Winning the national championship has brought a new wave of enthusiastic letter-men, this time from third graders in Tuscaloosa. Teacher Donna Crawford says she uses Alabama football and players to remind her students to always do their best, so the class wanted to thank the team for a job well done.
The Crimson Tide is certainly making Tuscaloosa proud. Not only bringing home the crystal trophy after a record-breaking juggernaut of a game, but this class of Seniors is one of the nation’s winningest in college football history. The BCS Champs also boast 22 graduates, tied with Boise State for the largest number of any bowl team. In the 2009 national championship, Bama also led college football in graduates with 22.
Alabama’s academics set an even higher bar. In the past year the Tide was among the top three in the SEC for football players named to the SEC Academic Honor Roll. Its freshmen also led the SEC Academic Honor Roll with 11 players recognized, many of whom played key roles in the BCS title game. No other SEC team had more than 5 players recognized.
The players understand how the younger generation looks up to them and takes the responsibility seriously. Dont’a Hightower even made sure to mention the kids in his profile as a Lott IMPACT Trophy finalist.
And it’s not just the kids who are proud of this Alabama football team. Bama Nation is looking forward to many more success stories in Tuscaloosa.
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.
This post is not meant to begrudge or question the judgment of Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox, who has been an outstanding voice of reason and calm in the face of incredible human suffering and loss. Nor is it meant to question the capabilities of the Alabama Emergency Management Agency, which has one of the best command and response structures in the country.
But there is an apparent disconnect between what the City of Tuscaloosa and Alabama EMA are telling the public about the number of people missing or unaccounted for following the devastating tornadoes of April 27.
The city has confirmed 39 deaths, 455 missing people and more than 1,000 injuries, said Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox in a press conference Sunday afternoon.
The names of the 39 confirmed deaths in the city and county were released during the press conference.
The city has removed 123 names from the list of missing people because they have been located or identified as a duplicate of a person already listed.
But from the Alabama EMA’s latest Situation Report (SitRep #10):
I am not accusing either the City of Tuscaloosa or the State of Alabama of lying or intentionally suppressing information. My guess is that there is simply a disconnect in either how the two entities define “missing persons” or in how they communicate important information to the public.
This kind of disconnect is not supposed to happen under a well operated Incident Command System (ICS). Under ICS protocol, consistent information based on the best available information should be provided.
Having one entity report only eight missing—not even including Tuscaloosa County among those reporting missing persons—and having the other state in numerous public statements that the number of missing is in the hundreds is something that needs to be addressed.
Someone needs to ask the EMA Public Information Officer and the Mayor’s office why these two numbers are so vastly different, and what will be done to reconcile the information they provide to the public.
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.
ABC 33/40’s Bill Castle spent most of yesterday flying around the Alabama damage centers of Wednesday’s deadly tornado outbreak, and returned with some truly incredible footage. In some of these videos, you will see a swath of destruction as much as three-quarters of a mile wide, and stretching for miles on end.
The paths of destruction are mind-boggling. I haven’t seen any of this firsthand, but watching some of this footage brings back memories of Hurricanes Andrew, Ivan, Katrina and Rita. Entire towns are obliterated. Even well built structures are damaged or destroyed.
My day job company is one of many FEMA and US Army Corps of Engineers advance contractors for various Emergency Support Functions (ESF’s). We are typically one of the first private sector contractors on the scene, handling everything from temporary housing to debris removal to infrastructure damage assessments. However, we aren’t mobilized until the search and rescue missions have been completed. Those are obviously still ongoing, and they might be for some time to come.
