Lessons learned

Springfield Mayor Misty Buscher has pledged to hire an emergency operations coordinator for the city and create a “long–term recovery group” to respond to any future disasters following the June 29 storms that hit Sangamon County.

And Doug Brown, chief utility engineer for City Water, Light & Power, is planning more cross-training for his employees and better ways of communicating with the public and the news media.

These are some of the lessons Springfield officials said they learned from the June 29 storms – known collectively as a derecho – that caused widespread power outages and property damage.

“So while the storm was terrible, we didn’t lose any lives, which I’m thankful for,” Buscher said. “We’ve learned from the storm, and the community will be stronger because of the storm.”

City officials in early August said they submitted damage assessment details to state and federal agencies as they sought millions of dollars in federal disaster assistance for city government, businesses and residents.

The city hasn’t yet received word from those agencies, including the U.S. Small Business Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, on what aid will be provided.

Haley Wilson, a spokesperson for Buscher, said Aug. 29 that information was unavailable on the status of measures mentioned by Buscher and Brown, as well as the total amount of money the city is requesting from the federal government in the wake of the derecho.

During recent public events and interviews with Illinois Times, Buscher and Brown shared some of the insight they gained.

The mayor told the audience at the July 28 meeting of the Citizens Club of Springfield that she didn’t plan to take on the role of emergency operations coordinator when she and other officials camped out in the basement of City Hall, in the emergency operations center, as the storms hit midday on June 29.

She learned that the coordinator job had gone unfilled since the administration of the late Mayor Tim Davlin.

Buscher, who defeated incumbent mayor Jim Langfelder in the April 4 election and was sworn in May 5, said she plans to assign that job to someone currently employed by the city because it won’t be a full-time position.

But someone needs to be trained and ready to coordinate the services of police, firefighters, Public Works and CWLP crews and other community resources in weather-related emergencies or mass-casualty events, she said.

The mayor commended city workers and Sangamon County 911 dispatchers who came to City Hall when the city’s radio communications antenna on top of the Wyndham Springfield City Centre broke in half during the storms.

As a result, emergency calls initially were automatically rerouted to dispatchers in Macon County. Buscher said Brown and other workers used laptop computers and notes on paper to make sure the rerouted calls were passed on quickly to Springfield police and fire and CWLP crews.

“It was all hands on deck – people working hand in hand,” the mayor said. “It was teamwork, and I cannot thank the people enough in the room who did all those things.”

She also applauded repair crews and the approximately 250 local and out-of-town electrical workers for the “huge undertaking restoring power. … I cannot thank our working men and women and City Water, Light & Power and all of the partners who came from other communities in getting that power restored to all our citizens.

“What happened in Springfield – how quickly that got restored in Springfield – is amazing.”

During and immediately after the storms – which officials described as an “inland hurricane” that provided little warning before its arrival – as many as 40,000 of CWLP’s 68,000 customers went without electricity.

It took crews from CWLP and other communities nine days to get the number without power down to 50, Brown said. He said CWLP is requesting almost $9 million in federal assistance to reimburse the city-owned utility for materials and overtime costs and to pay contracted “mutual aid” rates for out-of-town crews.

Brown said the derecho was the most widespread weather disaster in Springfield since the Good Friday ice storm in 1978. More information on the storms is available online from the National Weather Service at bit.ly/sangamonderecho.

Buscher thanked nonprofits such as the American Red Cross, Springfield YMCA and the BOS Center for assistance that included shelter, cooling centers and charging stations for cellphones and other mobile devices.

Buscher said Ethan Pose, the city’s community relations director, is organizing the long-term recovery group, made up of representatives from AARP, Springfield School District 186, the Red Cross, Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, churches and civic organizations.

It will be a “community-based group that would respond to any natural or manmade disasters,” Buscher said. “When the community needs help, the community group deploys. It would be such a faster process of getting help and all hands onboard if we had that process in place.”

CWLP is looking into more efficient ways of informing the public through the news media and social media about the progress of restoring power in future outages, Brown said. In the days after the derecho, city officials held daily news conferences that were streamed on the internet.

The Springfield City Council heard debate in the weeks after the storms over whether the installation of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) meters would have made a difference in the pace of restoring power.

The city currently uses automatic meter reading technology for CWLP customers that allows a CWLP vehicle to drive down a street and take wireless readings from nearby structures.

AMI readers would wirelessly connect to a central hub and allow city officials immediate and constant access to a customer’s electrical system and know when power is out, Brown said.

Conversion to such technology throughout CWLP’s territory would cost $20 million, he said. CWLP is considering switching to AMI readers, which also would allow the utility to charge differing rates at different times of the day, but Brown said several other capital projects have higher priority.

AMI readers would assist the city in handling small-scale outages but wouldn’t make much of a difference during a large-scale event such as a derecho, he said.

In mass outages, AMI “doesn’t speed up restoration,” Brown said. “When there’s something to fix, we still have to put somebody out there to review it and figure out what’s wrong and get the materials ordered or pulled from inventory.”

Dean Olsen is a senior staff writer at Illinois Times. He can be reached at dolsen@illinoistimes.com, 217-679-7810 or twitter.com/DeanOlsenIT.

This article appears in Renovation revelations.