By Saturday, the estimated price tag for cleaning up California’s flooded landscape had topped $100 million. Emergency management agencies weren’t ready for a “megaflood,” a once-in-a-century string of storms that have dumped some 32 trillion gallons of water on California’s parched land.
While Pennsylvania hasn’t experienced the same type of disaster, it does have experts with experience in dealing with flooding. The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency last week sent personnel to Sacramento to help that region respond to the current disaster and plan for the next one.
“The impact of historic and deadly flooding seen recently in California has been as shocking as it has been heartbreaking,” said Randy Padfield, director of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency.
“We have a lot of staff that are very experienced in dealing with floods,” Mr. Padfield said. “Pennsylvania is one of the most flood-prone states in the nation, and as a result, our staff have the experience to provide this much-needed support to our counterparts and communities in California.”
Loaning emergency personnel from far-away states to figure out what happened and how to be ready for the next monster flood is part of an ongoing exchange of expertise across the country.
The Emergency Management Assistance Compact is a formal agreement that allows all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands to share resources, such as personnel or equipment, during disasters.
In this case, with California squeezed between successive storms raging from the west and rivers of snowmelt flooding from the east, the federal government declared the situation a disaster area. That enabled emergency management teams from across the country to provide assistance.
Last week, two PEMA staff members were dispatched to Sacramento, where 10 inches of rain fell in 11 days.
During a two-week deployment, the Pennsylvania team will help local workers to engineer complicated remediation operations and assist staff from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“Sometimes something happens that overwhelms capability,” Mr. Padfield said. “We can’t always be ready for the maximum of maximums, In situations like this — where California has a scale of flooding that it has not seen regularly — states reach out to the compact and we send a mission-ready package of experts and equipment.”
The work of emergency management staff requested through the compact isn’t funded by taxpayers of their home states, so Pennsylvania taxpayers won’t foot the bill for PEMA’s current work in California.
States receiving help through the compact reimburse the assisting state when a small amount of assistance is requested. But in major weather disasters like the one happening in California, the state receiving help is reimbursed by the federal government.
Mr. Padfield said Pennsylvania is a big state with frequent surges of emergency management needs.
But he said he can’t remember the last time Pennsylvania received compact help.
“We can usually handle our own surges,” he said. “We requested additional medical resources through the compact during COVID-19. Unfortunately, other states were impacted as much as us.” In that case, compact assistance was not sent to Pennsylvania.
States avoid sending too many of their emergency experts at once so they are not shorthanded at home, Mr. Padfield said. There’s often some negotiation between states in need and states sending help.
In December, Pennsylvania emergency management staff, the state Department of Transportation and emergency workers from Ohio were deployed to Buffalo, N.Y., when not enough trucks were available to remove 52 inches of snow, said Mr. Padfield.
“The request goes out nationwide and states will offer what they can,” he said.
“Buffalo requested 14 hazard mitigation specialists and wanted them for 30 days. We could provide two of those specialists for 14 days, and they accepted. Other states filled in what we couldn’t provide.”
Some years, PEMA gets no out-of-state requests.
In 2017, during a particularly active and costly hurricane season, the agency sent emergency management teams to Texas and Florida. Also that year, when Hurricane Irma hit South Carolina, PEMA sent experts as well a swift-water evacuation team and an aquatic rescue helicopter.
“It could be just about anything,” Mr. Padfield said. “We have to be ready.”
John Hayes: jhayes@post-gazette.com
First Published: January 23, 2023, 11:00 a.m.
Updated: January 23, 2023, 11:28 a.m.
