to Jackson County as a member of an Incident Management Team, part of a state-to-state effort. He said that before Katrina, California was kept busy with its own fires and earthquakes, and the state was known as the “Disneyland of emergencies.” But when Katrina wreaked devastation in Louisiana and Mississippi, California joined the nationwide effort for emergency personnel to lend their expertise.
“We were requested to provide coordination,” Suter said. “The public and private agencies were all acting independently.”
The deputy fire chief was called at his Alamo home at 11 a.m. Sept. 14 and was en route with another response team member on a commercial flight soon after midnight. The rest of the 16-member group flew on a charter the afternoon of the 15th with equipment for everyone.
“We had to come with our own support or we would have become part of the problem,” Suter explained.
The public safety infrastructure was damaged, he noted, partly because the government employees who were depended upon to help were among the victims. Jackson County had a population of 133,000, and included four cities, including a large coastal community. Of that, 4,382 residences were destroyed; 14,650 were uninhabitable; and there were at least 180 fatalities.
When Suter’s team arrived, the first response effort was over and it was time to start the recovery. This included debris removal.
“One million 300,000 cubic yards of debris had been removed by the Corps of Engineers by the time we left,” Suter said. “They estimated that they had moved 12 percent of the debris.”
The conditions he described were mind-boggling. They had to work with different policies for each immediate location, depending on whether it was public or private property. There were no street signs.
“Not only did people lose everything they had, but it was all carried away,” he said. At least in a fire or earthquake, the rubble stays in place, he explained. With this hurricane, a 32-foot high wall of water went inland a mile, sweeping everything before it. “To say houses were destroyed – ‘destroyed’ is not even an accurate word,” he said.
He showed a photograph of a boat in the middle of nowhere, noting that he guessed it was “finders keepers” although the house of the yard where it landed was not in livable condition.
His team used a high school for a base camp and developed an action plan.
“We had goals for every day, 32 elements,” he explained. They had to provide food, water and sanitation for 50,000 people.
“Hundreds of trailers were waiting to be installed but we had to clear the debris and get hookups,” he recalled. “Three-quarters of the cars didn’t work because of salt water intrusion.” Beware of any used cars that are for sale from that area, he warned.
Suter also found out that it can be difficult to work in the Deep South, due to cultural and climate differences. The dark green tents did not work well with 95 percent humidity, he said.
He said he had previously been skeptical when people requested monetary donations rather than clothing but he saw what can happen to goods that were donated with the best intentions.
“When the stuff comes, if it isn’t sorted by gender or size or isn’t clean, they couldn’t accept it. The truckers got mad so they dumped it at the corner. It rains every day so now you have a health hazard,” he said. “So, much as I didn’t like it, money is best. They can buy what they want and it helps the economy.”
He said the faith-based groups did an enormous amount of good. “They cleaned out houses that were moldy to stop the deterioration,” he said.
When they finally located the emergency plan for Jackson County, it was a pretty good plan, said Suter. He brought this lesson back home with him and many more.
