Annual hurricane predictions typically roll out in May. This year, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts 13 to 17 named storms for the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 through Nov. 30. NOAA predicts at least seven to reach Category 3 hurricane status.
But the actual impact of such predictions is more elusive. Last year, NOAA predicted 13 to 16 such storms for 2006 but revised that estimate in August after a very slow start to the '06 hurricane season.
NOAA looks at weather models, evaluates trends and then makes a best-guess estimate. As 2006 proved, the first prediction didn't much matter because it was easy to just throw out new numbers halfway through the season, make a prediction closer to reality and save face a bit.
Each year, forecasters give these educated guesses a lot of credence.
While these forecasts are somewhat compelling, it's still a matter of predicting the weather. It's not an exact science, and there's a lot of guessing involved.
The National Guard, however, can't afford to guess. During seasonal storm preparedness, such predictions don't really matter. Whether 13 or 30 hurricanes, the Guard must be prepared for the worst-case scenario each time.
As a result, the Guard has had to take a step backward to go forward. That was August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast. The initial impact and subsequent failures in the days following the storm were glancing blows to the Guard and the public's perception of its response ability.
Realities of that fateful period in late August and early September of 2005 finally emerged, however, revealing the Guard as perhaps the most prepared and responsive agency throughout the unmitigated chaos.
How prepared was the Guard? Three days before the storm, 2,000 Guardsmen mobilized along the Gulf Coast.
After the storm made landfall in Mississippi, 5,000 were mobilized. The Alabama Guard virtually fell in behind the storm as it moved inland and was immediately working on recovery efforts.
This was two days before the levy failure in New Orleans, so the most pressing issue was recovery and rescue efforts in Mississippi, which was, by far, the most devastated. All along the coast, even a year later, barren foundation slabs and taller buildings with their first two floors completely hollowed out reflected the impact of a massive storm surge.
Once the levies broke in New Orleans, Aug. 31, the Guard number reached 11,000 deployed. From Sept. 1 through Sept. 5, Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) agreements-which allow aid from unaffected Guard forces in other states-brought another 30,000 troops into the region. By Sept. 10, at its peak, more than 50,000 Guardsmen were working in recovery efforts all along the coast.
This all happened behind a lot of noise, however-primarily many looking for someone or something to blame during the chaos.
Were too many troops deployed to Iraq at the time? Why were buses sitting in parking lots that could have taken citizens out of New Orleans before the storm? Who was in charge of recovery efforts?
This uncertainty led to a close call for the Guard last year when a provision in the fiscal 2007 Defense Authorization Act made changes to the Insurrection Act. The changes virtually stripped Guard authority from governors in a federal disaster like Katrina and gave it to the president.
But both the 2008 House and Senate defense authorization bills repeal those changes to the Insurrection Act, and with that concurrence, the item will not be part of conference committee debate.
As trying as the Katrina aftermath was, it shaped how the Guard and other agencies respond today. It served as a tool to bring the Guard, as the first federal responder, to work better the next time such a disaster occurs.
But officials realize the Guard always must operate with several unknowns when it comes to seasonal preparedness. Primary among them is the fact that no one knows if and when a particular event will occur; they don't know how bad it will be, and they don't know the nature of the damage.
As a result, Guard officials, along with various state and local authorities, must adopt an approach designed to hit a moving target, but with a foundation that remains the same.
"Since [Hurricane Katrina] we have been working on improving all aspects of our preparedness, especially for hurricanes," says Maj. Gen. John Basilica, director of logistics at the National Guard Bureau and a Louisiana Army Guardsman. "I would say that everything we're doing, we're doing with an eye towards an 'all hazards' way of doing business."
And he says it's not restricted to hurricane preparedness.
It's a matter of pounding out details of every plan and contingency before a disaster occurs. But as was often forgotten when people cried foul after Katrina, the Guard is still in a support role-albeit a big one.
"We are there to support the civilian leadership at every level-the local, of course in Louisiana, the parish officials that have responsibilities, and then at the state level we have a governor's office of homeland security and emergency preparedness." General Basilica says.
In Louisiana, the state has taken all of the information it has and has created a matrix through which every conceivable disaster response must pass.
These are predetermined missions based on the National Incident Management System, which connects responders from a variety of jurisdictions during a major disaster and its aftermath.
In 2004, the federal government released its "National Response Plan" with an emergency support function (ESF) established for various tasks in the event of a disaster.
In Louisiana, the Guard is responsible for all 15 ESFs in the plan and is also the supporting agency for all 15.
For example, ESF No. 1 is "Transportation," ESF No. 2 is "Communications"-on down the line through "Emergency Management," "Search and Rescue" and "External Affairs."
Within the 15 support functions are more than 100 potential missions for the Guard. In Louisiana, individual units are assigned particular tasks for each ESF, so when an event occurs, the Guard already knows its responsibilities.
"We have put these individual mission sets into what we refer to as 'contingency plans,'" General Basilica says. "That format is the type of format that I believe that all of the states are trying to move toward, but I just think that we've been doing it now since [hurricanes] Katrina and Rita and ... it's become very much the established way we do business."
Portions of such a plan are uncontrollable, however.
"What we've tried to do is we've tried to think of all the possible contingencies for the event. If it's a hurricane and it hits here-it's scalable, it's tailorable," General Basilica says. "[But] the storm gets a vote; it's not going to do what we tell it to do, so we try to think of everything."
Coordination on the Rise
State-level contingencies are only pan of the picture. Since Katrina, the entire Guard has been under the microscope regarding its ability to respond to any disaster.
Planning alone, as General Basilica indicates, has increased substantially at the local, state and federal level, particularly with increased cooperation between U.S. Northern Command and the Department of Homeland Security.
But the state is where the real action is.
Maj. Gen. Harold Cross, Mississippi adjutant general, says the hurricane plan in Mississippi has radically changed since Katrina, particularly regarding where the Guard will wait out a storm.
Unfortunately, it took the 2005 disaster to provide the information.
"We know the facilities down there that are above the flood plain [and will] stand a Category 5-plus hurricane wind force," General Cross says. "And so we will be able to station, probably 1,500 to 2,000 troops forward in the lower three counties embedded in those secure facilities with their equipment prior to landfall, and then we will be more readily accessible immediately after landfall."
One concern in recent months has been equipment availability for the Guard.
With states sometimes at woefully low equipment levels, the Guard must find alternate ways to ensure the equipment meets the need as quickly as possible after a disaster.
Air assets appear to be sufficient, according to NGB.
Right now, the Guard Bureau indicates the Guard has more than 175 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and 50 CH-47 Chinook helicopters available to respond to hurricanes in the Gulf States and along the Atlantic coast. Overall, NGB reports the Guard has more than 600 helicopters available nationwide, as well as 300 Air Guard aircraft available.
States falling short with other equipment, however, are getting particular attention as the hurricane season kicks off. For example, the Alabama Guard "identified some equipment shortages" that the Army agreed to address by June 1.
NGB indicates a Florida Guard "in a better readiness condition to respond to the citizens of Florida in 2007 than during the record-breaking hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005." But NGB still says the Guard is short of "dual-use" equipment, such as Humvees, trucks, trailers and night-vision goggles, due to combat commitments.
But the NGB says Florida has enough equipment to respond effectively to an emergency if utilizing EMAC to get equipment and additional units from other states.
While the bureau had no specifics on equipment availability in Louisiana, Mississippi, which took the brunt of Katrina, learned some specific lessons from the event.
One solution to any equipment shortage for Mississippi is lease agreements General Cross says he has with some private companies for equipment to help in a hurricane's aftermath-such as trucks for debris removal.
But the state also has devoted considerable efforts to evacuations to prevent the need for some of those rescues. One reason is the extreme volatility of the region.
According to General Cross, there's still a very large contingent of migratory construction workers throughout the Gulf Coast area, and Mississippi still has about 20,000 Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers.
Talk to Me
But regardless of contingency plans, heavy equipment and personnel, if the major players in a disaster such as a hurricane can't communicate, the effort is extremely hindered.
In New York City on 9/11, various rescue agencies didn't have the ability to speak with each other.
During Katrina, the problem was the same. In some cases, Army Guard soldiers had to use runners and hand signals to communicate with active-component soldiers only a block away.
Perhaps most important, each state and territory, according to NGB, now as an ACU-1000 inside the Unified Command Suite utilized by each weapons of mass destruction-civil support team.
"This electronic box device, the size of a small refrigerator, enables radios with different frequencies to be patched together, thus allowing city, county, federal and state emergency responders to talk to each other," according to NGB.
In addition, 23 states now have a satellite communications system that can be brought to an incident site that uses high frequencies to coordinate phone, video and satellite data for first responders.
Finally, NGB has a "land mobile emergency radio" stock of 300 radios and about 100 satellite phones available for deployment to a disaster zone.
According to General Cross, redundant communications systems now give responders the ability to have about 40 miles of communication coverage.
But it's not just NGB and the Guard that has focused attention on communication.
"The [emergency operations centers] and all the other governmental agencies have put a lot of attention on communication," General Cross says. "My main concern now is fratricide, in that we use all the band width and we get too much clutter on every frequency, but that's a good problem to deal with."
As Gulf states still are reeling from Katrina and its aftermath nearly two years later, General Cross doesn't deny that the disaster played a substantial role in future prevention.
If the state hadn't gotten the attention before, the Katrina disaster put communication and equipment deficiencies on the front burner and accelerated the fielding of some equipment.
"That would have taken years to evolve-just the communications piece of it-without the calamity that we had," General Cross says.
But that's only part of a larger picture that is much more fluid than identifying equipment shortages and working through various contingencies.
"No matter how much planning you do and no matter how voluminous these plans get, they all go out of the window on the first day because [we have to] improvise so much," he says. "You have to be innovative, and you have to be sensible, and you have to be able to handle the unexpected. No two disasters are the same."
© 2007 National Guard Association of the United States Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Source: National Guard
