Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, July 13, 2010,
Item 14
>> item 14, receive briefing regarding the capital area shelter hub plan.
>> good morning. My name is pete baldwin, emergency management coordinate four travis county. Sitting next to me is stacy guajardo. We wanted to give you a brief overview of our capital area shelter hub plan. We know we've been doing this for some time now, but we couldn't remember the last time we came to the court and said this is actually what happens when there is a hurricane coming into the texas gulf coast. So with that in mind i'm going to ask stacy to take the lead on this. She is the point person for our shelter hub team and is on the core planning team member. And i'm going to actually sit over here and punch buttons for her to talk to you.
>> thank you.
>> good morning, morning.
>> good morning.
>> morning, judge, commissioners. Thank you for having me. Briefly what i'd like to go over is just a history before we talk about the actual plan itself so we know how it came to be, how the austin-travis county was designated as a shelter hub. In 2005 the state of texas decided to develop a system to move evacuees from the coast into inland communities, larger inland communities. The state of texas designated the austin-travis county area as a shelter hub. Now, when the plan became in 2005, there was a storm already brewing out there by the name of katrina. I'm sure you heard. And as a matter of fact, we had already begun our planning for these storms. And that storm did change a lot of what we did. The state, when they want to activate the capital area shelter hub, they ask us, they formally request us. They send us an command form, form 213, to our office, asking us to officially activate the capital area shelter hub. When that happens, we set the plan in motion and dpin to open our shelters to receive coastal communities.
>> i think it's very important on this point to emphasize the fact that when we receive that request, we are then treated as contractors to the state and not -- much like when we declare our own disaster and it's usually a survive-25% split, when we accept that request and we activate, then we are reimbursed by the state our costs for operating the shelters.
>> this is a regional plan, not only does it encompass travis county, but it also hays county as well as williamson county. So three counties do participate in our sheltering plan. Also the cities that are within that -- within those counties. We have a number of organizations that are involved in helping us do this. This is a tremendous operation as you can imagine. Within our own organization we have travis county sheriff's office who plays a big role as well as our own health and human services department. Our fire marshals have helped us do some surveys of our schools, which i'll talk about in a minute, and also tnr plays a big part too. As you can see -- listed is we have a core team. This particular team is in charge of development of the plan to keep it updated. We participate in all the state's hurricane exercises as well as we developed the curriculum to train our shelter managers. These are a couple of statistics that i'd like to show you. Prior to hurricanes katrina and rita, our community only shetterred two to three hundred evacuees. After katrina -- rita has been our biggest event. As you can see there were 18,000 people who came to our community seeking shelter. And most recently was hurricane ike which happened in 2008, we had roughly 6,000 people that we sheltered in 2003 shelters. The austin-travis county emergency operations center, which is located at ctac, that does serve as area command for all the shelters that we operate in the three-county area. They all report directly to the emergency operations center. So getting to shelters, well, our primary shelters are our high schools. We utilize high schools within all three counties, secondary is middle schools, but our commitment our school districts is to begin to fill up the high schools first and utilize the middle schools second. We do not use elementary schools. And like i was saying, all of them have been presurveyed. Our fire marshal's office has been the lead on our survey team to get them all surveyed and ready to receive our communities from the coast. Our shelters use the command system. They are all three acting as unified command. We have the three representatives who are managers. We have the facility owner who is the school district, they act as the landlord. That is their facility, so they are part of ta unified command system, along with the red cross. They take care of the evacuee branch. They make sure the evacuees get registered. They're also in charge of dormitory operations. And we also have the local government representative who is in charge of plans and logistics. As a matter of fact, we have trained some of our own employees to serve in this function. Each unified commander does receive the specific training from our core team. We trained roughly about 100 or so people and the last four seasons that we've been doing this. Our basic training is about a six-hour course that we put our managers through. We've developed a refresher training for the individuals that have already completed the basic that they can sit down at their own personal computer and take a refresher course online and they can probably complete it within about a two hour period. However, we are actively recruiting additional shelter managers.
>> stint has sent down that there are designated people within the city that are required to provide some shelter managers. At some point in time we would like to have a discussion with the court not about mandating, but about issue county employees wish to become shelter managers and wish to volunteer that perhaps we can allow them to use that as their day of workplace they shelter instead of here if supervisors approve, but there's a long list of things that we need to work through before we bring that back to you.
>> so our commitment to our guests, as we like to refer them, is we will provide them a safe place to ride out the storm. We will provide them an area on our gym floors at our high schools and middle schools. They will of course have clean restrooms and shower facilities and we will also feed them two to three meals a day. Most of the evacuees that come to us from the coast do bring their own bedding, their own pillows, medications, things of that nature. Volunteers. What we have seen in past is we get a lot of spontaneous volunteers. There are a lot of individuals that really want to help. They see the storm out there, they see the shelters opening, the media has got a lot of coverage and they want to know how they can help. We identified some volunteer resource centers and they are recreational centers throughout the city of austin that open up both northeast, south and west. And they are meant to open to capture those spontaneous volunteers. It's about a two-hour program. The volunteer will show up, they will get orientated on the storm, they can get background checked by the red cross, all the volunteer resource centers are run by the red cross. Then they can also get scheduled and badged and then dispatched out to a shelter where they can help within their community. We also set up medical special needs shelters. These shelters are set up for those individuals that come to us that cannot go to a general population shelter. They perhaps need a caregiver with them, they need help with their medication, but they're not ill enough to go to a hospital. So we've set up our medical special needs shelter with our health and human services department does help us staff that shelter. Those in nursing homes go in like to like facilities. We do not receive nursing home populations in any of our shelters. Most of these facilities along the coast make agreements with sisterlike facilities, so we do not see them in our shelters. Pets and large animals, we have made all of our shelters pet friendly. They are housed along with the evacuees. That has been a success for us. We've seen in other communities where the animals are separated from their owner and sometimes those animals don't go home with their owner. That is not the case with us. Since we house them together, they go home together. So that has been a success. And we utilize our expo center for large animals, which yes, we do receive. And we came to find that out early on during rita.
>> actually, in rita, we filled up the expo center very quickly, and it then -- then we started sending them up into williamson county and we've since formalized some of those locations. But we were very, very surprised at the number of large animals that came up that caught us by surprise. We are now much better prepared to deal with that.
>> we've also served as a point to point for the city of galveston and galveston county. Especially during ike we actually activated this plan because ike hit galveston. The island of galveston. So yes, we did receive their portion of their community. About 1700 people came to us seeking shelter. And these are individuals that simply cannot evacuate themselves. Galveston does put them on a bus and they do send them to austin. We anticipate that they do come early, they have their own rfertion. Reservation. We'll active that plan this year if we need to. Lastly, one of the things that -- we've learned a lot. We've been doing this several years, but what we do know is the people that come to us, they come to us not necessarily because they want to, they come to us because they have no other place to go. So our mission and our principle here is when they come to us seeking shelter that we will treat them as our honored guests.
>> that concludes it. That was a fast presentation, but at least now you get an overview of how that shelter hub operates and it's not just a single agency, it is a multitude of agencies and support within to try to provide that sheltering operation on for those evacuees off the coast. We'd be glad to entertain any questions that you might have.
>> questions?
>> thank you for imagining the worst so we can be pleasantly surprised in the moment.
>> i take it that the high schools have been notified of their responsibility and given appropriate training, etcetera?
>> yes, sir. The school districts have all been on board and basically what they do is they provide that they will be part of that unified team. We've found they use their own existing food contracts to feed these people, so therefore when it comes time to submitting expenses, it's pretty clean.
>> that's great.
>> we'd be honored to receive our honored guests at the appropriate time.
>> thank you, judge.
>> thank you.
>> good presentation.
>> let's see if we can get
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Last Modified:
Tuesday, July 13, 2010 2:35 PM
