Milltown officials had a lot of ’splainin’ to do, and there was a packed room at the American Legion Hall on Sept. 12 when they held a meeting to hear residents’ complaints about the town’s handling of the recent hurricane.
Inmanyways, what happened in Milltown is emblematic of problems faced by many communities during and after the storm. The town had tried to get information out beforehand, but the municipal electric company shut down and water started rising, most communication stopped, and people were left trying to figure it out on their own.
The story of folks on the first floor of The Mill condominiums on Washington Avenue is particularly poignant. As water rose high enough to dump 42 inches into the post office building across the street, residents on the first floor of The Mill lost nearly everything to the flood, and 22 families were displaced. And as one woman said at the meeting, there was no way to get information, and they were working off rumors that said, among other things, that the water was unsafe to drink.
“There was nothing,” from the township in theway of information, she shouted. “Nothing! ”
As was reported in a story in last week’s Greater Media newspaper the Sentinel, local business owner Sallie Miller said at the meeting that she wanted to put a sign in the window of her Main Street storefront asking, “Where is the leadership?”
That is a good question, and the answer? Most of the leadership was hanging out at the borough’s administrative offices, just up the block.
For those of you unfamiliar with the community, I should point out that The Mill is right across the street from Borough Hall, where all of the community’s municipal offices are located, including public works and police. Officials at those offices, meanwhile, were being frustrated by their inability to communicate with residents. The town’s reverse 911 notification system only works with landlines, and that avenue of communication bit the dust when the power went out. Police Chief Raymond Geipel, who also serves as the borough’s Office of Emergency Management director, was not able to get messages out. In the days after the hurricane, officials directed people to call the main line for information, but the lines got swamped.
The solutions put forward at the meeting? The town says it’s working on a dedicated emergency line, a program where people provide authorities with their cell phone numbers so they can be reached that way, and creating a Facebook page where officials can post information about the emergency. They got Geipel a smart phone.
That’s all well and good, but as I noted in a recent column, the proposed solutions all rely on technology, and as we’ve learned, that can’t always be trusted. I suggest they’re overthinking this whole business to a certain extent.
Instead of sitting in their offices — or maybe instead of everyone sitting in their offices — trying to find a way to get residents on the phone, why don’t they simply go outside to the parking lot, and maybe a couple of other accessible places around town, and set up some card tables where officials can pass along anything they know about the electrical power outage, estimates about the timetable for restoration of services, revised travel routes, cable and Internet outages, where people can find or purchase emergency supplies like ice and lamp oil, and attempt to provide answers to all the other questions people have in a crisis.
And in addition to that, maybe they could jump in some of the municipal vehicles, drive around town and park them on street corners with a sign saying they’re there to help. That would have made people feel a lot better than parking out-of-town
law enforcement officers at stoplight-controlled intersections who did a decent job of keeping traffic moving, but simply shrugged their shoulders if you asked them a question.
On the morning after the storm in Milltown, lots of folks came out to assess the damage and walk around. Many of them spent most of that day on their front porches, visiting with friends and neighbors, and sharing what little they knew. It was like an extended block party where nobody had a shred of solid information about what was going on. How much better would they have felt if they could have walked down to the corner and asked someone who knew a few of the answers? I’m betting they would have been reassured, and not so many of them would have turned up at the Sept. 12 meeting to vent.
As I wrote earlier this month, information is often the first casualty in an emergency, and what happened in Milltown was certainly not unique. Variations on the theme were played out to lesser or greater extents all across the state. I know the same problems cropped up in my home community of East Brunswick, where emergency information stopped coming the minute the power and phones went down, and where nobody you called at the township seemed to know how to contact the Office of Emergency Management. Several I called didn’t even know the name of the director, or where the office is located. And residents sure didn’t know when their power might be back on, even though early phone messages assured them the township was working “aggressively” to get it restored. For future reference, that person’s name is Austin Kosik, and his phone number is 732-390- 6947.
If you don’t know the name and number of the emergency management office in your community, and it isn’t listed on the municipal website, I suggest you find out before the next time you need it.
If nothing else, communities around this state learned some hard lessons during and after Irene. Let’s just hope that in addition to beefing up the high-tech methods of disseminating information next time, they throw a few low-tech options into the mix.
Gregory Bean is the former executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at [email protected].