Sure, and it's actually one of the things that I'm most proud of. We,
with the help of Eric Tolbert who I hired to be the Director of
Emergency Management, with
Page 5Governor Hunt's blessing
of course, a North Carolina native who had gone down to Florida after
Andrew and really had incredible organizational skills. One of the
things that we had done between the time that Hurricane Fran hit and the
time Hurricane Floyd hit is we had changed the way we were organized
from a bureaucratic standpoint. The emergency management system in North
Carolina and, indeed, in the country is set up as a chain of command.
The on-the-ground position is a county emergency management coordinator.
The only way that the system works and the reason that it works so well
is if you're in a county and you've got a problem with the school, or
with the city, stop lights, or anything you need to channel those
requests through one person in a county, and then that person channels
that request to emergency management here in Raleigh in the basement of
the administrative building, the bunker over there where we've all spent
so many hours. Thank goodness no one has spent any time there the last
couple of years. So the problem or the needs come up through the county.
We did a lot of education [of] the principal of the school or the mayor
of the town so they knew they didn't need to call Raleigh directly. They
needed to get that person, and most of the counties had an emergency
center, and most people knew where it was. Then at the receiving end we
control the tasking of all state, federal, and local resources. We
prioritized and then send it back down. That, in a nutshell, is the way
the system worked. But one of the things that we had changed
tremendously is we used to do business by telephone. Gosh, we'd have
seventy-five phones over there in the basement of the administration
building. Just that summer we had gotten software written. We had gotten
Page 6a grant from the Federal Government. We'd given a
laptop to every county emergency management coordinator. We had training
on how to use it, so when the request came in at the county level they
were typed in by the EM coordinator, and in many instances we have
regional EM state employees that were out there with those folks, but
then the software automatically prioritized the request. It was so weird
to have been through Fran, Bonnie, Bertha, not Dennis because we had the
new system in place for Dennis but Dennis was just so concentrated on
one area, so instead of hearing the phone ring like crazy and having all
these people, we took this whole room, and we gave all the agencies a
room outside, and there were about four of us sitting, and just about as
quiet as it is now at this table, with the clicking of a laptop looking
at the screen helping prioritize with the computer. But we cut our
response time down from, in some instances, ninety-minutes, two hours to
always less than five minutes. It's great comfort that I know as we were
battling against this slow tidal wave of Floyd, sending volunteer fire
departments into towns in the middle of the night, waking people up,
getting them out of their house[s], that that time savings in that
software I know saved lives. It's a wonderful feeling.