The city’s debris removal plan was an “incomplete draft” that listed Traffic Engineering and Solid Waste as the departments in charge.
A year later, Fire Chief Chris James says Augusta’s Emergency Management Agency has overhauled its operations to address the problems it encountered.
The same can’t be said for Augusta’s 311 customer service hot line, which was unable to answer between 1,600 and 1,700 calls during the storm. System director Kelli Walker said last week that plans to upgrade emergency staffing, technology and space requirements remain “in progress” or are still “being discussed” or “reviewed.”
Asked why measures haven’t been implemented, Walker said Wednesday that a meeting is scheduled next week to discuss the changes.
“Once the plan is finalized it will be presented to Administration and if approved a funding source will be identified,” she said in an e-mail.
Augusta Commission member Bill Lockett applauded James for the EMA improvements but said he was unaware of the issues still facing 311. He said he plans to start making inquiries immediately, with the hope of funding and expediting an effort to solve 311’s “shortcomings” by next February.
“I think we have made great strides, but this is not going to be a one-time fix,” Lockett said. “It is going to be a continuous process.”
James said that after the storm, his EMA staff immediately began making adjustments to its emergency operations, volunteer management and debris removal plans and completely upgraded each earlier this month to get help out faster.
“It kind of caught our agency in a time of transition, but overall, we responded well,” said James, who was appointed the city’s emergency management director by the state Dec. 26.
The revamped emergency operations plan covers 15 functions, as recommended by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, including first aid, communications, and mass shelter care, to ensure everyone knows their job and provide continuity between local, state and federal efforts, James said.
The office now has five disaster assessment teams assigned to survey damage citywide, 17 firefighters and community volunteers trained to open emergency shelters, and plans to apply for a grant to buy five outdoor sirens. The city currently does not have any.
The volunteer management plan has been restructured to meet with disaster relief organizations, such as Team Rubicon, Samaritan’s Purse and the Georgia Baptist Convention, to guide them to communities that most need help and inform residents about groups approved to work in the area.
Augusta has adopted the state’s Praise and Preparedness course, a grass-roots movement designed to conduct church walkthroughs and provide resources and information to the faith community to plan and coordinate recovery efforts.
These efforts are expected to support the new debris plan, which was approved by the Augusta Commission this month to include pre-existing agreements with hauling and financial-recovery firms to prevent the city from having to “piggyback” on contracts from other counties, as it did last year.
After the storm, Augusta didn’t seek competitive bids for debris removal but used contracts awarded in 2010 in Chatham and Liberty counties to AshBritt, a hauling company based in Florida, and Leidos, a monitoring firm in Virginia.
The practice likely increased debris removal costs, delayed repayment from federal and state emergency management, and resulted in the city getting only about $11.7 million approved for reimbursement. Augusta has appealed the decision to recover about half of the remaining $6 million paid in debris removal costs.
James said his office now has a three-year contract with Ceres Environmental Services to remove debris and the firm Witt O’Brien’s to monitor the effort and lead the financial recovery process. Each contract has no activation charge and two 1-year options to renew before the services are reopened to the public.
“We had on-call contractors for debris pickup and tree removal, but the amount of damage caused by this storm was more than we had ever seen,” James said. “We now have a more complete plan that will make the process work faster.”
Both companies have had pre-existing contracts with Columbia County since 2008, which Emergency Management Director Pam Tucker said helped it receive maximum reimbursement from the state and federal government and a 2½ percent reduction in its local match for public assistance programs.
Tucker said Columbia County has been approved for 92 percent in state and federal reimbursement for its $10.1 million cleanup effort. She expects the Georgia Emergency Management Agency to “close out” the ice storm disaster with Columbia County within four to six weeks, at which time the remaining $924,665 owed will be paid to the county.
GEMA Director Charley English said in a November letter that the 2½ percent discount was awarded, in part, for Columbia County’s development of four operational recovery plans, the establishment and training of local damage assessment teams, and having pre-disaster debris removal contracts.
The disaster caught Augusta’s 311 center unprepared for the work it was called upon to do. The facility in the Municipal Building closed for the storm Feb. 12, leaving only two operators answering calls from home on cellphones the next day from people seeking road conditions, utility contact numbers and other information.
Walker said her staff had no way to log or expedite hundreds of work orders because they didn’t have power and Internet access. She said the department is “in the process” of developing a plan to ensure 311 has updated contact information, detailed policies and critical resources, such as power, staff, phones, Internet and network access, to operate in an emergency.
She said phone system modifications are “being discussed” that will allow the office to take calls 24/7 if needed with little notice.
Walker said the center is searching for a location that is “easily accessible” and discussing the possibility of obtaining volunteers to help offset the cost of working outside normal hours.
James said his office has arranged to rent generator trailers and spent $16,000 to pre-wire two city-owned shelters, May Park and Blythe community centers, to support alternate power supplies. The city’s only emergency shelter, originally in a community center next to the county jail, had no backup generator and needed to be moved to the school district’s bus depot on Mike Padgett Highway when it lost power.
James said the shelters are spread throughout the county to prevent the possibility of isolated outages from blacking out more than one site, but Red Cross records show about 20 locations don’t have backup generators or the capability to hook up an emergency electrical supply.
James said the plan is to do more pre-wiring as funds become available.
©2015 The Augusta Chronicle (Augusta, Ga.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
