// This is a machine generated transcript. Please report any transcription errors to will-help@illinois.edu.

[00:00:00]
Speaker 0: The weather and climate often cause concern and curiosity, but understanding the facts behind the phenomena can be a challenge. We're here to help. From the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Illinois Public Media, welcome to Weather Realness, a weekly podcast about the skies above Illinois and the world.

[00:00:30]
Joseph Trujillo Falcon: I'm your host, Joseph Trujillo Falcon, assistant professor in the Department of Climate, Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences in the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Whenever an emergency happens on campus, whether it be a tornado warning, a severe thunderstorm, or a police incident, you might receive an alert notification on your phone. Those alerts are managed by the Office of Emergency Management at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They're meant to help keep the campus community informed during emergencies. But this office does more than just sending out these alerts. Throughout the year, they prepare for disasters, coordinate responses across campus, and help the university recover after emergencies, including severe weather. Joining us today to take us behind the scenes on weather emergency preparedness is Brian Brauer, the executive director of Emergency Management here at the university. Thank you for joining us, Brian.

[00:01:26]
Brian Brauer: I'm happy to be here and talk about what we do to be

[00:01:29]
Joseph Trujillo Falcon: prepared, and preparedness is key here and to start this conversation off, I'd love to learn a little bit more about your role as executive director of Emergency Management. Could you tell us a little bit more about it?

[00:01:39]
Brian Brauer: This is a new position. I, I'm the first person filling this role. I report to the executive director of Public Safety and Chief of Police, Chief Matt Ballinger. My role is to do a lot of planning, a lot of preparation, and to have our campus be as prepared for a variety of emergencies as we could be. I only have a team of 5 people to do that, so it's uh we're definitely not a small army, we're a small group. So my vision is that in emergency management, our number one job is to support everybody else that is an emergency responder at the university. So that's our law enforcement folks at UIPD, that's the fire departments in Champaign and Urbana that respond in the EMS providers. If we make sure they have the resources they need, they can do the important work of helping keep our 70,000 people as safe as possible.

[00:02:36]
Joseph Trujillo Falcon: And when we think about this many people and the various kinds of threats, then what does emergency preparedness look like when you have to consider so many factors and so many people all at once?

[00:02:47]
Brian Brauer: One of our challenges is knowing what comes next and what the emergency is going to be, and we, we can't pick or predict. We've seen more severe weather, but this has also been a bit of an unusual year at the UI because we've had an array of emergencies. We had workers that were trapped when some bricks fell on them when they were doing a renovation at [FAR]. We had a chemical spill. That turned out to be cooking grease fortunately, but it polluted the [bonyard] from a restaurant and traveled 2 miles downstream, and the fire department had to track it back from where it was discovered. Back to the [bo yard] on campus, not a UI building, but until we knew what it was, we had to treat it like it was a chemical. We had a fire in a dorm, not, not a drill, but an actual fire caused by a lithium battery. We had a fire in a laboratory in the research park also caused by a lithium battery. We had a fire in a steam tunnel, which is very unique because our campus is heated by steam and cooled by chilled water. And that's the backbone of our facility's infrastructure. We had a fire in the same steam tunnel that broke a year ago. And created a large steam release. So each of those I see as an opportunity to test the plans we have as well as identify what the gaps are. When we had the steam pipe break. We were fortunate that our facilities team came to me and said we think this could have gone better. And we had conversations with the fire department, with the police department. And identified also working with the building staff, the chemical safety team in engineering, how could this have gone better? And we put a plan together. Trained on it and when a fire happened in that same steam tunnel 8 months later, it was a night and day response.

[00:04:51]
Joseph Trujillo Falcon: And when developing these kinds of plans for extreme weather, then, how does emergency management identify and really create these preparedness plans for these various kinds of hazards that, as you're saying, probably require different kinds of responses?

[00:05:04]
Brian Brauer: We're an exceptionally decentralized university with over 460 buildings. We have 12 colleges but many other large departments. And the individual departments get to drive a lot of what happens in their units. So initially it was an uphill battle to get more cooperation. To update their building emergency plans and that's where we've started. We adopted software called [Risk Connect] and our gentleman who's in charge of our emergency planning for the buildings, Jason Madden, Jason has delivered training across most of the university. Made sure that they have plans, made sure that they have. The building responders listed and have that contact information updated. And as of July 1st before he went on vacation, he was at 97% complete out of those 467 buildings. Now we have more buildings than that. We didn't cover every chicken coop. We started with the places that have the highest occupancy and the greatest risks and then we've worked our way down into smaller buildings. That includes the 4H camp out in [Allerton]. The last round of tornadoes that came through was heading directly towards that camp. So we not only verified they had plans in place, but we, they, they got a special phone call to make sure, all right, you've got a plan. Tell me what your plan is, and we agreed what they were going to do if the weather indicated a tornado could happen because for their camp. They had to walk 1 mile to get the kids into shelter at Allerton Park, so their, their reaction time was impacted differently than if we heard the sirens go off and we went into the basement of this building.

[00:07:00]
Joseph Trujillo Falcon: It's great to see all of these advances and making sure that each building has a specific priority. But even looking beyond tornadoes, what would you say are the most significant weather-related hazards facing the university and have these risks changed over time?

[00:07:15]
Brian Brauer: The other weather concerns that I have, one is exposure to the cold, the other is exposure to the heat. Because people that are not familiar with being in this climate, you know, someone who, I don't know if it snowed in Puerto Rico when you grew up there, but probably not. So someone who's coming from a warmer climate or an equatorial nation coming to this area may not understand that. Winter can be very severe here and it's not as simple as looking at the thermostat. You also have to consider what the wind is doing and what is that impact from the wind chill. What is the impact of having ice on the ground? What is the impact of heavy wet snow that has to be cleared versus light powdery snow. When I moved out here from near New York City. It surprised me because in New York City you'd plow your snow once and it stayed there. Here in the Midwest you would plow the light powdery snow and two hours later go and plow the same snow again because it blew back in place. So having people understand that driving in snow is different than driving in rain. Driving in rain is different than driving on a dry road. You know, using social media and other avenues to help people be more prepared. This will be the 2nd year that we've had an emergency management month where we're going to be putting out messages specifically for the risks we see at the university. And we're fortunate that through the Division of Public Safety we have a social media team that regularly incorporates weather focused messages. So we let people know when the weather's turning colder. That the [Connie Frank] Care Center has coats available for students that might not have them. We identify where are the warming shelters in the community so that if someone's apartment lost heat and they needed somewhere to go, we have a place we can direct them to.

[00:09:19]
Joseph Trujillo Falcon: If you're just joining us, this is Weather Realness, the podcast about weather and climate from Illinois Public Media and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I'm Joseph Trujillo Falcon, assistant professor in the Department of Climate, Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. We're talking with Brian Brauer, the executive director of Emergency Management, about how weather emergency preparedness works on campus. So we've talked a little bit about the disaster itself, but once that event has passed, what does that recovery process involve?

[00:09:54]
Brian Brauer: It starts with the damage assessment and figuring out where is it safe for people to go. Is it safe for them to return home? Do they need to stay in a shelter? It all depends on the safety of the structures. When I was a young firefighter in 1996, a tornado came through that came through southeast Urbana, which was uncommon for it to come into the city limits. And it also went and struck the community of Ogden. It was a 30-year anniversary of that tornado this year. Uh, for Ogden, it was months of recovery. Where initially it was going in, making sure people were out of their homes, making sure people were safe, making sure they were accounted for. We brought in resources from around the state to ensure that we had adequate regular coverage for the fire departments and the Ogden Fire Department brought in responders from other fire departments to help each day. We worked with non-governmental agencies like the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the United Way to coordinate donations, to coordinate volunteers, to help feed the people that were coming in and doing work. Severe weather unfortunately provides one of the more consistent examples. I also took a group of U of I students that were volunteering to uh Gifford after their tornado November 17th, I think 5 or 6 years ago. That tornado had a significant impact on the town and we went up as part of the later recovery where we were helping people carry debris from their yard and put it into a pile at the curb so that it could be collected. The county EMA was working to keep track of all the costs involved for the people that were coming in, the expenses of the emergency so that we could seek reimbursement from the federal government. I, that while it's a terrible thing to have to consider, the money has to come from somewhere to clean up after a disaster and knowing what do you need to keep track of. So that you can get reimbursed is important.

[00:12:12]
Joseph Trujillo Falcon: And it is just such an important perspective to illustrate here and that I hope our listening audience here takes into account that recovery isn't just the snapshots you see on television immediately after, it's a prolonged month-long, even year-long process to get communities back, uh, on their feet there. Now, let's talk a little bit there immediately after that kind of event especially here on campus, you know, let's say an extreme weather event were uh were to happen. How do officials decide when to reopen buildings or restore utilities after these kinds of events?

[00:12:45]
Brian Brauer: Looking at the university context, we'd rely on our facilities and services staff. They're the experts for how our buildings are put together, how the utilities flow into them, when is it safe to turn on the utilities, what is the impact of turning on those utilities. For example, one of the scenarios we exercised as a university drill last year was that we had a steam pipe break in the middle of the winter. And we had a building that needed to be evacuated because it had no heat. The scenario included that it was below freezing, so pipes were going to break. It's not as simple as, OK, we can turn the heat back on and everybody can go back in the building. You not only have to make sure the building is safe structurally, but you have to make sure all of the systems, the fire alarm system, the fire suppression system, heating, cooling, potable water. If water was shut off to a building, it has to be boiled for a period of time and tested to ensure that it's safe. So there's a lot of steps that go into reopening a building where we rely on the expertise of whoever owns that area. That's something that we'd coordinate through our university's emergency operations center. So that [F&S] might have their damage support team. And we could help coordinate, OK, those folks are going to need to eat. Where are we going to feed them? If it's wintertime, where are we going to let them go to warm up? What resources are they going to need to clear debris?

In 2008, I was detailed to the state's emergency operations center during the flooding of the Mississippi River. And I learned that there's something called a tub grinder. I didn't know what that was. [hi of a paper shredder.] That is so big it takes a barge to move it. Tub grinders are something you could drop a washing machine in, and it basically shreds it up. My responsibility was developing the plan for how as the waters receded and all the debris was being collected by the communities along the river, where did the tub grinders need to go and how are we going to allocate the three that were going to come sailing down the river. To each of the communities based on how much debris the community had to get rid of. What permits do you need? For example, if we had a wind event that took out a significant number of trees at the university. It might be an option to burn those trees, take them to the South [farms] and identify an area that we could safely burn the wood versus having to dispose of it some other way. That requires a permit from the state EPA. You know, as well as how do you message out to the community, this is how the cleanup is going to go, that if you know I live in Urbana and after one of the severe storms this spring, the city came around and any tree limbs that fell down in the street or on the front of your property, if you brought them to the curb, they came and picked them up. If you think about the types of things that people don't have the ability to handle themselves. Yeah, they're, they're not going to be able to get a tree off their house. One of the storms last fall, my boys had a tree land on their house. Who do you call for that? You know, there's the 911 piece where the fire department will show up and verify that everybody is safely out of the house, but then what? Who do you call to get a tree off your house? Now, fortunately there's plenty of — a handful of companies that will do that locally. But thinking through where are those resources, keeping that list before you need it. One of the other things that we manage for the university is our disaster recovery contracts. We have specific agreements with 3 companies so that if a disaster were to hit, we have a contract with them that says they'll come to the UI and we have an agreed rate plan. You know, since we're talking about weather, umbrellas get more expensive when it's raining outside. Similarly, there's an opportunity for less scrupulous companies to raise prices in a disaster, and we see that when there's extensive hail damage and companies come in. And want to do low quality work for high quality prices. So we have agreements in place so that if an emergency happens where we need help cleaning up after a fire, after a tornado, after a building collapse, we have all of those agreements lined out in advance.

[00:17:28]
Joseph Trujillo Falcon: If you're just joining us, this is Weather Realness, the podcast about weather and climate from Illinois Public Media and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I'm Joseph Trujillo Falcon, assistant professor in the Department of Climate, Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. We're talking with Brian Brauer, the executive director of Emergency Management, about how weather emergency preparedness works on campus. Now, that's honestly so interesting and just really encapsulates the work our emergency departments do here on campus, how much we appreciate it and I feel like at this point, it's so exciting that we want to even learn a little bit more. I know you mentioned the [AAA] alert system at the very beginning here of our conversation. But just for some context for our listening audience that might not have direct access to it, how does the [LII] alert system work and who is responsible for issuing those emergency notifications?

[00:18:21]
Brian Brauer: I'll take the second part first. Um, I, I'm not a 24/7 sitting in my office waiting for bad things to happen. So my team ensures that we have the contracts and the software and we work to pre-script the messages. That's why the, the communication conversation I want to have with you later is so is, uh, interesting to me. Our, our messages are prescripted. This way no one is having to decide on the fly what should this message include, what's important. Uh, from our studies of risk communication through, uh, [Vincent Cavello] is one of the folks that we model our communications after. What are the simple directions you need to give people to do? You know there's a fire at this address. The fire department is responding. Avoid the area. You know, crime is in progress at this intersection. Police are responding. Avoid the area, giving people information on what to do. A tornado has been sighted. One of the things we do because of the size of our university and the footprint of the geography we have is one of our, our rules for lack of a better term, is that if a tornado is likely to impact anywhere in Champaign, Urbana, or Savoy, our local agreement is we will set off the sirens for all three. It's if it's going to go off for one of those 3 communities, we're going to put it off for all 3 of those communities.

One of the other things we've adopted recently is based on feedback from the National Weather Service. The weather risks are intensifying. And there are destructive weather patterns besides tornadoes, so our outdoor warning sirens may get set off because there's a tornado. And that could be either visually confirmed by a spotter or confirmed on radar. If there are significant straight line winds, and I think we're at 80 miles an hour is the threshold we use, and we actually had that earlier this year combined with a tornado that went just north of town, and the other is hail over 2 inches. Because it doesn't matter if the wind is 80 miles an hour in a straight line or 80 miles an hour in a cyclone, it's still going to do significant damage. And we want people to know to seek shelter.

So coming back to the [Iina] alert piece. The message is sent out by our telecommunicators at the university. These are folks that are trained to receive emergency calls, and they communicate directly with the fire departments and with our 911 center [METCAD]. [MTAD] is who sets off the outdoor warning sirens. With the support of our county emergency management. It's important that there be as few approval steps as necessary. So our sergeants, our frontline supervisors at UIPD, those are the folks that are typically making the call to send out a [line eye] alert. Because they, they're the ones that have the best, fastest information. So they'll identify for the telecommunicator. Hey, telecommunicator Bob, please push out the tornado warning message. Now for tornado warnings, that's one of the few that our telecommunicators can send out autonomously. If the outdoor warning sirens are set off or if [MetA], our 911 center puts out on the radio that we're under a tornado warning, then they can push that alert out right away because time equals lives.

[00:22:10]
Joseph Trujillo Falcon: For sure. And really now looking at all of these things for [line] alerts, uh, are students here on campus automatically enrolled? Do they have to enroll themselves? What about parents or other family members on campus too?

[00:22:25]
Brian Brauer: So everyone with an illinois.edu email address is automatically enrolled to receive the alerts, uh, via email. That's not very timely. So if we have a cell phone number for folks, we incorporate those also. So our system for email is opt out. We'll incorporate the cell phone numbers that we have provided from people. However, parents can opt in. You can opt in with an additional email address with an additional phone number.

[00:22:57]
Joseph Trujillo Falcon: To close this conversation off, I really just wanna bring it back to the main group of people that you serve, and those are the nearly 60,000 students here on campus. What do you wish students on campus knew more about emergency preparedness to close this interview off?

[00:23:13]
Brian Brauer: If I got 3 wishes. I'd want to make sure that students were always, always aware of their surroundings. From a weather standpoint, what's the forecast? Are you dressed for the weather? If you have a car and you're going to be driving in winter weather, are you prepared? Do you have a blanket in the car? Do you have spare drinking water? Do you have additional medications at your home or apartment so that if you needed to evacuate, you have everything that you need prepared in the house and you know where it is. Do you have two ways out? Every room you go in, you should have a plan for how are you gonna get out of it. And if you can't go out the way you came in, what's another way? That kind of thinking will help keep people safe. And the final thing I'd offer is if it's after dark, you probably shouldn't be going anywhere alone. We're, we're a safe community. Sometimes because we do send out a [lini] alert when crime happens at the university, it can give the sense that there's more crime. We're required to do that by the [Janine Cleary] Act, so we have to let you know when something happens. That same crime could happen a mile east, west, north or south, and you would never know. But knowing where you are, not walking alone and being aware of what's going on around you are the three things I'd ask people to think about.

[00:24:43]
Joseph Trujillo Falcon: You know, and those three things are very important indeed and hopefully people took notes there. Thank you so much, Brian, for, uh, having us here. This has been such a fascinating conversation and all special thanks to you and your team in the Division of Public Safety there that work tirelessly every day to keep us safe. We've been talking with Brian Brauer, the executive director of Emergency Management here at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I'm Joseph Trujillo Falcon, assistant professor in the Department of Climate, Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences in the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Thanks for joining us on Weather Realness. Do you have a weather or climate question you want us to answer? Leave us a voicemail at 217-333-2141 or email weatherrealness@illinois.edu.

[00:25:32]
Speaker 3: A note about our next segment of Weather Realness. It is about the unusually quiet Atlantic hurricane season. Our segment was taped weeks before Hurricane [Isaias] was formed. As of October 8th, it is churning in the Gulf of Mexico. There are hurricane warnings from New Orleans to Tallahassee, Florida. Stay up to date on the storm by going to weather.gov.