Five officers from Beaufort County’s Burton Fire District came
back from their rescue effort in Louisiana’s St. Bernard Parish with
unimaginable tales of flooding and destruction.
When Chief Harry Rountree saw the photos, he pulled out county
flood prediction maps and looked at them with eyes wide open. He
took the worst flooding considered before Katrina and cranked it up
a notch.
“We always had been under the assumption that some of our five
fire stations would survive,” Rountree said. “Now we’re putting
together a plan how we do our job if all five of my stations are
wiped out.”
Across South Carolina, emergency personnel watched Katrina and
Rita and wondered: How would our hurricane plans have stood up?
They’ve concluded South Carolina is ahead of the curve on some
concerns — lane reversals, buses for those without vehicles — but
might want to tweak some other plans.
• Some coastal emergency agencies
may not have enough boats, for instance, to rescue residents
stranded by high water.
• State officials want coastal
nursing homes to refine their evacuation plans to ensure they have
somewhere to take their residents and a way to get them there.
• Some officials fret coastal
counties might not have enough shelter space for evacuees or — if a
strong storm comes ashore — would have no shelter space at all.
So Rountree and others are studying their emergency plans.
“We all learn from our mistakes and others’ misfortune,” said
Cathy Haynes, deputy director of the Charleston County Emergency
Preparedness Department.
For instance, the Burton Fire Department, which has no boats —
but does have some Jet Ski-like personal watercraft — will be
responsible for 83 square miles of low-lying Beaufort County.
The county’s plan calls from the volunteer Beaufort Water Search
and Rescue group to aid in rescues. What if those volunteers have
left the county or their boats have been destroyed, as happened to
many in Louisiana?
Rountree’s workers who went to Louisiana told him a lack of boats
wasn’t a problem there. Boats were floating loose everywhere, and
rescuers simply used what they could find.
“We anticipate the same thing would happen around here,” Rountree
said.
Still, Rountree would love to have a few well-equipped rescue
boats he would know he could count on.
‘ISSUE ... HAS BEEN AROUND FOR YEARS’
The safety of S.C. nursing home residents is such a concern that
state officials called dozens of nursing homes in coastal counties
last month as Hurricane Ophelia approached. The message they gave
the homes: follow your emergency plans.
At least one nursing home in Horry County wasn’t able to bring 20
of its patients to a local hospital, as detailed in its plan,
because the hospital was near capacity.
“We encourage the homes to have backup plans aside from what the
regulations say they must have,” said Jerry Paul, director of the
Department of Health and Environmental Control’s Health Facilities
Preparation Division.
Every nursing home must file an evacuation plan with the state
before it can get a license to operate, and the plan has to be
re-filed every year.
DHEC says it took five nursing homes to court in 1999 for failing
to evacuate residents as Hurricane Floyd sideswiped the state.
But state officials have no control over which ambulance or bus
service nursing homes are contracting with or whether those
companies can handle a large number of evacuees.
During the mandatory evacuation for Floyd, some overbooked
ambulance services were unable to meet their agreements with nursing
homes. A similar problem plagued nursing homes that attempted to
evacuate in the face of Katrina’s wrath in Louisiana and
Mississippi.
“This issue of capacity has been around for years,” Paul
said.
Some nursing home managers take extra precautions. For instance,
the Epic Group, which runs homes in Mount Pleasant, Conway and
Beaufort, worked out deals with ambulance services far inland that
don’t have other nursing home clients.
“We don’t rely on anyone,” said Carolyn Davidson, area manager
for Epic Group. “We contract with an ambulance service, a bus
service. We have contracts for supplies, contracts with hotels. We
have to do rather extensive planning.”
‘WHOA. WE NEED TO BE READY’
Some also are concerned about whether South Carolina’s coastal
counties have enough emergency shelters.
Beaufort County, for instance, has a population of 133,000 and
thousands more tourists at any time. But the county is low-lying. As
a result, all of its schools designated as shelters are expected to
flood during a direct hit by a Category 3 or stronger hurricane.
Concerned by that prospect, the American Red Cross would close
its four school-based Beaufort County shelters if an approaching
storm grew to a Category 3.
“I don’t like it, but I have to yield to (the Red Cross’)
expertise,” said William Winn, director of the Beaufort County
Emergency Management Department.
People fleeing Beaufort County are instructed to head to shelters
in Jasper, Colleton and Hampton counties or on to the Aiken-Augusta
area.
For those without transportation, the county has an emergency bus
evacuation system.
During the Hurricane Charley evacuation last year, Beaufort
County activated that system, but only five people showed up at the
pickup points looking for a ride, said Rochelle Ferguson, executive
director of the Lowcountry Regional Transportation Authority.
The shelter situation in Horry County is only slightly better,
with room for about 5,000 people in a county where the day-to-day
population swells to half a million during the peak tourist season.
The Horry shelters reached capacity during the Hurricane Floyd
evacuation in 1999.
People with their own transportation can drive to shelters in
Dillon, Marion and Florence counties. “We encourage people to move
farther inland,” said Randall Webster, director of the Horry County
Emergency Management Department. “These shelters (in Horry) are for
people who can’t .”
Emergency officials now wonder if the attention paid to Katrina
could prompt more evacuees to show up at local shelters, filling
them to capacity. Bus drivers also might need to get familiar with
roads leading out of the counties.
“Until Katrina, we never thought there would be a possibility
that we would have to provide transportation farther than the county
line,” Charleston’s Haynes said. “Because of Katrina we said ‘Whoa.
We need to be ready to take people outside the county.’”
