Just 36 hours after Irene left the streets of
Manhattan, soggy Governor Cuomo was calling the response to the tropical storm,
by both the city and the state, “Picture Perfect.” Most in the media agreed saying
the city’s week long preparations were a new model of preparedness. The truth
is that this so-called new model was not tested and from preliminary reports it
did not work as advertised by the politicians. The city found itself short of
1,000 key city employees and had to ask the Governor to call in the National
Guard-- 900 were sent to the five boroughs to pick up the slack. Of these 900,
only about one quarter of them arrived by Sunday morning and a full 30% did not
arrive until Sunday evening, long after the storm had moved north and west of
the city. An interesting article, written by an EMT first responder, was posted
to the blog capitalnewyork.com.
On the Thursday evening before the
storm hit, EMT Kevin Heldman received a robo-call from the Office of Emergency
Management (OEM). The call asked if he was available for disaster work and he
answered yes, but then somehow Kevin got lost in the OEM’s bureaucracy. This is
how he described it:
“I called the 718 number that called me and
was told the mailbox was full or not accepting messages. I called 311
repeatedly and they had absolutely no information about where I should report,
what agency was coordinating the response efforts, or who I should call. I
asked different operators, and asked to speak to supervisors. No luck.
I finally got a second robo-call, and
was told to report to City College in Harlem on 137th Street at 10 a.m. for a
12-hour shift.”
“The city was using the gym as a
shelter. We stood around for a long while with nothing to do, because no one
was in charge. The City College athletic director came in. She wanted to make
sure her floor was OK. She got people to come in and cover the volleyball court
and told us the roof was leaking in a number of different places and that if
the rain got bad so might the leaks. (This was in a hurricane shelter.)
There was a teacher who was head of
science research at Stuyvesant. He and I went up to the roof to check it out.
People were still working up there. There were numerous construction projects
in progress with large amounts of material all over the place—the stuff that
you would want secured or lashed down if you thought a hurricane was coming. We
asked two workers whether they were going to be taking care of that. They said
they didn’t know; their supervisor was out and would be back later.”
You
may remember an earlier post that we discussed how the city had spent a ton of
cash on buying complicated shortwave radios for the schools in times of
disasters but the state refused to fund any training. Well Kevin experienced
that also during his adventure at the OEM sponsored hurricane shelter:
“He
[a science teacher with no training] was made our head of communications [by
the two random CERT volunteers], even though he didn’t know how to put together,
charge or operate any of the brand new radios he and I were taking out of their
packages, putting together and charging.”
In fact, one year after the radios
were bought, an audit found that nearly twenty percent had disappeared and a
majority of school officials had no idea where they were in their buildings. So
it is not surprising they could not get the radios functioning, it is more surprising
that they found them at all.
OEM claims that there are strict
protocols for dealing with volunteers, going so far as to send out hundreds of
DVDs about “Volunteer Orientation” to shelters. The video shows a strict
command structure with everyone going about their business and reporting to
others. The truth at the shelters was very different:
“For a few hours, we sat there with
nothing to do, meeting with various administrators who came in and also didn’t
know what was going on or where we were supposed to go the next day, when the
storm was supposed to hit with full force. A police officer came in at one point,
stayed for a minute and left. The volunteers started leaving [the CERT
volunteers had already left by 2am].”
Kevin was eventually redeployed to
one of the larger evacuation centers at John Jay College. He was assigned to
the medical team and found out firsthand how ill-prepared the centers were to
deal with the many disabled evacuees. This despite having the largest
deployment of medical, CERT and even National Guardsmen of any of the
evacuation centers in Manhattan. Here is one almost comical episode:
“A number of people at the shelter were
diabetic and had to be checked and there was only one glucometer. I asked the
nurse using the glucometer if it would it help if there was another one and she
said that yes, of course it would. So I was back in Roosevelt E.R. asking the
operations manager whether she could possibly spare one.
After a while, she checked and told me
that no, I couldn’t borrow a glucometer because all of theirs were built into
units. I asked whether I could take one from one of the Roosevelt ambulances.
She said she would try that, and then another administrator got involved, and
he tried to open an ambulance door, but it was locked. He made some phone calls
but couldn’t get in touch with anyone. I left my cell-phone number, asked him to
please call me when he heard anything. Back in the shelter, maybe 30 minutes
later, he called to tell me that no glucometer was available.
Maybe an hour later, a Roosevelt
administrator, Eileen Yost, showed up to speak with Dr. Long, asking what she
could do to help. When she was walking away, I went up to her and introduced
myself, told her what I had been doing and what had been going on and that what
we really needed was a glucometer...
Eventually we got our glucometer. I
took it from the hospital to the shelter under my raincoat. Dr. Long saw me
pull it out from under my coat and asked whether I stole it. I had to explain
that the very nice Roosevelt administrator had found one for us.
Susan Dietz, the chief nurse and vice
president of patient care at Roosevelt, had very kindly and patiently showed me
how to use the glucometer, which was a fancy new model unfamiliar to the nurses
at the shelter. This was after one of her colleagues, responding to my
requests, had tried to call security to have me thrown out.”
Similar reports made by volunteers and
evacuees can be found by trolling the internet. For some reason these voices
never made it to the mainstream press reports or any of the official
debriefings made by the OEM. Without these on the ground observations there is
little chance the city will be better prepared next time when we might really
need it.
