“It was a very localized tornado outbreak, but it was pretty hardcore as far as the damage that it did,” said Jason Matthews, a corporal with the Lake County Sheriff’s Office who is assigned to the 911 communications section.
The aftermath of the tornado would teach Lake County’s emergency responders valuable lessons about communications and training — lessons that would be put to good use in a different type of disaster six years later.
A tornado first touched down near the Sumter County line, damaging more than 1,000 homes and destroying about 200, Matthews said. Then, in the community of Lady Lake, it damaged 200 homes and destroyed 100 — and killed eight people. Shortly after that, a second tornado touched down near Lake Mack, killing about a dozen people and affecting hundreds of homes.
One casualty of the tornadoes: a 1,700-foot-tall communications tower that served an entire region of the county. The tower housed equipment for several different radio systems and a couple local radio stations. When Matthews responded to a phone call saying there had been a terrible tornado and communications were down, he and his colleagues responded to see if they could fix it. “We found the tower completely destroyed. The tornado knocked it to the ground,” Matthews said. “It was in a pretty rural area, and at that time we didn’t have a backup tower. We never would have thought that tower would come down.”
As they worked to recover from the tornadoes, law enforcement and other emergency responders in the county realized that they were lacking not only backup communication towers, but also common training that would enable them to work together.
“The Groundhog Day tornadoes in 2007 were a call to action,” Matthews said. “Our communication system wasn’t really equipped to handle that incident. It also gave us a wake-up call to the lack of common training between police and fire and EMS.”
The problems had not been obvious before the tornadoes.
“Everybody thought we all worked together really well, but after 2007 we realized we could do better,” said Thomas Carpenter, emergency management division manager for Lake County. “When the tower went down and the communications went away, it accentuated how we were working in silos. That’s when we started working on our training and the new communications system.”
One key to better training: making sure everyone was using FEMA’s national framework for emergency management, the National Incident Management System (NIMS). NIMS includes the Incident Command System (ICS), which is a standard, on-scene, all-hazards incident management system. The goal is to make it easier for agencies to work together on short notice, as when neighboring departments come to the aid of a community that has experienced a disaster.
“NIMS and ICS don’t tell local and state governments what to do,” said Matthews. “It really gives them a set of management tools, ideas and common terminology to bring to agencies that don’t normally work together to accomplish a goal.”
In the aftermath of the 2007 tornadoes, Lake County officials asked neighboring counties for help bringing mobile communications towers to the affected area. In 24 hours, a team of radio technicians, vendors and county personnel was able to remove the equipment from the destroyed building and rebuild a temporary radio system.
But despite the cooperation, the path to success was not smooth.
“Our county was the last county in Region 5 that was using the VHF and UHF radio spectrum — we were not on 800 MHz as the rest of the region was,” Matthews said. “In the initial response phase, the first 12 to 24 hours, as other counties were sending people in to help us, we had a lot of difficulty with agencies being able to communicate with each other.”
And technological incompatibility was only part of the problem.
“We focus a lot on the radio system that didn’t work, and we tend to shift our focus away from the underlying factors,” Matthews said. “There are a lot of agencies that don’t talk together on a regular basis. They don’t train together.” It’s more fruitful, he said, to have people from different agencies who know each other and have worked together, even in a training exercise, before a disaster.
The lack of training on NIMS and ICS protocols showed, as well.
“Fire and EMS had been training and using NIMS and ICS protocols for a long time,” Matthews said. “When they show up at a scene, they know to go to the check-in and get their orders for the day before they go to work. At that time, on the law enforcement side of the house, it was more, ‘Just show up and go to work.’” This left the command staff without a clear picture of who was working on what, who was on their way and who was on standby to come if necessary.
The Lake County Sheriff’s department took stock of its response to the tornadoes and implemented a number of changes: Created a full-time emergency management coordinator position. This person’s job included setting up training on NIMS and ICS so that personnel would be better able to work with other public safety responders and more efficiently use their resources.
Established an agency incident management team. This group, a mix of people from around the agency, plays a crucial role in managing emergencies, such as by checking in personnel from outside the county.
Increased communications training. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security was rolling out courses for communications unit leaders and communications technicians. “I was fortunate enough to get to attend one of those, and I brought back the training and knowledge,” said Matthews. This allowed all the radio personnel to be trained on incident response, something that hadn’t traditionally been part of their training.
Participated in regional and statewide communications exercises. This helped in two ways: The players from different agencies got to know each other, and the communications staff got in on the early part of the disaster response. “In the past, communications folks didn’t get called until communications were really bad,” Matthews said. “Anytime there’s a major incident now, we jointly respond.” That way, they can find out which outside agencies are coming to help and anticipate any special communications needs they will have. And the communications staff now has “a relationship and a trust factor” with the battalion chiefs and shift commanders who are working on emergency response.
Upgraded the radio system. “In 2009, we purchased a brand-new radio system to replace the antiquated VHF technology,” said Matthews. “It put us on a level playing field with everyone else in the region.” The county also increased the number of communications towers, making the infrastructure much stronger.
Matthews attributes the smooth purchase of the new radio system to the problems that resulted from using the old system during the aftermath of the tornadoes.
“The elected officials came out and saw that tower lying in the grass” in 2007, said Matthews. “It spurred the discussions to get things moving.”
Would all this training, reorganization and new technology actually make a difference in an emergency? Lake County had an opportunity to answer this question — and see how well all these changes were working — a few years later.
The county is home to a company called Blue Rhino, which refurbishes and refills the propane canisters used for gas grills. The refurbishment facility operates 24 hours per day.
On July 29, 2013, a malfunction with a forklift caused a fire, which in turn caused a small explosion, Matthews said. Over half an hour, the situation worsened. As the initial fire engine companies were responding, the fire spread to 55,000 gas grill tanks that were stored — filled with propane — on the property. About 300 to 500 of the canisters rocketed away from the facility, some landing more than a mile away.
“Almost the entire inventory of 55,000 filled containers caught on fire and exploded,” said Matthews. “It was quite a scene.”
Hundreds of people called 911, saying they could see the fire, reporting propane canisters landing in their yards and asking if they should evacuate.“It was quite a scary situation for a lot of the residents,” Matthews said. “It called for a very large public safety response.”
About 19 different agencies responded: multiple law enforcement agencies, fire and rescue departments, and the county’s emergency management services department. The agencies ranged from the local level all the way to the federal level. There were also aircraft from air medical transport agencies preparing to transport victims to hospitals.
Some critically injured employees were flown to trauma centers, but the numbers weren’t as bad as was initially feared. Although they were first anticipating the possibility of hundreds of wounded people, the actual number was more like two or three dozen.
“We were very lucky,” Matthews said. “We attribute that to the quick response and evacuation of the immediate area. Also, it happened at 11 p.m. in a light industrial area that is not heavily populated during that time.”
Matthews and his colleagues learned the value of all the training, improved communications and standardized systems that had been put in place.
The best proof that the training worked well was how the communications team responded even though Matthews wasn’t there for the second incident. Because the agency personnel had been sharing knowledge and a lot of employees had been trained, they weren’t hindered by the absence of one person.
“I was out of town when it happened — on a canoe trip, so far out that I didn’t have cell service. I didn’t even know about it until the next day,” he said. “The incident management team folks that I had trained to be able to step in did their jobs, and they did a wonderful job of handling it.”
Having 19 agencies working together also showed the value of the NIMS and ICS frameworks, Matthews said. The training and planning work paid off as well.
“When everybody got there, they knew each other — they were used to seeing each other,” Carpenter said.
The incident was also a key test of the new communications system. “The voice communications piece of it was seamless,” said Matthews. This was true not only for the agencies in the county that worked together regularly, but also for outside groups.
“Orange County responded to help us out, as did several state agencies, the aircraft entities and the Florida Wildlife Commission,” Matthews said. “We were able to communicate with all those people at the push of a button.”
The contrast between the 2007 tornadoes and the 2013 propane canister incident clearly showed the value of the training and upgraded communications systems.
“In between the two incidents, it completely changed the way we do things,” Matthews said.
And although the improvements centered around getting better technology, Matthews said the goal is actually for technology not to be the focus. When communications systems operate smoothly, emergency responders can focus on what needs to be done to help people and recover from the disaster — not on whether they are able to reach their colleagues on the radio. “It lets us concentrate less on the technology and more on the problem at hand,” Matthews said.
