This article discusses the Portland, Oregon, Water Bureau's (PWB) extraordinary utility emergency response model to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in the Gulf Coast region. Staffed with management and
operations crews trained to respond to
earthquakes that threaten the Pacific
Northwest community, and backed by
city leaders, the PWB responded to an
urgent request by the Sewerage and
Water Board (SWB) of New Orleans
for gate-valve control trucks; it
mobilized a fleet of its own service
vehicles and 70 employees for a two-month
field mission. The effort has
inspired several other cities to consider
picking up in 2006 where PWB left off
in early December.
As described by PWB and SWB
officials and witnessed by the author,
PWB's pioneering response has most
likely altered the water utility disaster-response
landscape permanently. It
brought the water supply community
not only a greatly expanded vision of
emergency management in these
threat-plagued times but also the
deeper bonds of family shared for so
long by police officers, firefighters, and
other danger and disaster frontline first
responders.
Portland's remarkable experiment in
emergency assistance to a seriously
wounded water utility some 2,600
miles distant has been as beneficial to
volunteer PWB crews as it has been to
SWB's suffering employees and
customers. The result of PWB's actions
could very well mark a transformation
in how water utilities think about and
prepare for helping themselves and
other utilities when disaster strikes.
| Edition : | Vol. 98 - No. 1 |
| File Size : | 1
file
, 930 KB |
| Note : | This product is unavailable in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus |
| Number of Pages : | 11 |
| Published : | 01/01/2006 |
