In late 1811, a magnitude 7.7 earthquake shook the New Madrid Seismic Zone, stretching across Southern and Midwestern states. It was followed by two earthquakes in 1812 ranging from magnitude 7.5 to 7.7, six aftershocks ranging from magnitude 5.5 to 6.3 within the first two days and hundreds more aftershocks were felt into 1813. The earthquakes caused geographic changes that can still be seen today: Reelfoot Lake was formed in Tennessee and a piece of Kentucky was disconnected from the state. “Stories are told that the Ohio River actually ran backward when New Madrid fired off 200 years ago,” said Brig. Gen. John Heltzel, director of the Kentucky Division of Emergency Management.
Two centuries later, that scenario was the basis for National Level Exercise (NLE) 2011, one of the largest emergency exercises in U.S. history and the first of its scale to simulate a natural disaster. For five days in May, eight states, four FEMA regions, and thousands of emergency managers and first responders from all disciplines and levels of government responded to a magnitude 7.7 earthquake that struck near Marked Tree, Ark., and this time had the potential to cause massive damage to modern-day infrastructure.
The states that participated in the NLE — Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee — all can be impacted by the New Madrid Seismic Zone. Mandated by Congress and directed by the White House, the NLE is a Tier I exercise that’s conducted annually in accordance with FEMA’s National Exercise Program.
“NLE 11 was the first of a series that was focused on a natural hazard versus a terrorism nexus,” said FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate. “It was also the largest exercise involving participants from multiple states, local governments and federal partners, and a real emphasis with our faith-based and [nongovernmental] organizations, as well as with the private sector.”
Two States, Two Approaches
The exercise kicked off May 16, but preparation had been ongoing for more than a year. In addition, the Central U.S. Earthquake Consortium spent two years creating a catastrophic response plan for the states, Heltzel said. The NLE provided an opportunity not only for the states and local governments to test their emergency response plans, which includes working with the four FEMA regions and federal partners, but also for the region to put its plan into action.
Although the participating states responded to the same overarching scenario, they exercised their capabilities differently. Arkansas wanted the exercise to be as realistic as possible, said David Maxwell, director of the state’s Department of Emergency Management. “The state played three days at 24 hours,” he said. “So we actually turned off the power to the building, ran on generators for three days, and the first two days we had no communications except satellite phones, ham radio and that sort of thing.”
Arkansas wanted to test several objectives, including communications, and Maxwell said playing without modes that people have grown accustomed to like cell phones and e-mail was stressful. Although the 700/800 MHz system came back online fairly quickly, the way the satellite system was set up proved problematic, though Maxwell did not divulge the details.
The state also had issues with getting resources on a push basis rather than a pull basis, according to Maxwell. “We thought we would have some flowing to us automatically,” he said. “Getting that taken care of and knowing that we can count on resources pushed to us to the point that we say, ‘No more,’ or we’ll turn them around and pay for it, is the point that we want to get to.”
The states in FEMA Region VI, which includes Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, have an agreement that’s similar to an Emergency Management Assistance Compact, and Maxwell said assumptions had been made that resources would automatically go to the disaster-stricken state. But that wasn’t fully the case during the NLE. Even though things didn’t work perfectly, however, that’s the point of the NLE: to determine what works, what needs adjusting and if new processes must be developed.
To the northeast, the Kentucky state Emergency Operations Center (EOC) retained
communications during the exercise, but completed the largest communications test in the state’s history on day one. “We’re calling down literally every leg of communications using radio, ham radio, satellite phone, Internet — every way we make contact with a county to test those links,” Heltzel said. “Then for local preparedness, we’re encouraging our local coordinators to make contact with all their different pieces of communication.”
Each day, Kentucky looked at a specific response capability like sustainment, lifesaving and mass evacuation. The goal was to develop a new emergency operations plan that will take into consideration the after-action report from the NLE, as well as lessons learned from recent real-world events, Heltzel said.
Though much of the response occurred in EOCs, many actions took place in real time in the real world, including medical evacuation sites, damage assessments, urban search and rescue operations, and aircraft movement. “A site in Indiana served as a simulated area of actual earthquake damages with multiple teams rotating in and out, while demonstrating integration from the National Guard all the way through the local responder,” Fugate said.
Immediate Benefits
Real-world emergencies like heavy rains and historic flooding caused some states and local governments to scale down their level of play, but one state’s desire to participate despite ongoing responses proved more beneficial than anyone could have predicted.
Fugate said Missouri was probably the best example of multistate response activities that included all levels of government, the private sector and nongovernmental organizations. “Missouri was already dealing with flooding due to the levee breach at Birds Point, they had already had tornado touchdowns in St. Louis and had ongoing disasters,” he said. “But they had a full state EOC activation with hundreds of people there.”
Throughout the week, Missouri exercised a mass casualty evacuation, mutual aid, Emergency Management Assistant Compacts and deployed urban search and rescue teams. “Nobody knew it, but when that exercise concluded on Thursday, not more than three days later, many of the same things that were exercised for NLE 11 were put into place when the tornadoes hit Joplin,” Fugate said.
