Emergency Preparedness

Prior to the Thursday night workshop I was chatting with Mayor Keller when the incident regarding the water (read more) came up.

We had a good discussion, but agreed to disagree on one point. Mayor Keller was taking a lot of the blame for not having a better plan in place to notify and inform the community when a signficant emergency occurs, and I believe that in this particular case it was the responsibity of the service provider to notify its customers, not the Mayor's.

I'm glad to see that they Mayor was so adament to have a plan in place for the future. He rightly pointed out that the water is one thing, but a train caring hazardous materials that may have any kind of issue is something else altogether.

As a whole the Mayor's plan (briefly outlined in the workshop report) will need to have redundancy and account for communications channels being blocked/unavailable (if power is out using email and web, radio and television does little good). The local community will need the support of utilities as well as local media and other EMS providers.

In the instance of the water, PA American Water should have had a plan that comprised more than notifying local Emergency Management and posting a note on its web site. This company has customers' phone numbers and they could easily acquire email. A public utility whose product could cause or deliver harmful material to consumers ought to be at the least required to attempt to individually contact all customers via phone and email. This could easily be done through a call center using an automated message.

In the case of the recent incident, PA American Water would notify Emergency Management, it would notify customers, and it would post an announcement on its web site. Emergency Management would then enact its plan, which based on the Mayor's comments would include a unique and specific siren indicating to residents to tune in to local radio or tv (most likely the same sources for snow emergencies) and to visit the borough's web site. Customers would then have a role in notifying individuals they see or know. In the case of a customer like a school district, they too could quickly disseminate information to parents via their email alert system.

All of these elements working together are required. While I applaud the Mayor for taking responsibility and working to ensure the community is not caught off guard again, I don't think he should be shoudering the blame for PA American Water's inability to notify its customers.

Read the incident release.
Read previous post on customer notification.