No Katrina for Tampa

The city has worked to ensure that since New Orleans' lack of a plan became obvious.

By JANET ZINK
Published June 3, 2007

TAMPA - As the chaos in New Orleans unfolded after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Tampa's fire chief was grilled by his boss, Mayor Pam Iorio.

"The mayor spent a lot of time watching CNN, and she asked a lot of questions," said fire Chief Dennis Jones. "She was looking at it as if she were going to be on the TV like New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was."

Said Iorio: "The whole scene with Katrina -- you never got the sense that there was any competency. It was a disaster from top to bottom. I would never want that for our community."

Soon after Katrina, Tampa's emergency plan came in for an overhaul.

"We tightened up everything," said Jones, who heads city emergency management operations.

The city got more aggressive about registering people for special needs shelters, made sure buses would reach public housing complexes, bought Meals Ready to Eat and satellite phones for emergency workers, and trained a team of amateur radio operators to keep communication lines open when cell and satellite phones fail.

With the arrival of the 2007 hurricane season, Iorio said the city is much better prepared than it was two years ago.

Iorio first pulled out the city's old emergency plans after she faced national TV news crews when Hurricane Charley was predicted to hit Tampa in 2004.

Charley veered off, but Iorio discovered the plans, developed years earlier, were sorely lacking.

Her first order of business was to name Jones head of the emergency management team. Previously, the operations were housed in the Department of Public Works and coordinated by an engineer. They were focused on recovery after a storm, not on evacuation and communication during a storm.

In December 2005, Jones hired Chauncia Cuellar, who worked as a homeland security consultant for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, to focus full time on emergency planning.

Jones and Cuellar beefed up the city's communications systems and evacuation plans.

"We focused on leaving no one behind," Jones said. "(Iorio's) very concerned that the city be prepared and that we've reached out to our most at-risk citizens, who maybe don't have the economic strength to prepare themselves or don't have transportation and may be in an area where they're vulnerable."

City officials go yearly to assisted living facilities and homeless shelters to evaluate their response plans, and they pushed for 10 emergency bus routes that reach public housing complexes.

The new plan includes "a very clear line of command," Cuellar said. "Everyone knows who's in charge and who makes the resources move. In a disaster, there can't be any delayed response like there was in Katrina."

Emergency center

For the past year, the city has been tweaking the plan to make it comply with a national system developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. That means any other government or agency that follows those guidelines can easily mesh with Tampa's operations.

Cuellar has planned five drills in the past 18 months for city emergency response teams.

The city also expanded its emergency operations center from one room at Tampa's emergency dispatch center to three rooms.

One room houses the operations group, which includes representatives from public works, the fire rescue and police departments, parks department, TECO Energy, Hillsborough County, the Salvation Army and the Red Cross.

Another room holds space for amateur radio operators and a call center for the public.

The third room is for the executive policy group, which includes the mayor, the chief of staff and top administrators.

Larry Gispert, Hillsborough County's emergency management director, said the city has made great strides in emergency planning.

"Since they had no plan two years ago, it has to be considered an improvement," he said. The county coordinates response in an emergency for all of Hillsborough, including its three cities.

Who's in charge?

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina, tension erupted among city and county officials when Iorio started asking questions about emergency planning. County Administrator Pat Bean announced she was in charge in case of an emergency.

But Gispert said the city's improved plan to take care of residents benefits everyone.

"The law says if the city fails to do it, the county must come in and do it," he said. "If they're capable of taking care of their own residents, that helps us tremendously. Our plate is full. It's overflowing."

Gispert, along with County Commissioner Mark Sharpe, has been advocating for a joint emergency operations center for the city and county, but the $30-million proposal has been tabled.

Iorio and Cuellar say Tampa still has much more emergency planning to do.

"Frankly, this city is about seven years behind for a city this size," Cuellar said.

She said she is now making sure members of the city's emergency response team know who their counterparts are at the county, regional and state levels.

Al Steenson, president of Tampa's Gandy Civic Association, said he's impressed with the improvements the city has made.

"Hopefully, we won't have to use it, but if we do, we'll see if it works," he said. "We have dodged the bullet year after year after year. And one of these days we're not going to be able to dodge it. We need to be prepared."

Iorio said she remains concerned about rebuilding after a disaster, even though in the past two years she has squirreled away $7.5-million in a city emergency reserve.

She pointed out that it cost almost $7-million to clean up debris after Hurricane Charley, and Tampa didn't even sustain a direct hit.

And she worries about evacuation routes. Since 2004, emergency planners throughout the state have made sure that access to toll roads will be free in case of an emergency. The city also arranged with the Florida Department of Transportation to turn the Lee Roy Selmon Crosstown Expressway into a one-way road east during an evacuation.

But Iorio still doubts that the bay area's roads could handle a mass exodus from Pinellas and Hillsborough counties.

"It's yet another reason why I think a transit system is important," she said.

Still, Iorio said she's likely to feel much more confident if Tampa again faces a threat.

"We're much better prepared than we were in '04," she said.

Janet Zink can be reached at jzink@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3401.

Know this number

Call the city at (813) 232-6890 in emergencies if you need transportation to a shelter or want to report such problems as trees in the roadway.

[Last modified June 2, 2007, 23:43:35]