Va. applies lessons learned from past storms

A reverse 911 alert system and $20 million of drainage work in Shockoe Bottom and the creek leading to it are Tropical Storm Gaston's local legacy, five years after it flooded Richmond.

The giant backup generators that Richmond fires up every 10 weeks at its water and wastewater plants reflect lessons learned from Hurricane Isabel in 2003.

Virginia's hurricane experiences in recent years have helped local and state officials continue to refine their emergency plans. Their work already has affected how officials respond -- Richmond used its reverse 911 telephone system to tell people to evacuate when Tropical Storm Ernesto flooded homes around the city's Battery Park neighborhood in September 2006.

The devastation Hurricane Katrina wreaked on the Gulf Coast in 2005 also taught lessons, in Virginia and across the country.

"I think Katrina made folks take the whole thing a lot more seriously," said Michael Cline, Virginia's emergency management coordinator.

Virginia's risk of a direct hurricane hit is smaller than North Carolina's, where the shape of the coast means the Outer Banks tend to be first to get the full brunt of a northward-swinging hurricane. To hit Virginia's Hampton Roads first, a hurricane would have to follow an unusual track with a sharp westward turn, Cline said.

Florida is closer to the main east-to-west track that hurricanes follow, and as Katrina showed, hurricanes that reach the Gulf Coast pick up tremendous energy from the warm waters there, just as they tend to weaken as they travel into the north Atlantic.

Local emergency management officials, remembering Gaston, make a point of identifying low-lying areas and spots where rising and fast-moving water means safety hazards or traffic bottlenecks, he said.

Cline's state agency, the Department of Emergency Management, reviews local plans and arranges regular training for local government's emergency services and management officials. .

His department organizes at least one statewide field exercise a year, in which emergency management officials walk through everything from the logistics and communications to first aid for the injured. State and local officials do smaller-scale, specialized practice sessions at least monthly.

There are also sessions during which agency heads practice how they coordinate responses to specific kinds of incidents.

One significant recent change was the Army Corps of Engineers' latest look -- its first in 16 years -- at storm surges in Hampton Roads. Their study, completed last year, looked at what could happen with a direct hit on Hampton Roads -- where a major hurricane has not come to shore since the mid-18th century.

The study shows that a larger area of Hampton Roads could be underwater than planners had expected, Cline said. It means more people would have to be evacuated -- more than 1 million if a Category 4 hurricane, with winds of 131 to 155 mph, struck Hampton Roads at the height of the tourist season.

Already, Hampton Roads officials are arranging for new emergency shelters -- some of the schools they had been counting on could be underwater, Cline said. Officials are also identifying "refuges of last resort," where people can find shelter from winds and water but that won't have food, water and power that emergency shelters do, Cline said.

The state's plan, meanwhile, calls for officials to begin stockpiling emergency supplies four to six days before a tropical storm's possible landfall here. One to two days out, officials will be checking emergency shelters to be sure they would be ready and watching the storm to see whether ordering an evacuation makes sense. They would tell people to leave about 30 hours before landfall.

The state plan calls for turning Interstate 64 into a one-way road for traffic headed west out of the danger zone. The plan identifies buildings at 18 colleges as shelters for the evacuated.

Emergency management officials say residents and visitors to Virginia should have a plan, too.

"Our surveys show no more than 10 to 20 percent actually have a plan or assemble disaster kits," Cline said.

Locally, Henrico County's alert system sends e-mail and text messages to cell phones and landlines in the event of a major weather problem.

"One thing everyone learned after Katrina was to think about reaching all populations, particularly those with special needs or people with pets," said Anna McRay, deputy coordinator for emergency management in Henrico. "It's essential to make sure everybody is in contact."

Contact David Ress at (804) 649-6051 or dress @timesdispatch.com.