This image is from Reed Timmer’s Facebook page. Timmer is a meteorologist who stars in the reality show, Storm Chasers. When one thinks of the frequency of deadly tornadic activity, the conventional wisdom is that most of the deadliest storms are found in the midwest and plains area of the U.S. While that area is active, the deadliest storms actually occur in an area much farther east and south.
The April 2011 breakout of tornadoes in Alabama that killed hundreds and devastated towns across the north central regions of Alabama were historically bad, but they also occurred in a historically active area of the country.
The hotspot is an area spanning from southeastern Missouri and northeastern Arkansas through the delta area of western Tennessee, and into the northern parts of Mississippi and Alabama. But there’s real danger in the entire state of Oklahoma, and it ranges all the way north to the Great Lakes south to Louisiana and all the way east into the Georgia mountains.
nota bene: This is a measure of “killer” tornadoes, not necessarily intensity. You have to wonder if this is a phenomenon caused by having more people living in a dangerous area or if this is an area that just gets hit harder.
Watch the video below, as Channel 13’s John Paepke describes a very common scam used by some unscrupulous debris contractors to defraud taxpayers. Believe me—this is just one of many creative ways that some contractors have come up with to “shortload” their trucks and get paid for more material than they are actually transporting between the disaster area and the local landfill.
When Jefferson County decided to award an “emergency contract” to an out-of-state debris management firm, this blog raised the alarm. Since that decision, a number of municipalities within the county have elected to piggy-back onto Jefferson’s Contract with Ceres Environmental. The City of Birmingham initially awarded an emergency contractor to DRC, a company located in Mobile. However, some reports indicate that the city is reconsidering that contract in the wake of conflicting information on the cost sharing rules.
Ceres Environmental was one of three large debris management contractors hired to remove debris following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. While none of the contractors hired to do the work in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama after that storm were perfect little angels, the company hired by Jefferson County was cited numerous times for, shall we say, very questionable activities during the recovery effort. The company also agreed to pay up to $1.5 million in back wages to workers it hired during their tour of duty in Bayou Country.
Granted, the company examined in Paepke’s story was a subcontractor of Ceres Environmental. But the prime contractor is responsible for the performance of all subcontractors, regardless of which “tier” they are in with their subcontract. For all we know, this company could have been a sub of a sub of Ceres.
That’s not likely, because the low-ball cost per cubic yard negotiated by Jefferson County and Ceres means that there’s very little room for profit below the first tier of Ceres’ subcontractors. That margin squeeze creates a much stronger incentive to cheat. Hey, if you’re hauling 20 cubic yards of material and you can get paid for hauling 40, how many different ways could you come up with to game the system?
It is entirely possible that Ceres has learned the lessons of Katrina and won’t tolerate the kind of activities discussed in Paepke’s report last night. After all, the company mentioned in the story had its placards pulled and is no longer working in Jefferson County.
Paepke is expected to have another segment on tonight’s news, in which he covers the various tradeoffs associated with using a private contractor or the US Army Corps of Engineers for debris management after major disasters. It should be interesting, because as I mentioned in the post two weeks ago, I don’t think the local governments have any idea what kind of task they’re up against.
But you know what? If Jefferson County had a team of qualified debris management quality assurance personnel on the job, the truck would never have been loaded in the first place.
UPDATE: In response to emails and Twitter DM’s, here’s the deal with Jefferson County deciding to use a private contractor rather than following Tuscaloosa’s lead and letting the feds handle it.
FEMA has bookshelves of regulations promulgated under the Stafford Act. Many of those regulations describe how a non-federal entity is expected to monitor and verify that only debris eligible for federal assistance is removed from the disaster zone. Per my industry and professional contacts in the area, neither Jefferson County nor any the municipalities piggy-backing on JeffCo’s contract have trained Quality Assurance representatives monitoring the debris removal operations.
They’ve staged a few employees at the management and disposal areas, but they have no one monitoring the crews that are actually picking up and hauling the debris. A contractor goes out. He picks up some stuff. He travels to the landfill. He wants his load ticket.
NO ONE has verified that the contractor has stayed within the Jefferson County jurisdiction. That means the debris hauls being delivered to the management and disposal areas could have come from anywhere. It could have come from the city of Birmingham. Or, maybe it came from Shelby County. St. Clair County.
FEMA will ask: “How do you know where it came from?”
And if the county or its municipalities can’t answer to the government’s satisfaction, they don’t get paid.
That is a recipe for a financial disaster after the natural disaster. This is a BIG DEAL, folks. Jefferson County already stands on the precipice of bankruptcy, and they are voluntarily cash-flow financing a multi-million dollar operation and hoping that they get reimbursed.
Jefferson County, Alabama, already standing on the brink of bankruptcy before last week’s devastating and deadly tornadoes, had a way to avoid finding the money to pay for the collection, removal, disposal and monitoring of millions of tons of storm debris.
The US Army Corps of Engineers, through its Advanced Contracting Initiative, has a standing, indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract with Phillips & Jordan, the Zephryllis, Florida based disaster debris management firm that handled the removal and disposal of the Twin Towers debris after 9/11. The Corps and Phillips & Jordan have worked together on many different events and have the business of debris management down to a science, employing a high-tech, wireless and GIS-based monitoring and management system. All counties in the state eligible for Public Assistance under the Presidential Disaster Declaration had access to that contract. Tuscaloosa County wisely accepted the federal assistance. Other counties are likely to follow suit.
Jefferson County? Nope.
With the same infinite wisdom county leaders showed in dragging the county to the brink of financial ruin, JeffCo has elected to enter into an emergency contract with Ceres Environmental Services, a Minnesota-based company that gained notoriety following Hurricane Katrina by swindling millions from workers in Louisiana. The company was also cited by Corps Internal Review staff on numerous occasions for failing to comply with basic terms of their contract. None of the prime contractors hired by the Corps after Katrina were angels, but Ceres’ citations piled up like storm debris.
FEMA also has numerous regulations on how debris cleanup operations are to be monitored. Debris has to be separated by type. Hazardous materials must be segregated and handled by specialized contractors. White goods must be processed to remove coolant and other hazardous materials they may contain.
Every single truckload of material has to be witnessed by a Quality Assurance representative of the entity hiring the debris contractor, and must sign off on the time, date, location and type of debris collected. Every truckload must then be witnessed arriving at an approved reduction or disposal site. Small storm events don’t take much effort to clean up in the aftermath. Last Wednesday’s storm was historic in both the damage caused and the debris generated. Ceres is going to descend on Jefferson County with an army of trucks, skid steer loaders, knucklebooms and track hoes.
If this operation doesn’t go strictly according the bookshelves of FEMA regulations, the 75% federal share of the cost isn’t reimbursed. How likely is the state to pick up a tab that could reach into the hundreds of millions?
Jefferson County is woefully unprepared for this effort, and if they don’t do it right, they will tumble off the precipice and fall right into the abyss of federal bankruptcy court.
On Sunday, this blog posed the question: How many people are really missing in Alabama? That post was not meant as a knock on the fine organization and outstanding effort of the Alabama Emergency Management Agency, or the heroic efforts of the City of Tuscaloosa’s Mayor—Walt Maddox—and his tireless team of public servants. It was meant to shed some light on the fact that there were inconsistencies between the two organizations’ published figures for casualties and missing persons.
Under Incident Management System (IMS) protocol, a single Public Information Office (PIO) is responsible for communicating with the public and insuring that the information provided is clear, accurate and represents the best data available at the time.
The State of Alabama has one of the best disaster response organizations in the country. They have polished their procedures to the extent that very little in the way of assistance is required from FEMA. Even with the breathtaking scope of the April 27 disaster in Alabama, FEMA is providing only token assistance and coordination. That will change somewhat as the efforts morph from response to recovery, but by and large the state and local authorities are showing the nation how a disaster response effort should be managed.
How information regarding casualties and missing persons has been communicated is the only blemish on an otherwise exceptionally well managed response. Today, there are a pair of stories in the state’s print media on this subject. The first, published by the Birmingham News, notes that the discrepancy is not limited to Tuscaloosa County, but appears to be an issue in other areas of the state as well:
Counties in the greater Birmingham metro area hit hard by the storms reported no one missing as of Monday according to the state EMA data.
"I think at most we had maybe eight persons reported as missing in the first few days and they have been accounted for now," said Regina Myers, assistant EMA director in Walker County.
Jefferson County has had a high of about 50 people who were "unaccounted for," but none had been classified as "missing," said Mark Kelly, public information officer for Jefferson County EMA. He was unsure how many of those people still had not been accounted for late Monday.
The second of the two articles covering the story was published by the Tuscaloosa News, and that story explains part of the reason why such discrepancies exist—the lists of missing persons being maintained by the local authorities are in a near constant state of fluctuation. As a result, Alabama EMA’s Situation Reports are no longer including casualty and missing persons information.
I think that’s a mistake.
It’s important information that prevents wild rumors from being propagated—like the one over the weekend that Forrest Lake had been drained and that authorities were keeping horrible secrets about numbers of lost lives. Rumors like that divert important resources and strain the already stretched thin law enforcement. Clear, concise information from emergency management officials—even if the information is stale the moment the ink is dry—helps prevent the spread of misinformation.
I am glad that AEMA and local authorities are aware of the discrepancies noted here last Sunday. I am disappointed that EMA has elected to cease communicating the information altogether. It makes it difficult for news organizations to get a clear picture of the situation. The public is incompletely informed and that lets people make up and spread crazy stories.
Click the image below to view the Tuscaloosa imagery in Google Maps (but the full resolution version in Google Earth is much better).
Rough order of magnitude distance estimates are eight miles for the Tuscaloosa path and about nine miles for Jefferson. Pretty much everything about a quarter to a half-mile on either side of the centerline would have been severely damaged or destroyed.
Even well built structures were obliterated.
Damage assessments continue, but these storms will almost certainly be rated EF-5, the worst possible. EF-5 storms are exceedingly rare. The last one to touch down in the US was the Iowa storm of 2008. The storm that laid waste to Smithfield, Mississippi has already been given an EF-5 classification.
Update to add: Since the Google Earth imagery is stored in KML format, these are viewable in resource and CPU hogging ArcGIS and compatible applications.
Mother nature dealt the State of Alabama a cruel hand on Wednesday, April 27, 2011. It may be the worst known outbreak of tornadoes in recorded history. As emergency personnel search the rubble in counties across the northern part of the state, the death toll continues to rise. At least 145 are confirmed dead. Hundreds more are injured and an unknown number are still missing.
Entire neighborhoods have been reduced to tangled masses of debris.
The needs are great—many people have lost everything.
You can help.
Text REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation, or visit this site.
If you’d like to help with the cleanup in Tuscaloosa, please contact Nancy Green at 205-561-4169.
DeKalb County is in need of 8kw to 10kw Generators. Contact the county EMA if you can provide one or more.
Stay off the streets! I know—The damage is incredible and you’re curious. But emergency and response personnel don’t need to be navigating around gaggles of sightseers.
Kids Kottage is heading to Tuscaloosa and needs help from Mobile. accepting diapers, formula, baby food, and childrens clothing; bottled water and enerygy bars for rescue workers.
They are at 1781 Dawes Road and their number is (251) 633-0000.
If you know of any other ways people are reaching out, email me, drop me a comment, or catch me on Twitter and Facebook.
As you can see from the map below, more than half the state has been affected.
Jefferson County, Alabama, 
On Sunday, this blog posed the question: 
