Looking Ahead to Improve Disaster Responses

When Hurricane Irene struck New Jersey and cut electrical power supplies for thousands of Warren residents, local officials scrambled into action to try and shorten the outage.

When many residents rely on their electrical supply to provide well water for household use, or just to keep up developments, such outages are disruptive—and potentially dangerous.

But in the days that followed the storm, it became evident that communication was a problem: with the township's Internet and email systems offline, officials had no way to get information to many and no way to guage the problems residents were facing.

The township, as well as other governing agencies, have vowed to study the problems posed by Irene and the responses to it to better prepare for the next such disaster, but one member of Warren's Township Committee just completed participation in a national effort to devise a way for all towns to guage their readiness to deal with emergencies—before the emergency strikes.

Vic Sordillo was a member of the steering committee of the Community Resilience System Initiative, a program launched by the Department of Homeland Security, which is seeking to develop a system for municipalities to measure and improve on their preparedness for dealing with emergencies.

The committee had just issued its final report in August when Irene brought its purpose to the forefront.

"The timing is actually perfect for communities to look at some of the issues that are before them to restore power ... when we have a catastrophe like we did with this hurricane," Sordillo said at the committee's Sept. 8 meeting.

Sordillo said the program allows communities to evaluate how quickly they can return to normal if faced with an emergency, examining such characteristics as what potential threats the community faces, what services and assets the community has for dealing with the threats, and what can be done to improve the community's ability to deal with threats.

While communities now have emergency management coordinators and detailed plans by first responders, a town's resilience depends on a wider segment of the population, including the business community, insurance providers and often, just the level of shared feelings about the town. Sordillo noted in an interview that Warren's shared community vision generally helps make the town very resilient after disasters such as severe storms, while other communities lacking that struggle.

Once intitiated, the Community Resilience System will help towns determine what areas they may need to improve upon, as well as help develop a more widely shared community vision.

Sordillo was tapped for the steering committee thorugh his work as vice-president and manager of loss control for the Chubb Corporation.

For more information about the Community Resilience System, visit the organization's website.