Can you hear me now?

From last fall’s Ivan-related flooding, to this April’s snowmelt-related deluge, to the recent scare over the Swinging Bridge Dam, the Upper Delaware watershed has been subjected to a series of disasters (or near-disasters) that are, to one degree or another, forces of nature beyond our control. But there is a common thread that has run through all of them that ought to be very much in our control: a problem with communications.

Last fall, the difficulty was one of coordinating emergency services. Much of this was related to the need to rely on land lines rather than the far more flexible wireless technology for communication. But some was due to a lack of clear plans about who needed to contact whom with regard to such matters as evacuations and emergency shelters.

On April 3 this year, PPL unleashed waters from the Lake Wallenpaupack Dam without giving notice to residents downstream. As a result, residents such as Joan Searle of Rowland, PA, were inundated with no time to prepare, receiving “warning” only after the water was already washing around their knees. Furthermore, as Supervisor John LiGreci of Lumberland has noted, there appears to be no coordination between PPL on the Pennsylvania side and Mirant on the New York side of the river with regard to water releases to the Lackawaxen and Mongaup Rivers respectively. As it turns out, this apparently did not create extra problems this April; but it could certainly do so if a couple of walls of water from simultaneous releases hit the Delaware during a future flood.

The incident at Swinging Bridge Dam on May 5 was a disaster that wasn’t but still managed to be a problem due to communications snafus.

Apparently, the National Weather Service and Sullivan County Emergency Coordinator Dick Martinkovic spoke to each other at cross-purposes. The National Weather Service merely meant to discover whether the county believed that a possible dam breakdown could occur and produce flooding; Martinkovic thought that the service had already decided that there was a threat due to weather. The result of this misunderstanding was that a flood watch was posted 7:00 a.m. the morning of Friday, May 6 and not removed until 4:00 p.m. the next day. On the basis of this snafu, the National Park Service in turn closed portions of the Upper Delaware to traffic during that period—too early in the year to cause serious problems this time around, but potentially damaging should something similar occur in peak season.

But even if the weakening of the dam had proved to be more serious, there still would have been a communications problem. Mirant Corporation, which operates the dam, does have a list of officials and agencies that it calls in case of such emergencies, and called them when they first noticed the problem. But LiGreci, who is after all supervisor of the town in which the dam is located, found out about it not from them, but from the state police. And the next day, when the weather service issued its flood watch, nobody notified him at all. He is now requesting an amendment of the county’s emergency procedures that will clarify the lines of communication.

The details of all these problems are different, but they are variations on the same theme: we seem to remain behind the curve in terms of establishing adequate and effective communications systems to handle cases of emergency. And although, in the wake of each incident, some resolution is made to improve matters—PPL, for instance, has said that it will be changing its notification procedures to Wayne and Pike emergency services—it would be nice for once to make such changes before a disaster happens instead of afterwards.

Hurricane season starts soon, but it should be a while before it hits its stride. We have almost a year until the next snowmelt. How about using the time to have the emergency coordinators, elected officials, representatives of the utilities and the park service all get together and come up with a clear, comprehensive and unified system for talking to each other—before we find the water swirling around our ankles again?

Dr. Punnybone

It's in the stars