Ice storm simulation helps Westmoreland County Public Safety, partners prep for disaster
Jan. 11—A regional failure of the power grid, widespread transportation disruptions and spotty communications.
Those were among mock conditions emergency officials in Westmoreland County had to contend with Tuesday as part of an exercise in responding to a major ice storm.
About 30 public safety staffers and other stakeholders gathered at the Regional Special Operations Center in Unity for Operation Bold Leap. The tabletop simulation was the latest in emergency coordination exercises the county completes annually as part of the federal Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program.
An ice storm is among the potential hazards the county faces each winter.
"I've seen it where you have these sudden drops in temperature during a rain storm and, the next thing you know, electric wires are getting covered with ice," said Roland "Bud" Mertz, Westmoreland County's public safety director. "Add wind to that and they start snapping, and trees start snapping.
"Then you've got power issues and transportation issues. A quarter of an inch of ice can be damaging, let alone half an inch," he added.
Mertz and his staff could just as easily have chosen a flood as the focus of the exercise. The idea, he said, was for county safety officials and partner entities to practice their response to a disaster.
"No matter what the topic is, it's about people working together and communicating well together, working with a team," he said. "We fill the room with subject matter experts in different areas, and they work together on a (disaster) response. They work with our incident management team to solve the problem."
Other participants among more than 20 social service, private and public entities in the exercise included representatives of Westmoreland Manor, the Area Agency on Aging, Behavioral Health and Development and the county commissioners' staffs.
In keeping with federal emergency guidelines, exercise participants assessed the disaster based on seven "community lifelines": safety and security; food, water and shelter; health and medical; energy; communications; transportation; and hazardous materials.
Mertz said each of the seven areas is assigned a different color code based on its status, to determine the urgency it demands in a particular disaster response.
"If transportation is green, I know the roads are open," he said. "If it's red, it's because it's totally not working. That allows you to focus your attention to bring those colors up to where they should be."
When flash flooding caused damage and evacuations Aug. 5 in areas of Unity, including the village of Dorothy, local municipal officials took the lead in mustering equipment for larger-scale recovery efforts, Mertz said.
"They were getting dumpsters and the heavy equipment they needed to remove trees and debris," he said, while the county "supported them more in helping the individual disaster survivors."
Tuesday's exercise represented partial activation of the county Emergency Operations Center staff and resources, said Chris Tantlinger, the county's deputy emergency management coordinator.
Within the past 17 years, he said, "We've only had a full EOC activation twice, where we've asked everybody to come in."
Those disasters were the "Snowmageddon" storm that dumped about 21 inches of snow on the region Feb. 5 and 6, 2010, and a tornado that tore through Westmoreland County on March 23, 2011, damaging Hempfield Area High School and about 90 homes.
Exercise participants reviewed highlights of Westmoreland County's emergency operations plan, which is periodically renewed.
"We need to think of it as a football playbook," Tantlinger said. "You don't carry the book out onto the field to see how you're going to play the game. You're going to have to run the plays in practice throughout the week, and then you're going to respond appropriately at the time."
Jeff Himler is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Jeff by email at jhimler@triblive.com or via Twitter .
