Ice Storm Deployment
On December 12, 2008, a regional ice storm knocked out power from thousands of households across eastern MA and southern NH. Many homes were without water, electricity, and heat for over a week.
Some residents simply needed a warm place to shower and enjoy meals during the day, returning home to makeshift heating from wood stoves or generators at night. However, many families were entirely displaced from their homes, requiring a safe haven until their power was restored. Brutal temperatures and multiple snowfalls created conditions that rendered housing unsafe for vulnerable elders, as well as for the medically fragile.
Full-service emergency shelters were opened to care for area residents in Westford and Lowell. To ensure continuous staffing, 45 MRC members filled 82 shifts at these shelters around the clock.
Lowell High School was chosen as the site for sheltering the city’s urban population, and also accommodated those without power from neighboring Dracut. Operations were transferred to the smaller Council on Aging facility on the third and last day of service.
Westford opened its shelter at the Blanchard School, caring for up to 37 residents during peak hours. The Blanchard shelter remained open for six days.
At both shelters, the MRC was called to provide surge capacity while working seamlessly with other responders: police, fire, Red Cross, CERT, emergency management, elder services, and municipal agencies.
The UMV MRC ensured that one medical and one non-medical member were on site at all times in the Westford shelter. The unit provided volunteers as requested in Lowell.
Medical members provided direct patient care. This required monitoring the overall health of residents at the shelter, anticipating and preventing problems, and taking action whenever issues arose. Medical conditions can be aggravated when vulnerable people are under stress and their schedules are disrupted, which was especially the case from the upheaval of temporary lodging during the ice storm disaster.
Non-medical volunteers assisted with registration of shelter visitors and staff, communication, and other tasks as needed.
Both Lowell and Westford shelters provided specialized cots and supplies for those who needed additional care.
The UMV MRC was better able to respond purely by having over 540 members with diverse skills in our ranks. This sheer number was essential because members were enduring the same power outages as everyone else. MRC staff needed to make more calls across a wider geographic area, to reach volunteers who still had power and could deploy. Many were enlisted from towns that suffered less impact from the storm.
Several communities in nearby Region 4A hadn’t lost power, so the UMV MRC was able to supplement its response as needed through other units.
The call-out was further complicated because municipal offices in Westford, including the MRC and the health department, had also lost power. Thus the Internet, e-mail, Comcast cable and phone services were inaccessible. Our unit’s preferred deployment method – sending a blast e-mail to hundreds of UMV MRC members at once – was therefore disabled.
Furthermore, hundreds of members didn’t have phone service, and had no power to access their answering machines or recharge cell phone batteries. The solution? Armed with a printed copy of member contact data, MRC staff simply kept calling down the list of members until the necessary shifts for each day were filled.
Some displaced residents remained at the shelter for nearly a week, until it was safe to move back to more permanent facilities. The last resident to leave was eager for her return to a home environment.
The UMV MRC held a debriefing session and invited comments from participants, for the Westford Health Department’s section of the town’s After Action Report.