JWSC talks disaster prep

Aug. 3--Heading into hurricane season, the Brunswick-Glynn County Joint Water and Sewer Commission is looking at how to make future service outages as short and easy on customers as possible.

Utility commissioners discussed several topics at an emergency preparedness committee meeting on Thursday, touching on past performance during storms like hurricanes Matthew and Irma, steps taken to improve since then and priorities down the line.

"We never talk about this, especially in public, that Winter Storm Grayson was a big deal," said JWSC Interim Executive Director Andrew Burroughs. "We talk about planning for hurricanes all the time and floods all the time but we got, if we're being honest, a very minor ice storm through here compared to what a lot of the country deals with, and it caused us tremendous power outages."

Widespread power outages meant the utility had to wait for the power to come back on before it could get its system fully operational, working off generators and bypass pumps in the meantime.

In an attempt to prevent long-term water and sewer service disruptions in the future, Burroughs said the utility has taken stock of and begun working on its emergency and recovery procedures.

"As far as current season preparedness level, you can kind of sum it up into two questions," Burroughs told commissioners on Thursday. "Is our system more resilient than it was a year ago? We have made improvements to our system to make it more resilient than it was a year ago, but we are in no way in a perfect resilient scenario. But we are slowly making progress on that.

"As far as our staff resiliency, having been through these events makes us better prepared to handle them after the fact now, but also focusing getting training to go through these events has been a big help. I want to thank Mr. (Administration Director Jay) Sellers for spearheading that for us, because if you've never worked in an incident command structure, things are much more regimented that way than they are in other areas, so making sure you understand the protocols can be a big help."

Sudden losses of power can not only damage equipment but restoring power to the various sewer pump stations out of sync can cause issues, Burroughs said, in some cases leading to overflow and sewage spills.

To minimize the chance of such a thing occurring, the utility came up with a standard process of cutting the power to the sewer system.

"Every time it rains we're not going to shut the system down, but If we're going to have sustained tropical-storm-force winds as predicted by the National Weather Service, and there's a named event, we will try to implement this starting 12 hours in advance," Burroughs said.

A large-scale water and sewer system can't just be shut down, Burroughs said, it needs to be "de-energized."

"It is standard practice in our industry that prior to a major event, the system be de-energized to limit the problems after an event takes place," he said.

The various pump stations need to be shut down in a certain order to prevent issues in the systems that could result in overflows and sewage spills and to get as much sewage out of the pipes as possible before the whole system is shut down.

"The sewer system will be pumped down from the edges in so that there is as much available capacity as possible in the event of a storm hitting, and the shutdown procedures will begin nine hours before landfall," Burroughs said. "... Roughly three hours after the event passes, we would start bringing the system back up.

"The water system will be shut down as well. It's a little easier to shut the water system down than the sewer because you don't have to pump everything down. It's fine for the water to stay in the pipes."

In the event of a large storm, it's better to cut power entirely than to risk damage, Sellers explained.

"If we can't have our staff out there maintaining the system, we'd rather have control over it being re-energized," Sellers said.

In addition, Sellers has been working on a public information campaign, getting videos out on the JWSC's YouTube channel and Facebook page.

Looking at the near future, Burroughs told the commission about what he sees as immediate needs and priorities.

First up are back-up pumps and generators. The utility's early Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax 2020 wishlist includes some money for related expenses.

"Backup power and pumping are something that's a longer-term issue because of the sheer cost," Burroughs said

Behind that comes the remote diagnostic system for water and sewer equipment: the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, or SCADA, system. The system allows utility workers to check the status of pump stations and water towers, among other things, without having to drive around physically checking each one.

Burroughs said he'd like to upgrade the system so it won't go down when the power goes out.

Third on the list is to repurpose part of Academy Creek to be a backup server room to serve as a redundant records archive.

Sellers also gave a presentation on the JWSC's emergency operations plan.

"We follow well-established (Federal Emergency Management Agency) standards to facilitate integration with other agencies, NGOs and other area partners," Sellers said.

Within the plan, the utility has standard operating procedures for dealing with flooding, winter storms and hurricanes. Sellers focused on hurricanes for the discussion.

Commissioner Cornell Harvey asked about the addition of customer service representatives and finance department personnel to the emergency response staff roster.

"Unless you prove to us that we really actually need that, that's something that we should look at even harder, standing as many up as we do here," Harvey said.

Sellers said the customer service reps were added after a request from Glynn County. The county's customer service personnel were swamped with water- and sewer-related calls following past hurricanes, and asked for the utility to provide people to answer those questions.

Finance staff members were added to handle documentation necessary to submit to FEMA for reimbursement of disaster-related expenses and to handle the logistics of procuring food for work crews, equipment and material for repairs, among other things, Burroughs explained.

During the early days of a disaster, the utility will need a lot more staff to get a handle on the situation than it will to manage it later on, Burroughs said. As such, the JWSC may be able to lower staff as the emergency winds down, but Burroughs maintained the staffing levels in the plan were appropriate.

Additionally, Burroughs broached the subject of emergency pay for salaried employees. The county pays its salaried employees a premium during officially-declared states of emergency, he said. The utility has chosen to do so for some emergencies and not for others.

If the utility commission wants to seek FEMA reimbursement for increased pay to salaried employees, it needs to codify the practice in its policies, he said.

"FEMA's very much about 'What was your plan going into the event? We'll reimburse you for what you planned for, not what you figured out after the fact,'" Burroughs said. Some of what the commissioners discussed will carry over to a human resources committee meeting on Thursday when committee members will consider an emergency pay policy for salaried employees.

___

(c)2019 The Brunswick News (Brunswick, Ga.)

Visit The Brunswick News (Brunswick, Ga.) at www.thebrunswicknews.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.