After Hurricane Katrina, however, communities weren’t ready for an influx of residents. Aspects critical to supporting the population, like utilities, food supplies, fuel distributors and financial institutions, needed to be restored.
Cherreen Gegenheimer, the business and economic development liaison for Jefferson Parish, said within a week of Katrina’s devastation, parish officials discussed how to re-establish businesses in the community. “The ultimate goal, of course, is to bring your entire population back in as soon as living conditions are sustainable,” Gegenheimer said, “but if you can’t do that immediately, how are you going to get the right people back in and when?”
The government developed an on-the-fly plan, she said, because no one had considered the possibility of evacuating everyone in the community and then repopulating the parish.
The makeshift plan got Jefferson Parish through Katrina’s aftermath, but it also illustrated the importance of preparing for repopulation following large-scale disasters that require a mass evacuation.
“In the months after Katrina, especially by early ’06, businesses were coming to us saying, ‘We have caught our breath, our feet are back on the ground, but every year there is hurricane season. What’s going to be different next time?’” Gegenheimer said.
One thing businesses requested was a codified plan — something set up in advance that could be implemented following a mass evacuation. Jefferson Parish rolled out a draft plan for the 2006 hurricane season, which runs June through November, in which it tracked the area’s businesses in an Excel spreadsheet. But that didn’t prove to be comprehensive enough. “Our 2000 census had us at about 455,000 people and probably 30,000 businesses — and you can’t do that in Excel,” Gegenheimer said.
In summer 2006, Jefferson Parish contacted the New Orleans’ Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI) to gauge its interest in developing a regional plan. Many of the parish’s emergency response service providers also have contracts with surrounding parishes, so it made sense to have a regional initiative. The areas’ plans aren’t identical, but they do share the ideology of returning critical functions and businesses based on order of importance.
“Anyone who had worked in the immediate aftermath of Katrina saw a confused set of complex circumstances on the ground without any kind of guidance to direct people and the appropriate response,” said Col. Robert Williams, program manager of New Orleans’ UASI. “More importantly was how to get the needed services back into the city in a sequenced way that would increase safety and sustain life support in an orderly fashion.”
Phases of Re-Entry
Jefferson Parish created a tiered re-entry plan composed of three levels. The system first allows primary infrastructure and major utility companies, as well as predesignated government staff and contractors, back into the area (tier one); next are assessment teams representing major companies and employers (tier two); and last is the return of business owners and designated employees whose businesses are vital to the return of citizens and the parish’s economy (tier three).
The parish enlisted an IT contractor to develop a software program that aligned with the tier-based re-entry process. The final product is the JumpStart Jefferson Business Continuity System — a website where businesses can register their information, are assigned to a tier that’s correlated to how important the business is to preparing the community for citizens, and receive an authorization placard for their vehicle to re-enter the community.
Businesses and industries apply for tier two or three classification, but those who believe they should re-enter first ask to be placed in tier one. Also, the program automatically recognizes and sends certain industry applications, like hospitals and other critical infrastructure, to a parish administrator to be reviewed for inclusion in tier one.
Following a mass evacuation, when officials are ready for a tier to return, it’s announced through e-mails, government Web portals and the media. The placards are visibly displayed on incoming vehicles’ dashboards for those managing the re-entry route to see.
The placards are printed on tamperproof paper with unique designs and large letters that are color-coded according to its tier, Williams said, but individual employees re-entering aren’t issued placards. “Everybody in the vehicle must have an ID that links them to the placard that the business was issued, so that we can make sure everyone is playing fair,” he said.
Although placards allow people to re-enter the disaster area, they are only allowed to access locations that are necessary to their work. “Tiers one and two don’t provide access to your place of residence,” Gegenheimer said. “This is strictly to your place of business and in and around the parish to take care of what your business is. In terms of use, the businesses have agreed that they take full responsibility for sustaining the employees they bring in.”
Working together, New Orleans, Jefferson Parish and other nearby areas offer regional placards that allow individuals with legitimate business needs in other parishes to travel back and forth. Law enforcement in the disaster area can easily identify regional placards, because they have an “R” after the tier number, according to Gegenheimer.
Testing the Plan
In 2008, Jefferson Parish tested the re-entry plan after the evacuation of its coastal communities in preparation for Hurricane Gustav. Following the storm, the parish president called for tier one re-entry, and critical businesses and functions were brought back into the area using the placard system. Within 24 hours the president called for everyone to re-enter, Gegenheimer said, but “the people who had to use it were extremely pleased.”
The re-entry plan has received positive feedback so far, and there are plans to make it more comprehensive in the future. Currently there’s no way to track which businesses and functions actually re-enter the area, but Williams said New Orleans is considering adding a drive-through point with a card reader that would scan a credential and track those who enter the disaster area.
Most importantly, Gegenheimer said, is the ability to get people back into the area quickly with as little congestion on the main roads as possible.
For governments interested in learning more about the re-entry plan and the Web-based system, Cherreen Gegenheimer can be e-mailed at cgegenheimer@jeffparish.net.
