Florida Catastrophic Planning
Florida Catastrophic Planning Project Overview
The FEMA sponsored Florida Catastrophic Planning (FLCP) Initiative, which began in November 2006, consider two large-scale incidents resulting in projected consequences of catastrophic proportions: a breach of the Herbert Hoover Dike (HHD) around the waters of Lake Okeechobee and a Category 5 hurricane impacting the entire South Florida peninsula, which has a population of nearly seven million.
In April 2006, experts hired to evaluate the HHD said that the dike posed “a grave and imminent danger.” If the dike were to fail, the communities surrounding Lake Okeechobee would be flooded, resulting in great human suffering and loss of life. Additionally, Florida’s vulnerability to hurricanes has long been a concern for emergency planners. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida with near-catastrophic effects. In 2004, Florida was hit by four major hurricanes, raising the level of awareness of this threat. More significantly, the response to Hurricane Katrina vividly illustrated the importance of catastrophic planning.
While Florida has successfully handled many significant disasters, it is the job of emergency management to be thinking of the next “what if” and plan for it. A direct hit by a Category 5 hurricane with a subsequent failure of the HHD could have a devastating impact—not only on Florida but also to the entire U.S. economy. Millions of people are expected to be displaced for a significant period of time. Concern over this prompted the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the State of Florida to begin the FLCP initiative in the fall of 2006.
The main products of the FLCP project will be two sets of planning guidance (Federal and State) to be used to strengthen planning and procedural elements of the State Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan.
As part of technical assistance to develop these planning guidance, this project includes data collection and comprehensive capability assessments of local, state, and federal resources to support response to a failure of the HHD and a Category 5 hurricane striking South Florida. Analysis of the assessments and draft county plans will help to identify resource gaps, inconsistencies, and competing interests for limited resources. These issues are addressed by participants from multiple agencies and levels of government through operational workgroups and at planning workshops.
Approach
A planning and technical assistance team directly supports the FLCP Initiative. Project planners are distributed throughout Florida with three (3) planners deployed to South Florida to coordinate local planning efforts. Additionally, three (3) planners are deployed to North Florida in support of state and federal level efforts. The FLCP team is responsible for coordinating a local-up planning approach built on a scenario-based required resource process. Subject matter experts and responders who share responsibility for implementing disaster operations author plans, procedures & protocols thru function specific workgroup collaboration. Consequence based thresholds and resource shortfalls are indentified at the lowest jurisdictional levels then used as the bases for both state and federal level planning.
Scenario-Based Planning
The FLCP planning process is driven by a planning scenario known as Hurricane Ono. In this approach, a plausible, but fictional, event and its consequences are used to develop core concepts and coordinate existing ones. This planning process promotes communication and builds stronger relationships among federal, state, local, and tribal agencies and non-governmental organizations that are critical in an effective unified response and recovery.
The Hurricane Ono Scenario
After a winter of drought conditions and a summer during which several lingering tropical depressions have saturated central and southern Florida, the level of Lake Okeechobee has reached eighteen feet.
Hurricane Ono, a large Category 5 hurricane, makes landfall at 11 a.m. EDT on Monday, September 10, just north of Fort Lauderdale. The storm travels northwest across the state, maintaining Category 4 strength as it grazes the southwest reaches of Lake Okeechobee. The surge on the lake causes a breach of Reach 2 of the HHD in the vicinity of Clewiston. Tornadoes spawned by the hurricane also touch down on the dike, causing breaches in Reaches 1B and 1C near the towns of Pahokee and Belle Glade. Wind and flood control actions also cause the S80 structure on the St. Lucie Canal to fail. Ono continues across the state and, after spending 36 hours over land, exits into the Gulf of Mexico at Pinellas County.
Once over the Gulf, Ono regains strength, turns north, and makes a second landfall as a Category 4 hurricane on the Gulf coast of Alabama, between Mobile and Pensacola, before deteriorating rapidly into a tropical storm.
Consequences
Preliminary models show that Ono would prompt an evacuation of nearly 3 million residents, put most of South Florida under 1–4+ feet of water for weeks, destroy the homes of more than 70 percent of the population, leave six million people without electricity; and cripple the state’s transportation infrastructure. The expected impacts of Hurricane Ono are described in more detail in the Consequence Projections documents linked below.
While planning discussions are applicable to a range of catastrophic events, Hurricane Ono and the projected consequences establish the necessary capacity of response and recovery functions. Consequence projections also illustrate the catastrophic scenario and highlight the situational complexities that should be considered during planning. For example, if research and analysis indicate that a segment of the population in the area of impact are projected to require post-storm evacuation assistance, the planning guidance must address the personnel, resource, transportation, triage, staging, jurisdictional, legal, and geographic challenges that such a demand would present.
Strategic Sessions
Strategic Sessions are facilitated, objective driven sessions designed to provide a cross-discipline forum for validating emerging or maturing concepts and eliminate the “white page syndrome” that often inhibits development of operational plans. These sessions foster integrated planning among command staff, subject matter experts, responders, private sector and nonprofit stakeholders. Prior to Strategic Sessions draft documents are compiled using available research, existing best management practices, after-action reports, workshop notes, and required resource analysis from assessment or decision tools. These initial drafts are reviewed by local EM staff, discipline specific workgroups, coalitions and associations. Participants within the session are asked to accept, adapt, reject or create planning language that will be operationally viable. Strategic sessions and the four step process – accept, adapt, reject and create, ensure horizontal and vertical integration.
Workshops
Both the planning workshops and the individual county planners providing direct technical assistance build off of each other, sharing the common framework established by the catastrophic scenario and projected consequences. These workshops provide a venue for discussing planning issues, allowing a range of emergency management personnel—including local, tribal, state, federal, volunteer, and private industry—to participate in the planning. The workshops are framed by the Hurricane Ono scenario. Since they are not exercises, but rather planning workshops, all of the information regarding the Hurricane Ono scenario and consequence projections are presented up front so the information is readily available for discussion and reference as needed. Participants at all levels of government help to solve the planning challenges presented by the scenario, and the operational knowledge and experience captured make the resulting planning guidance more viable.
Seven major workshops have been held thus far:
- The November 2006 Phase 1 Kickoff Workshop in West Palm Beach, Florida, allowed representatives from each of the Lake Okeechobee counties to receive technical assistance that focused on direct HHD failure impacts and to list and prioritize actions for the development or enhancement of their county CEMP HHD annexes.
- The February 2007 Regional Planning Workshop in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, joined the two phases of the FLCP Project with the introduction of the Hurricane Ono scenario. It focused on local capabilities and needs and initiated development of decision matrices.
- The April 2007 State Planning Workshop in Tallahassee, Florida, allowed participants to discuss state-level concerns from previous workshops and to identify state capabilities and needs and continued development of decision matrices.
- The June 2007 Regional Planning Workshop, hosted by the Miami-Dade Office of Emergency Management, revisited issues of local importance and provided an opportunity to refine decision matrices.
- The November 2007 State-Federal Integration Workshop focused on coordination across these levels of government in planning to address identified gaps and challenges.
- The June 2008 Regional Planning Workshop in Palm Harbor, FL, refined the vertically and horizontally integrated rough draft catastrophic planning pieces developed through working sessions and by Operational Workgroups during Winter/Sprint 2008.
- The November 2008 State-Federal Integration Workshop further identified and began to address gaps and challenges identified throughout the planning process.
Scenario-Based Resource Planning and Decision Tools
Scenario-based resource planning uses the project scenario to establish a common framework for evaluation of capabilities across a region and throughout the multiple levels of emergency management. Since real life disasters do not generally follow a plan, the formulas and calculations inherent to an effective decision-making process need to be captured. This process gathers key steps and skills known to experienced individuals and converts them into accessible institutional knowledge. These formulas and calculations can usually be best expressed in the form of decision matrices that can be manipulated to provide a means of quickly determining resource needs and shortfalls for various events. In the planning stages, the information provided by the matrices allows the entire emergency management system to be analyzed for gaps. On the ground, the matrices enable rapid, informed decision-making during response. Finally, the development of the matrices highlights policy limitations for official consideration both prior to and during events.
FLCP decision matrices are intended to satisfy the requirements of the scenario and to provide a scalable, adaptable tool for emergency managers to use in the field. The Scenario-Based Resource Planning document, which can be found in the Documents section below, describes this process in more detail. Decision matrices created during the catastrophic planning process thus far can also be found in the Documents section below.
Function & Discipline Specific Workgroups
Function and Discipline Specific Workgroups were developed to promote cross-jurisdictional (vertical) integration, cross-discipline (horizontal) integration and outcome driven planning. Designated workgroup leads coordinate stakeholder interaction/participation, identify workgroup objectives, provide subject matter expertise, and identify inter-discipline collaboration opportunities. Workgroups are comprised of local, state and federal partners to ensure that each planning guidance defines appropriate outcomes, addresses discipline specific issues, and develops mature operational procedures. There are currently 15 workgroups:
Environmental Response |
Fire Rescue/USAR |
Host Communities |
Each FLCP Planner is assigned multiple workgroups to assist the state and federal leads as necessary.
Recent and Upcoming Events
In 2009, Strategic Sessions were held in Tallahassee and Atlanta. In addition, some of the consequences, concepts, and plans developed with this project were incorporated into the 2009 Florida Statewide Hurricane Exercise. The outcomes of the 2009 Florida Statewide Hurricane Exercise were use to add planning elements to the Florida State Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan; as well as other plans, procedures, and guides utilized by the State Emergency Response Team.
Documents
EM01_2009Jul24_FLCP_Environmental_Protection
EM02_ 2009Jul24_FLCP_FireRescueHazMat_Response
EM03_2009Jul24_FLCP_FireRescue_SAR
EM04_2009July24_EmergencyServices_Matrix
EM05_ 2009Jul24_FLCP_FireRescue_Suppression
EM06_2009July24_FireStation_Tables
EM07_2009Jul24_FLCP_HealthMedical
EM08_2009Jul24_FLCP_LawEnforcement
EM09_ 2009July24_ESF16_Deploy_2007Master
FLCP_Complete_wComments_2009JUL24
FLCP_EmergencyServices_2009JUL24
FLCP_HumanServices_2009JUL24
FLCP_Infrastructure_2009JUL24
FLCP_Public Information_2009JUL24
FLCP_StateICG_2009Jul24
HM01_ 2009Jul24_FLCP_AnimalIssues
HM02_ 2009July24_AnimalIssues_ESF17Matrix
HM03_ 2009Jul24_FLCP_CommunityStabilization
HM04_2009Jul24_FLCP_DisasterHousing
HM05_2009Jul24_FLCP_Education
HM06_2009JUL24_FLCP_HostCommunities
HM07_2009Jul24_HostCommunities_Typing_Draft
HM08_2009July24_HurricaneOno_RelocationEstimates
HM09_2009Jul24_FLCP_HW_Case_Management
HM10_2009Jul24_FLCP_HW_FamilyNotification
HM11_2009Jul24_FLCP_MassCare_FeedingSheltering
HM12_2009July24_MassCare Formulas
HM13_2009Jul24_FLCP_PopulationMovement
HM14_2009July24_PopulationShift_matrix
HM15_2009Jul24_FLCP_VolunteersDonations
INFRA01_FLCP_Debris_2009Jul24
INFRA02_FLCP_Fuels_2009Jul24
Updated:
April 20, 2010 12:07
