Although there are many lessons that local officials might take away from the devastation brought by last October’s Hurricane Sandy,Pequannock Township Manager Dave Hollberg may have summed it up best in three words: "Never assume anything." Even if it’s something that you thought was a sure thing.
"I don’t think I ever could have ever imagined that an entire town (would be) without power for the better part of two weeks in the United States of America in the 21st century," he said. "You always think you’ve planned for the worst case, and then something else comes up."
That has proven to be the main lesson emergency management officials learned: No amount of preparation is too much, and even that will not be enough when a mega-storm like Sandy comes hurtling up the coast.
Towns like Pequannock, which contains just under 14,000 people inside its 7 square miles, were hit particularly hard due to their picturesque tree-lined thoroughfares, which, after hundreds of those trees fell due to the gusts of wind measuring 50–80 mph, became tangled spider webs of branches, power lines, and telephone polls.
Precautions taken in the last two years — from the creation of the township’s emergency AM radio station to the installation of generators at the 10,000-gallon municipal fueling station on Alexander Avenue — proved invaluable, however, and led to several "sighs of relief" from officials as darkened commercial gas stations remained unable to pump what was left in their tanks.
The gas shortage, said Hollberg, was something that caught them completely off guard, and being as it was unclear as to whether it was caused by a minor supply disruption or a serious refinery issue, they didn’t have time to think a new plan through. Although it never got to the point where municipal and emergency vehicles were running low, it could have been markedly worse if the shortage had continued or the Alexander Avenue generator had failed.
"We didn’t really have a good contingency plan for that ahead of time, and we had to make it up on the fly," he said.
Backup plans were "dire," he said, and involved sending out the minimum of EMS needed for a given incident — think one fire truck per call — and the issuing of gas certificates to volunteers to ensure they could still reach their stations.
"The demand started to increase on that supply, and if weren’t going to be able to get anything in new. Then you had to be able to stretch that for an indefinite period of time," he said.
‘We should be able to…function as government’
A serious consequence of the outages, he said, was the near-total cessation of normal government functions, from tax collections to the holding of the national election, which was moved to Pequannock Township High School (PTHS) and held by the light of portable lamps with electricity provided by a massive Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)- provided diesel generator.
"We made that up as we went along," he said.
The storm illuminated not only how bad the overall electrical infrastructure is, said Township Office of Emergency Management (OEM) Coordinator Bobbi Jo Murphy, but also how sorely Pequannock lacked generators of sufficient strength at its critical buildings; after three days, the ones the town had were burning out.
"They’re not designed to run for two weeks at a clip," Hollberg said. "We ended up shutting all the lights off, shutting all the computers off, the police desk was running at the bare minimum…that’s no way to operate during an emergency. We should be able to continue our operation and function as ‘government’ in an emergency."
As a result, the township is now seeking funding from the federal Sandy aid declaration to purchase nine new generators of varying strengths to power everything from its water wells and pump stations to Town Hall itself at a cost of just over $960,000. For FEMA to fund the purchase, however, they must be diesel units; in what sounds like a failure in logic, the governmental agency has declared natural gas to be an "interruptible fuel source" because of the threat of ruptured gas lines during earthquakes.
It’s not exactly what they want, but Pequannock isn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
"If diesel is what they want and they’ll pay for it, then that’s what we’ll get," said Hollberg.
"But if the feds don’t fund it…over the course of the next 10 years, this needs to be a priority."
One thing that functioned very well during the emergency, said Murphy, was the town’s communications — even though the back-and-forth with power utility JCP&L went notoriously bad, the town’s interactions with its departments and residents weren’t.
"We said from the start that this would be a crisis of communication, and that’s what it was," she said. "The AM radio station was a godsend, because phone lines went out, computers went out, but the all of our updates were on the radio…it ended up being a saving grace for us."
One call Hollberg would make earlier if he had to do it again was the decision to pull the EMS off the streets, he said. Many local departments heard the calls from Wayne, where an officer was critically injured in Packanack Lake when a tree fell on his cruiser, and the manager said Pequannock should have ordered its people back sooner.
"That’s a tough call to make, to tell people ‘Don’t respond anymore. Stop doing what you’re trained and paid to do,’" he said. "But we all probably should have made that call about a half-hour earlier."
‘It wasn’t really on the radar’
The situation was similar, if less dire, in neighboring Riverdale, which sits just north of Pequannock but, at 2 square miles, is much smaller and, with 3,500 residents, has less than one-third of the population.
Fire Chief and OEM Coordinator Dan Sturm said that although the town had prepared for wind, fires, and heavy rains, no one could have predicted the mass outage that lasted from between three and 11 days, depending on the neighborhood.
"It wasn’t really on the radar. We knew we were going to lose it in some parts of town, but we didn’t think we’d lose it for that long of a period," he said.
Because Riverdale’s lights came back on sooner, the gas shortage did not reach the straits it did in Pequannock — plus, Sturm said, arrangements were made with multiple local stations to assure that a portion of each delivery be put aside for the municipal vehicles, meaning that there was a reserve of about 2,000–3,000 gallons.
"We didn’t see that coming….we had no warning of a fuel shortage," he said.
The borough’s DPW and emergency responders fared well with supplies of material, however, although new generators for the Riverdale Police Department, water system, and the Loy Avenue community center are in the works. If they only receive FEMA funding for diesel units, Sturm said, conversion kits allowing for multiple fueling options will be installed.
In the future, he said, fuel stockpiles will be built up in advance of storms.
Sandy, he said, has made local officials realize that the purchase of critical backup systems can no longer be put off with promises of future funding.
"I think (Sandy) opened everybody’s eyes that we really need to be prepared… We’re at that point where we have to move forward with it. No more waiting," he said.
The borough is also reinstating its Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), a program that trains volunteers in disaster preparedness and imparts upon them basic disaster response skills such as fire safety, light search and rescue, and medical operations.
Twenty-three members have already been recruited, he said, and will soon be able to perform tasks like man shelters and do door-to-door notifications, thus freeing up firefighters and other EMS personnel to do the work they need to do.
"It’s just a manpower resource that we could use a lot," he said.
Pompton Lakes, which has been through several catastrophic floods in the past five years, coped with the storm well, said OEM Coordinator Al Evangelista — just 2.5 inches of rain fell on Pompton Lake, which had been lowered beforehand.
With the municipal vehicles fueling up at the county depot on Ringwood Avenue, the gas shortage was not a concern, and the regular Pompton residents’ experience with weather disasters went a long way toward assuring that things went smoothly.
"We’ve got a little bit of practice (with disasters)," Evangelista said, "and the response of our community to our reverse 911 calls really, really paid off. We kept (residents) in the loop as we went along."
Also, the borough’s Shade Tree Commission has been active in cutting down old, decaying trees that stood along the public right-of-way, which meant that fewer trees fell on power lines. As a result, the better part of the town did not lose power, he said.
‘Very little’ to be done
Even with its expansive amount of land (80 square miles) and its larger population of 26,000, West Milford seems to have experienced fewer problems than its down-mountain neighbors. According to Deputy Office of Emergency Management Coordinator Ronald Svrchek, the township’s issues stemmed from things that were out of its control, such as the battle to get power restored by its utilities.
Otherwise, the township OEM fared well, said Svrchek.
"We went through our Emergency Operations Plan, we had the appropriate staffing…we’d spent the better part of a week preparing," he said.
West Milford’s municipal fuel depots were kept topped off, he said, and although power was down for between 10–14 days in various spots, generators were maintained, and wear and tear was not excessive due to preventative maintenance performed by the DPW. However, he wants capital upgrades, such as the purchase of new generators and DPW equipment in the future, and an increase in staffing as well.
"It comes down to one word: preparation. You can’t run a 20-year-old bucket loader being held together by rust, and replacing equipment is what you’re supposed to do," he said. "But with a frozen tax base and no building available in this town, we’re strapped. We do the best we can, and we try to be prepared, but we’re at the northern tip (of the county) here."
And in the end, when it comes to disasters like Sandy, he said, there’s "very little" that can be done.
"You can prepare all you want but you’re never going to be prepared." he said. "We’ll continue to prepare…you have to anticipate the worst."
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
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