Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Representative Owens]: Cam family over there. Hey, Cam.

[Keith Cuban, Emergency Management Planner, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: Thank you. Now 03:00. We're going to be in Burlington voice testimony on seven 07/08.

[Representative Sarah "Sarita" Austin]: This is I

[Representative Larry Labor (Vice Chair, presiding)]: believe Christian Fire. Fires. This is first. Never heard of your shingle,

[Christian Meyer, Director, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: haven't seen that commercial.

[Representative Ela Chapin]: You guys, we're live.

[Representative Owens]: We're live. Okay.

[Christian Meyer, Director, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: Hi. Thank you all for having us today. Christian Meyer, director of Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission. I'm here with my emergency management planner, Keith Cuban. I'll give some some basic remarks about our reading of the the bill as we've seen it. House seven seventy eight. Keith, we also mentioned in the email there might be some questions about the twenty three flooding event. Keith, our emergency planner, can answer any questions in that in that regard. And we're also happy just to answer questions you may have about the RPCs and what role we think we can play, keep it as informal as you'd like. But I'll I'll I'll give some things to start with in that case. I participated in the DAM emergency management emergency operations planning study committee. Through the course of that committee, we heard a lot about the work they've done at Chittenden and with communities downstream, the Chittenden Reservoir. And coming away from that work, they've been able to pull together regular meetings, build relationships between municipal officials, the dam operators, and other concerned parties. They're able to create not only create an emergency operation plan, but we're able to apply for and purchase some equipment to improve their response to an emergency, all stemming out of those relationships and less strategic meetings. I came away from that as a regional planner, thinking the need that we have for it locally in Vermont. I know you all spoke to Michael Billingsley earlier in the day, and how we might be able to support communities like Plainfield as they work towards these goals. Here in Central Vermont, have the Waterbury Dam at Riceville. We have the Eastbury Dam and Marshfield number six, all of which stand directly above historic villages, towns, cities. In so much as we've seen that communication can be stressed during an emergency event, the idea of having open lines of communication laid out and conceived beforehand seems obvious and important. It reflects the work we've done with municipalities through their local planning emergency planning documents. And I I from what I've read and from my understanding of the current draft of of seven seventy eight, it it progresses this this system. Traditionally, RPCs have helped with emergency planning mitigation, resilience, adaptation, recovery for our municipalities where we give those my understanding is this role grew out of Irene and the planning that went in planning immediately following that event, recognizing that there was a gap between the state and the local needs and the identification of RBCs at being able to step in and fill that gap with those existing municipal relationships. We're able, in that sense, to provide a point of contact, a person, a friendly face, someone municipalities know can call and get the resources they need, not just in the days following an emergency event or the weeks following an emergency event, but really in the years following an emergency event as they start planning for the next emergency or disaster. So, of course, all this work is is is underpinned by long term funding that we've been able to get through the FEMA emergency management planning grant, which due to federal delays and cuts, is somewhat on rocky territory now. So while I think RPCs are open to this idea as it's laid out and open to the idea that we can support municipalities' plan for the risks associated with these high hazard dams, We're in this sort of an unstable position around our long term, you know, emergency funding based on these federal actions.

[Representative Owens]: So those are that's more

[Christian Meyer, Director, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: or less all I have to say prepared, but, again, happy to take questions or or specific speak to more specifications.

[Representative Owens]: Representative two. I think it'd

[Representative Ela Chapin]: be helpful if you talk a little bit just about Central Vermont given that we've just heard a bunch from Plainfield and have a number of dams, both state owned and otherwise, that have their high hazard dams. Guess I just, just a little bit about, I'm curious about the sort of municipal context that EMS how municipalities at EMS, but you know not every town has its own EMS provider like how. How you see the capacity, I guess I would start with capacity in our region, and then maybe also sort of how you interact with all, do you have relationships with every one of those entities in your region? And what does it take to get an entire region downstream of a dam like Marshfield or Waterbury to coordinate on a project like this? Do you have something equivalent that you already do? You can spend a little time trying to on those routes.

[Christian Meyer, Director, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: You can start on that. You know the actors better.

[Keith Cuban, Emergency Management Planner, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: Yeah. We work directly with Capital Fire Mutual Aid, which is the parent organization of almost all the fire departments within the region. We do have some relationship with individual fire departments, but that's kind of on a personal basis. If they reach out to us, we we are definitely willing to work with any of them, but, you know, it's basically whether they're accessing our services. You know, we we have time constraints and funding constraints, so, you know, we're not always going out there trying to start those new relationships as often as we'd really like. But, you know, we try to do as much as possible. There definitely would be constraints in a lot of our towns. The we have a number of towns that the emergency management director is also on the fire department. So in any event, they're gonna be out there most likely trying to evacuate people where ideally that person ideally, are two separate positions in each town because that way the EMD can actually coordinate the response or any needs that the fire department might need as they're evacuating people. They would be that communication piece that goes back and forth to the state or to us at the RPC, where we would then funnel that up to the state to Vermont Emergency Management. So it it definitely varies. We thinking of worst case scenario in a in a damn event, you know, we would definitely need all the capacity we could get. So any pre planning we could do ahead of time would pay huge dividends to actually have a plan. Because otherwise, it's literally going to be people just going door to door, and they might not even coordinate that well. Because even developing routes that you would have for for evacuating people, you know, because you you definitely don't wanna have two different people going in the same direction. You know, somebody you know, they're then putting themselves at risk. You wanna be minimized as much as possible. You know, also thinking of state resources in that kind of event, we'd probably wanna be try to use utilizing some kind of geofencing or something where we're sending something directly out to all the cell phones in that region. You know, I mean, you would wanna get the word out as fast and as furiously as possible so that you can, you know, get everyone moving to higher ground. But we definitely would especially thinking of the Upper Valley towns below Marshfield 6, Route 2 is not an evacuation ground at all. I mean, hard stop. If you were on there and that dam failed, you're gonna die. You know, the the chances are really high of that because, I mean, that flow road goes under in every flood we've had. You know, in 2023, it was completely impassable. '24, you know, you there were a few culverts that may have blown out in there as well. You know? So you have to plan that accordingly of where are we gonna evacuate those people. And it's not it might not be the main route that you would normally think of. You know, I'm thinking of Waterbury, the same thing. I mean, 80 9 isn't gonna be an evacuation route if Waterbury didn't fail. Same same with two. So, I mean, any preplanning we can do to think of that at a time, I think would definitely pay dividends if you if, you God forbid, that ever happened. Obviously, that would be everyone's worst day.

[Representative Ela Chapin]: Maybe I didn't phrase this quite right, but I'm really curious about your role in potentially being a contracted partner. RPCs aren't listed in this bill.

[Christian Meyer, Director, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: Okay. But

[Representative Ela Chapin]: this bill puts the onus on VEM to create these regional emergency operations plans. Our VEM director is here in the room, he's testifying tomorrow. So if you want to jump in, let us know. BEM could contract with a partner to develop, to pull all the parties together. And I guess I was sort of presuming you would fare whether you're willing for what kind of a role of the EM, whether you already do that kind of partnership. Really, so for the pre planning work, not the in the moment, in an emergency, which we hope really frankly never happens. We're hoping that isn't the case in very low likelihood, but the planning we're trying to say should happen. So in the event of that planning work, what would your role be? If VEM was looking to you for support and partnership in developing a regional plan, how do you go about pulling all the municipalities and EMS providers from multiple jurisdictions together? Is that something you do regularly and do you have support to give one example you could share with us?

[Keith Cuban, Emergency Management Planner, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: Yeah. I can use it. So Green Mountain Power does do an exercise that they do with Marshfield six. It's on a probably five year every every three years, something something around basis. It's not a yearly endeavor. We help coordinate with all the fire departments to get them to attend that and try to get as much representation as possible. And we can the RPC is definitely good to handle that level of coordination of bringing people together to try to have those conversations. It would be kind of like a at least from my perspective thinking about it, it'd be kind of like a of like a local hazard mitigation plan, except you're using a larger framework for it. So, you know, organizing that to do that planning and even to do the mapping, I believe, you know, almost every RPC or I believe all the RPCs do have GIS people on staff. I know we in our region definitely do. So that that level of planning could be done by the RPCs.

[Christian Meyer, Director, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: Yeah. I'll just I'll just add. I think that is one of our our strengths at the regional level is that convener, that facilitator I mentioned, Rutland Regional Planning Commission has helped, who was not the instigator of the Chittenden emergency operation plan. But once that relationships those relationships had congealed, they were able to come in and start saying, alright. We're gonna organize meeting. We're gonna get the agenda. We're gonna get food. We're gonna get the venue. We're gonna make sure there's a place for all the people with who need to be talking to meet, and we're gonna make this easy and increase the skills to make sure this keeps moving. And so to that end, I think we we are we are well suited to play that role. We are also very aware of where our limitations are. And when engineering or technical needs are necessary, we we will play contract for that type of work.

[Representative Sarah "Sarita" Austin]: Hi, thank you. So having been a school counselor and working on safety committees, do schools I know schools have emergency plans. I'm wondering, is flooding in there where they have routes and drills and plans

[Christian Meyer, Director, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: I in can speak just one quick example, and then I'll turn it over to you, because you do know the plans better than In a former time, when we had Vermont Yankee down in the southern part of the state, the RBC was very much involved in the planning of those evacuation routes and had to go through that regularly and help convene and even did some of that mapping. So that's related directly to an emergency event and where an RPC is helping. But in terms of actual specific flood response?

[Keith Cuban, Emergency Management Planner, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: To be honest, I don't deal with

[Christian Meyer, Director, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: the schools that often.

[Keith Cuban, Emergency Management Planner, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: I do know because Twinfield, you know, you talked with Michael Billingsley. I'd helped him some when he was working with Twinfield School. Because because of its location, they were concerned with flooding there, and especially if you took the access to the school because if if the Windusky flood application school could be cut off. So thinking of that evacuation planning of the school and where do you reunite the parents with that. So some schools have, but across the board, I do not know.

[Erica Hornin, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: Might be able to

[Keith Cuban, Emergency Management Planner, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: provide more information because I think the

[Christian Meyer, Director, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: VEM notes

[Representative Sarah "Sarita" Austin]: testifying tomorrow. Right. Yeah.

[Erica Hornin, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: In general, the Vermont School Safety Center is working with the schools. So that's an entity that is currently under VEM, but it's gonna move under online security. But, they work with the security emergency operations plans. Act 29 did some adjustments to that. Specifically, I don't know if they're more all hazards, so flooding, fires, intruders are all in there.

[Representative Ela Chapin]: You mind introducing yourself for the record?

[Erica Hornin, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: I'm Erica Hornin, director of Vermont Emergency Management.

[Christian Meyer, Director, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: Sorry. And

[Representative Sarah "Sarita" Austin]: just the other have you identified, like, let's say, the time of the flood, who would be Not names, but positions to be at the command center? Who would be expected to be I imagine you'd have a command center.

[Christian Meyer, Director, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: So there is the the emergency action plan, as Keith mentioned earlier, which has sort of that initial phone tree. Mhmm. When we when we think about the emergency operation plan, we're kinda thinking about what exists beyond that initial phone tree, and maybe you're able to speak to what the who the municipal reps your municipal appointments would be, at that that command center.

[Keith Cuban, Emergency Management Planner, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: Yeah. At an emergency operation center for a dam failure, Be honest. I mean, obviously, you would wanna have whoever the owner, dam entity is, anybody from Dam Safety. Yeah. But then you would probably want a rep from each town that you're expecting your you know, or at least a contact person. With our town nature not having enough regional government, it is a little tougher because then you don't really need a rep from each town going down. You definitely wanna have a line of communication with them. Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How do you how do you facilitate that as far as who's who's in the overall command structure? Right. That would have

[Christian Meyer, Director, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: to be determined. In the Chittenden example, there's everything from the chief of police of Rutland Yeah. All the way up to the emergency management, director in the town of Chittenden. Chittenden, so they they volunteer in that position. So it's a it could be a broad range of people as well.

[Representative Sarah "Sarita" Austin]: Is a governor or a legis you know, is there anybody in a position, a high position in government?

[Christian Meyer, Director, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: I'd have to look back at their our conversation. Might be

[Representative Sarah "Sarita" Austin]: a good thing. Thank you.

[Representative Larry Labor (Vice Chair, presiding)]: Any other questions? Representative Owens?

[Representative Owens]: Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thanks, Dennis, for your presentation and your willingness to share with us. We've heard a lot today and a lot from the about the importance of having an evacuation plan, knowing the routes and all that. That all seems to me very after the fact. Okay, good to have a plan in place, everybody knows where they're going to go. We heard earlier that they get fifty seconds or something like that. I mean, nothing's going to happen in fifty seconds. You're not even going get the siren spun up. If you had a siren, if that was part of the plan, in fifty seconds. So, it seems to me that to get

[Representative Larry Labor (Vice Chair, presiding)]: a little

[Representative Owens]: bit more warning on these things, you wouldn't wanna just be statically watching the water level rise. You'd wanna two or three day weather predictions are getting pretty good. 300, maybe not super duper, but within twenty four hours, they're getting pretty darn good. And if we had even just rain gauges strategically positioned throughout the entire watershed for these dams that are of questionable nature, it seemed like we could get a pretty good advanced warning before the water level in the dam itself rises to a level of danger Well before. I mean, like, hours, even days before. Is that all part of the emergency operation plan, is to do all that technical measurement and and have eyes on that on a regular basis when the rain is coming?

[Christian Meyer, Director, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: Yeah. Most most of that is being done, thankfully, as part of the emergency action plans. This gets super difficult to keep the two things. Your operations plans and action plans. But the action plans and and keep an eye of sat through those tabletop scenarios, and they do. Okay. Two days out, we're code yellow because we know four inches of rain is coming. We're at 46 feet six feet to crest. Okay. We're code I don't wanna get into too many details. I don't know the plans well enough. But there are a series of, thresholds. Those dam operators are watching, and they know, alright. We get to yellow. We we warn the community. We let them know the situation.

[Representative Owens]: Up to at least some spillway forty eight hours in advance or whatever to

[Representative Larry Labor (Vice Chair, presiding)]: start dropping the water level down.

[Christian Meyer, Director, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: Right? If that needs to happen, if they notice a failure or any sort of seepage, like, yeah. It's all a lot of that is all of that's laid out. What's not laid out is then how do we we know we have an emergency. How do we get the people out of harm's way? Okay.

[Representative Owens]: So you said we don't we literally don't have that latter part of the emergency operations for the action plan.

[Christian Meyer, Director, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: You wanna fact check me on that?

[Representative Larry Labor (Vice Chair, presiding)]: I gotta do this.

[Keith Cuban, Emergency Management Planner, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: I mean, there's a so, like, Marshfield six, there's a plan for a call tree of who who GMP would call in that event. But as far as actually how that plan would be implemented, once once they could place their call out, that's that's about where it stops really. You know, it would then be up to each local fire department to determine how they were gonna do that. And I think this is also an educational piece that we could possibly do, you know, and I don't know if this is included in your bill, but letting people know that already, you know and it's, I mean, as simple as a mailer to every address that's identified that's in those flood areas so they at least know you are downstream of a dam. Because as we saw on '23, a lot of people didn't even realize they were in the flood plain until their home was flooding. So that pre educational piece often pays huge dividends. Yeah.

[Christian Meyer, Director, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: I think that speaks really well to that preplanic, I think you called it.

[Representative Larry Labor (Vice Chair, presiding)]: I have a couple of observations. Maybe overlooking an asset that is pretty ready to go on a moment's notice, and that would be a national guard. The other things, maybe I'd I'd start thinking about late fifties, early sixties. Was around. They had active civil defense, hit siren testings all throughout Vermont. Now they don't have to spin them up. He gives a Klaxon. But I'm just thinking that in our own town's Lent policy plan, We have an operational plan that doesn't include that because the National Guard is in Newport. That's for the army. And they got all of the Humvees and etcetera vehicles that can got snorkels and can do deep water. So thinking that maybe we ought to use our net assets that are already here. Those people live in a community. Who's your thought?

[Representative Sarah "Sarita" Austin]: Yeah. National doubt.

[Representative Larry Labor (Vice Chair, presiding)]: That

[Keith Cuban, Emergency Management Planner, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: is we're getting out early.

[Representative Larry Labor (Vice Chair, presiding)]: I can't believe it. Mister Farmer, would you like to comment on any of the testimonies that you've heard this afternoon?

[Keith Cuban, Emergency Management Planner, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: Yeah, I mean,

[Erica Hornin, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: it's good stuff and it's great to hear from the RPCs because, you know, they might be something that we try to leverage up because as Representative Chapin said that, you know, the onus of this bill is on the in our capacity is pretty minimal. So how can we leverage an entity that's already reaching out to local municipalities and local first responders, especially landlords. It's great

[Representative Larry Labor (Vice Chair, presiding)]: to hear that.

[Erica Hornin, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: Know, it's good that you heard from Michael talking about these dams. Right? A lot of people just don't know that they're out there. The numbers that first witness talked about, you know, in a thousand of these things out there. They're not all dangerous, some are just a small thing out in the field, but there's a significant amount. Think of the one, if the Waterbury didn't have an issue, my office on the 2nd Floor is underwater. So you know there's significant issues there, you can talk over to in 'eighty nine and what that means. So the idea of having emergency operations plans is a great idea. You talked a little bit about the National Guard. They roll with the USAR team, the Swiftwater team, so they go out once we know something is happening. You know, you could theoretically use it for evacuations, but the one thing I wanna keep in the back of everyone's mind is the and the National Guard are not first responders. So we're not, like, on the clock, like, can blink 20 fourseven, like we have a watch officer, but they have a callback in an hour because they're on standby. So by union rules, they have an hour to call back to their pager. So because we're not that instant command post, you gotta think of instant command post as the fire chief down at the flood directing people where to go. Emergency operations center is back at either the town hall or the big one at the state level. You know, they're helping the instant command post to boots on the ground. So we don't have that quick response. If the guard doesn't have quick response, you know, they're usually twenty four to forty eight hours. So we do a lot of preemptive. It's gonna snow badly. It's gonna rain. Let's get our gears moving. But we don't have that quick response mechanism, specifically being out of it. We're working to get a watch desk, we call it, where it moves from a sixty minute delay time to less than fifteen minute delay time, but it's physicians and personnel. Even having a 20 three-seventhree 65 watch desk isn't one person, it's probably like five between vacations and time and weekends. Lots of things there. So just keep that in the back of your mind as we're trying to set expectations for this bill and what VEM can actually do in the drop of a hat. For me it's a lot about that pilot project. You got to find those gaps using the pilot project. Use those two dams, try to come up with some different templates and different techniques, how are going roll it out, how are going to include the RPCs, how are you going to get all the municipalities in one room because that's extremely difficult. Now you're trying to get five fire departments, three EMS, and they might be covered by two different dispatchers. So how are you going to communicate all that? You know we do have some technology with VT alerts that we talked about geocaching buildings where we can actually just draw a map on a circle on a map and call everyone's cell phone. We don't need to know the building's address. We can go straight to their landlines, so we have that capability. But again, we can't do it in sixty less than sixty minutes, so what does that mean? How do we get it involved upfront? How do we work with a dam owner? Work on, okay. It's yellow. These are the things you're gonna do. You're gonna call us, and now we might be a little bit more postured to do what needs to be do done. The fire chief is kinda ready.

[Christian Meyer, Director, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: But really a lot of

[Erica Hornin, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: these EOPs are at the local level. They know the roads that they need

[Keith Cuban, Emergency Management Planner, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: to go on. They know

[Erica Hornin, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: the hill they need to climb to get out of the way. They know where their shelter is that they can go to, so you've got to have all those police oncologists on board. Unfortunately they're all overtaxed and underpaid, so they don't have a lot of capacity to do this and we run into that all the time where we have a state statute that says there's an emergency management director for each town and they shall have these responsibilities and then we just drop them right off and help support them. So we give them training, but they just they may not have the time. They're certainly not first responders, so you know when that damn calls them in the middle of the night, they may not even answer the phone because they don't sleep with it like I do, so they're just not ready for that. So you have to put them in the circle of information but not first. Like as a first responder, so I'm a fire chief, like I get to page in the middle of the night. I'm up and out and all my people are up and out, so you need to have them be the first they're the first circle preparation. What does that mean? And what's the consecutive circles after that for support? You know, you can get people out to go somewhere. Okay. How do they how are they gonna get there? You have individuals that can't leave their house. How how are they gonna be? You know, and and Michael with his science, like, all those things are integral parts of this, making sure that you get those, to Michael's point, 200 houses out in half an hour is a big task for a playing field that has 11 firefighters, two trucks. So, you know, the the pilot project has really got to dig into all of that. There's going to be some gaps that are going to need to be filled, you know, some timing, support, resources, and really figuring out what those gaps are so we can adjust them. I think there's some, you need to have some legislative changes, you need have to some support and ease more, how do you facilitate that at BEM, we have more capacity as ROCCs. So really that's what I'm looking at, this bill is pilot probably because it's the first thing. The second part about getting through all the stuff using the first part makes a lot of sense, but you gotta gotta build a car before you drive it. So that's kind of what we're looking at. So it's great to hear all the input. I think everyone's on the same page. Right? Dams are somewhat dangerous in a a hierarchy of they're not gonna go all the time, but when they do, it's really bad and really fast, so you need to be ready and able to to handle that. It's much easier to do on a day like this than when it's raining cats and dogs. It's gonna

[Christian Meyer, Director, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: be yellow, you know, on the head,

[Erica Hornin, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: get to people in

[Keith Cuban, Emergency Management Planner, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: the room.

[Erica Hornin, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: So it's a big lift, it makes a lot of sense to do. That was my testimony first. So get tomorrow off.

[Keith Cuban, Emergency Management Planner, Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission]: So I got it

[Erica Hornin, Director, Vermont Emergency Management]: up here.

[Representative Larry Labor (Vice Chair, presiding)]: Oh, thank you very much. I guess meeting's adjourned.