Lafayette has lacked a comprehensive emergency plan for decades, and some parish officials believe the community was lucky to avoid major disasters as it lagged behind its neighbors in preparedness.
“I pray every day during hurricane season that we don’t have a storm,” says Christina Dayries, Mayor-President Monique Blanco Boulet’s chief of staff and now the point person for establishing an emergency preparedness office.
Dayries’s background is in emergency planning, having most recently held the deputy director/chief of staff role for the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. Dayries says having a designated department would allow for better pre-planning for the type of major emergencies the area has been mostly lucky to avoid but that experts predict are sure to come.
“I would say yes, we have been lucky not to have a major event,” notes Broussard Fire Chief Bryan Champagne.
Lafayette currently contracts emergency management with 911, which already handles emergency calls for the parish.
“We’re not getting that full-time dedicated resource for emergency management like we need here in Lafayette,” says Dayries.
The Boulet administration’s proposal for an emergency preparedness office would allow 911 to focus solely on emergency calls by establishing a separate office of emergency management with two full-time staff members.
Broussard’s Champagne supports the plan, saying “911 needs to be focused on 911 and the emergency calls coming in. … The whole goal of splitting the agencies up is so that there’s a dedicated person strictly focusing on every avenue of an emergency operations plan.”
This emergency management department would not just handle preparedness planning, but what Dayries classifies as the five steps of emergency management — prevention, preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation. The department would cover everything from notification systems to a plan to get residents back to Lafayette after a mass evacuation.
The program includes staffing so-called “lily pads” used as staging zones for municipalities around the parish to centralize and eventually evacuate residents. “If we rescue people, we pick them up because they can’t get out and we’ll bring them to that holding area,” says Champagne. “Then they’ll take a bus to Lafayette and then get on a bigger bus and go north.”
Champagne says in the past many of these lily pads have been staffed by Broussard City Council members and their families, whereas an emergency preparedness department would have a plan for employees and volunteers to man these lily pads across the parish.
Lafayette is working on properly preparing locations north of I-10, including the MLK Recreation Center, for generators and staffing.
Proper lily pad planning is just the beginning of LCG’s emergency preparedness goals. Dayries has identified 35 areas with potential for improvement.
The clearest of these deficiencies is the lack of backup plans for emergency equipment.
Under proper emergency management, contracts are spread over multiple companies, and backups are contracted as fail safes. Hurricanes, for example, often impact numerous parishes in the state, leaving a fight for limited resources like generators.
LCG has only one contract covering its emergency equipment needs. The contract is with DRC Emergency Services, which also has contracts with neighboring parishes.
“They’re supposed to bring us generators, portable showers and toilets, those types of equipment, and we have no backup; [LCG] put all their eggs into one basket,” says Dayries.
The administration is working to get generators under contract and backup contracts in place but is locked into the main contract for another 18 months.
Dayries says once the contract expires, the goal will be to spread the contracts out to adequately prepare the parish for competition with neighboring parishes over emergency equipment.
Notification System
An important aspect of emergency response is an effective alert system. And right now there is not even an effective system to notify city employees if there are issues with City Hall during an emergency.
The parish currently uses the IPAWS notification system provided at the state level by GOHSEP. This system issues shelter-in-place warnings but is not supposed to be the main system for a parish like Lafayette. Under IPAWS guidelines by FEMA, it is supposed to complement the type of local emergency notification system Lafayette lacks.
GOHSEP’s website explaining IPAWS notes that state and local authorities use IPAWS to route alerts to local emergency alert system stations, explaining that it complements but does not replace the systems state and local authorities should be using. New Orleans, for example, has NOLA Ready alerts, a local emergency alert system and an automated flood warning system — all at the local level.
Lafayette is still in the process of building an effective local alert system.
Political Battle
In mid-July the Lafayette Parish Council voted down Boulet’s proposed parish ordinance to establish the emergency management office but did take what can be viewed as a first step toward a new plan by repealing at the same meeting an outdated emergency ordinance. Still, the proposed preparedness office won’t move forward until the council agrees to fund it.
Dayries believes council members support a robust emergency preparedness plan but have misgivings about the price, whether the city should help fund it, and timing of the proposal.
She says a proposal for temporary funding will be back on the Parish Council’s Aug. 6 agenda. “We’re only going to ask for salary and related benefits and operating costs [for] September and October, to close out the fiscal year,” Dayries says.
This will allow LCG to start searching for qualified candidates for the two full-time positions and addressing some of the 35 different areas Dayries identified for improvement.
Funding for the emergency preparedness department positions is already in Boulet’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year.
“We know we need this,” Dayries says. “We know we need an effective emergency management agency.”