But not far from the Bay Bridge, two communities—Watsonville and Santa Cruz—were completely cut off by land and after a few days of isolation began to get desperate. That’s when an ad hoc general aviation effort came to the rescue with 500,000 pounds of food and supplies, keeping the communities afloat until regular transportation modes were restored.
More than 20 years later, that effort got some pilots thinking: What if something like the Loma Prieta earthquake happens now — shouldn’t we be prepared ahead of time? That prompted the creation of Disaster Airlift Response Teams (DARTs) at airports in Santa Monica, Calif., and Watsonville. Other teams are forming at nearby airports.
This past January the Santa Monica DART hosted a drill in conjunction with Red Cross and local emergency managers, where volunteer pilots flew 11 planes loaded with “supplies” from various airports into the Santa Monica airport after a “magnitude 6.7 earthquake.”
The exercise consisted of the planes flying “sample missions,” as Marshall put it, moving blood products and other supplies. “The basic idea of a DART is to build competency and to be able to operate safely during a real emergency,” said Paul Marshall, DART chapter coordinator for the California Pilots Association. “Five airports around Santa Monica were used as transportation points.”
The drill was the culmination of a lot of thought and hard work. “It took us a long time to get going,” Marshall said. “It took us about four years before we had a tabletop exercise.”
After a few drills at the Santa Monica airport, Marshall and others thought it was time to expand and let others know what they were doing. Along with the forming of other DARTs, they developed communications with FEMA and CalOES and are poised to help in a disaster.
They got the call last October when an El Nino system caused mudslides in some areas of Southern California that isolated a Tehachapi Mountain community. There were two small airports on each side of the community and a DART came to the rescue. The pilots said it was the most “meaningful” flights they’d had.
“The basic model is that the DARTs are part of the National Incident Management System, which espouses that there should be in incident command system and that all disasters start out with local management,” Marshall said. “The way we plug into that is in the logistics part of the EOC.”
Marshall is hopeful that DARTs will expand to other areas as an acknowledgment of the value of small airports during disasters. “The emergency infrastructure has thousands of airports that are wonderful alternative transport nodes where when normal transportation infrastructures degreed due to disaster, you can have an alternative way to bring food, supplies and personnel into and out of a region.”
