 Thank you, Craig, and thank you for another panelist for another excellent panel this afternoon. Closer to the end, we're now going to have moving to a round table, which close to a panel discussion except that the people on the round table will not be starting out with statements. We'll just go directly into questions. I'm Brad Coleman, a member of the Planning Committee, a member of BASC, 38 years with NOAA, so I have had some experience on the front line in Seattle, so no hurricanes, but I do know the challenges and opportunities, the importance of communicating risk. Most recently, you moved into private sector and then just this last year, I was president of the American Mutological Society. We're going to continue with session four, which is risk communication and decision-making in communities. In this particular round table, we're going to have four excellent panelists on community leaders, community action, and going back to Craig's introduction, we're really looking and trying to have this conversation with them, front-line people on their needs, their sources, and their decision-making process. So since this is a round table, we're not going to have introductions, we're not going to do the individual statements, so I'm going to go through the four, introduce them, and ask them to give a very brief introduction of themselves and their background. So I'll start with Jeff Linder, Harris County Flood Control District. Are you out there, Jeff? Yeah, I'm here. Jeff Linder with Harris County Flood Control District. I sit in the Harris County Mercy Operations Center and brief the emergency managers, the Joint Information Center folks, and our elected officials for all weather hazards in Houston and Harris County. Okay. Thank you, Jeff. And now we'll move on to Peyton Siler-Jones. Peyton, are you out there? Brad, I'm sorry. We are currently trying to identify whether Randy and Archie can join the Zoom, and I believe Peyton is no longer joining us for this session. She had something come up. Okay. So I'm going to work on that in the meantime. Okay. And Archie Chasson is, do we know about Archie? We're trying to bring them in right now. Okay. So if you want to get started with Jeff, and then we'll update you. Okay. So this is going to be a small round table. Thank you for your introduction, Jeff. I think we're going to cut right to the chase and talk about information, and it really comes down to what information do you need to take into account to make decisions about responses? And I imagine the list is huge, but sort of call out a few of the highlights that you think are really critical. And if you wouldn't mind also maybe some that you'd like to call out that are, you really would like to have, but don't quite need it, just a nice to have. And then finally, everyone in the decision-making process that watches warnings, making call to actions for the various local communities. At some point you have to make that decision. And how do you get over that line of wanting a little bit more information or a little bit more time versus actually making the call? Yeah. Great questions. And, you know, I'll start with what we use here to base our decisions on and to brief our elected officials. So obviously we're using the National Weather Service typically for a hurricane event. We're getting at least twice a day briefings, sometimes four times a day. And also the information coming from the National Hurricane Center. So those are the two primary sources of information for any sort of tropical hurricane type event. And all the decisions we make are based on that information. You know, the expected storm surge and stuff like that with respect to evacuation. What would I like to see? Well, I think right now the storm surge watch warning goes out about 48 hours, which is awesome when we get our inundation packet from the hurricane center. I know there's some effort to increase that to maybe 60 hours or so. So just to give you an idea of what we face here in Houston, Galveston, we have to start making decisions at 96 hours. So the only thing we have available to us at that point is our moms and meows. And those are the predetermined maps based on category of what could be flooded from seawater. And you know, that's one of the things, you know, you just heard me use seawater. A lot of people have no clue what the world storm surge is. And so we sometimes have to dumb it down to saltwater seawater. That's what we're talking about here. And so we have to start making, looking at those decisions at 96 hours, especially when it comes to ordering resources from our, from the state. And Harris County alone, we need 2,400 buses to get 2,400 buses here in time to evacuate those that have signed up with our system that they need assistance in evacuating or our critical needs are nursing homes and our hospitals. We have to start that process at about 96 hours out. And so getting all that lined up. And if you think of 96 hours out, there's a lot of uncertainty in that forecast potentially at that timeline at that time frame. And so yes, we are sort of making some initial decisions. Yes, that comes associated with cost and cost always weighs in at some point on how certain are we to start spending money. That something is going to happen here in that we're doing the correct thing. And then about 60 hours out between about 55 and 60 hours out is when we generally make our determination and our decisions when it comes to the general public evacuation. We have a what we call a Mac call. It's a multi-agency coordination call with all the counties in the area to get the thought process of what our counties on the Gulf Coast are planning. Galveston, Missouri, Chambers County, obviously they're right at the beachfront. And then what Harris County is planning because we're this big gohema of people that sit just north of all those coastal counties. And so if we go out and say, Hey, we're going to issue an evacuation order before our coastal counties do that that creates challenges on our on our roadway systems and our freeway systems. And so we work together to establish the evacuation timeline and the zones and the zip codes that we're going to call. And then we generally do that in a phased approach, but the coastal going first and we hold back if we're going to do all three zones, A, B and C, like we did for Rita, we hold back those B and C zones until those coastal evacuation zones have some time to evacuate out. When I say hold back, there might be a six or eight people on the road. It's not like we're waiting a day. That's another important thing with evacuation. I think a lot of people think, oh, we're making the decision at six a.m. this morning by eight a.m. people are going to be on the road. And that's really not the case. There's certainly a lag time between when an elected official or emergency manager calls for an evacuation and people actually process that information begin preparing their house, figure out the whole work situation, get the kids out of the school and all that type of stuff and actually start moving. And that's a really important thing for our lag time from when those decisions become public. And one thing we've kind of realized here in our schools are a really, really big factor when it comes to evacuation. So we work very closely with our school districts on our timelines. And hey, this is the plan for tomorrow. We recommend closing schools so people have that freedom to evacuate out of the area. A lot of those, a lot of those lessons learned again, high end evacuation event for us that we had not tried since Hurricane Gilbert here in 1988. And there was, there was lots of problems with Rita. And one thing I think, I think you heard this from the Dair County person there is we're very similar here in the state of Texas. It's the local elected official, our county judge and our city mayor who ultimately makes the decision on the evacuation orders. And so briefing those, making sure they understand the threat we're facing, the uncertainty and threat. Because like I said, at the time, we have to make those decisions. Sometimes it's not a hundred percent certain we're going to get the storm surge, you know, we're going to get the storm. And a classic example, that was Hurricane Laura back in, in was a 2020 in Southwest Louisiana. We were right on the cusp of pulling the trigger for mandatory evacuation in Harris County. Galveston County had done a mandatory, we went ahead and did voluntary A and B, virtually nobody left for that. But we were, we were extremely nervous. And the only thing that kept us from pulling that trigger and going with a mandatory evacuation was that Hurricane Center forecast really never changed for about 48 hours. It kind of honed in Sabine Pass Southwest Louisiana and it never really deviated, even though the European models and all that were up Galveston Bay. And there was a lot of pressure being applied by TV meteorologists saying, hey, look at the European. This is horrible. It's going to be an absolute disaster. And we never really, we just stayed with what the Hurricane Center was, was going with. We spoke directly with, you know, our local National Weather Service office and talked to them about the confidence. And they were very confident in that forecast track. And so kind of a CYA for us is we did the voluntary for A and B. And we could, we could have ramped it up to a mandatory if we needed to. But it's just as important sometimes not to pull the trigger as it is to pull the trigger, especially when you're dealing with such large populations like we have here for four to six million people that roughly about 1.5 to 2 million have to get out of the storm surge areas. And so having that, having that, you know, good information and confidence really, really helps with the evacuation planning and trigger and trigger points. I don't really know how to say this, but you know, you're also dealing with, you're dealing with elected officials. And when you're dealing with elected officials, whether evacuation is sometimes not their top of top priority in that type of stuff. And so not only are you dealing with elected officials in your own jurisdiction, but you're dealing with elected officials from other jurisdictions. And for example, with Hurricane Ike back in 2008, Galveston County was very, very, the city of Galveston was very, very, very slow in pulling the trigger on the evacuation down there. And that created a real challenge for us because we kept delaying hoping that they would pull that trigger. So we didn't trap all these people on the roadways down that way. And finally we had to get, you know, it was very direct language that if you don't do this in the next six hours, you know, we're going to, we're going to go. And so there comes, there comes that timing and one thing if you think about the decision process, because I think a lot of people think the evacuation decision process is relatively easy, right? You follow, you follow your guidelines, you follow your rules, you follow your policies and you pull the trigger. But it's nowhere near as easy as it, as that sounds in real time. And one thing I've noticed is when their storm is a category three or category four or category five out in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, Rita, the decision is a lot easier than if it's a tropical storm coming off Cuba and the forecast is for a big storm in the Gulf of Mexico. We saw that with Ida, we saw that with Laura, we saw that with Ian. And so those emergency managers and those decision makers are basing their entire decision on a forecast. And there's just this thought process in the back of your head of, I just don't know if I believe the forecast and that's what we kind of get into when we don't already have the big hurricane coming down on us like we had with Rita. Okay, great. Thank you, Jeff. That's a great introduction to the session. We do have an additional panelist now and my understanding is that Archie Shason is out there. Is that true, Archie? Hey, guys, how are you all? Hi. Let me introduce Archie. He is, I believe, president of the Laforge Parish government. That's me. We're the Laforge Parish government down here on the coast of Louisiana. And Jeff, I think, hit a lot of stuff on the head when I caught the back end of his deal. These decisions are not always easy for us as elected officials and emergency managers. So those things get a little sticky from time to time. Yes, they do. Maybe we'll do... Why don't we go ahead and go on to the next question. And I'm sure we can get back to some questions for Jeff. So what I'll do is Archie, I'll ask you the next one, which is getting back... Uncertainty has been mentioned a number of different times, sort of both sides of the coin here through the day today, importance or not of communicating uncertainty. Could you share with us what role does uncertainty play in this process that you play in? And what needs do you have on uncertainty and coming right down to actually how do you communicate uncertainty to your stakeholders? Yeah, you know, it gets a little sticky. You think back like the history of these five-day forecasts are really invented by the weather service. So the Navy had five days to get in and out of ports. So they were able to either move ships in or get ships out of the way. So when we look at those five-day tracks, there is a whole lot of uncertainty in them, right? We try to do the best they can and I know those guys do the best they can with the forecast, but you're trying to communicate that through the forecast. So when we look at the forecast in the south, we always have two different types of weather services that we run. So when we look at the forecast that's the one that we run, we see that we've got 53-miles-wide. We touched the Gulf of Mexico at the very bottom of us and have port Fousha which services about 100% of the deep water energy industry out in the Gulf. So we have people from the never flooded. So you run into that roadblock, right? And how do you communicate with that older generation who thinks that the structure they're in is never gonna go anywhere and they're safe no matter what the category the storm is. All the way to people, you know, what I will say my age and a little bit younger who are just in the family roles, right? I'm 38. The first hurricane I remember was Hurricane Andrew back in the early 90s. And I remember riding out with my parents with the mattress over my head with my brother under the kitchen table, right? So you have these first-time folks who have never really experienced a catastrophic storm. We don't remember the Betsy's of the world. We remember Andrew and even Katrina for us in LaFouche Parish was not that big of a deal. So wind event, we had a little bit of damage but was not nearly with New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast saw. So you fast forward to the hurricane season of 2020, right? We were in that cone of error seven different times. I signed seven different emergency declarations for those different events. And each time the storm would either jog left or right, a little bit of wind, a little bit of water in the lower part of the Parish, outside of a hurricane protection system, you know, LA Highway 1, which goes all the way to Port Fuchon is an un-elevated highway for now for the majority of it. So we would shut down the roadway, the storm would go east or west and then nothing would really happen, right? So we fast forward to the hurricane season of 2021 and here comes Hurricane Iva, right? We went from what we thought was gonna be a category two, maybe a category three storm, maybe a little bit east of us or a little bit west of us was setting up to look like another hurricane, Andrew. People were not really that worried about it. And I never forget, you know, it was slated to hit Saturday and the Sunday, they backed up the forecast where it was gonna be Sunday and the Monday. And I'm in our emergency operation center and one of the folks come find me and they said, look, the weather service is on the phone for you. It's about 3.30 in the afternoon on Friday or regular call with the weather service is supposed to be about four o'clock with the governor's office and the GOSEP staff up in Baton Rouge. And Megan's on the phone, she said, look, Archie, I just wanna let you know don't be surprised on the four o'clock call. We're gonna upgrade this thing to a category four. It's gonna hit you dead in the mouth at Port Fuchon. Category five is not out of the realm of possibility. You know, do what you have to do before the four o'clock call. And I can remember hanging up the phone and looking at our emergency operations director and going, pull every trigger we got, I'll be back in about 10 minutes. And I remember walking out in the back and having a complete meltdown about how we were gonna keep people safe, how we were gonna communicate that, knowing that a lot of people were caught in those two options, right? They either survived Betsy or they haven't seen anything like this shit and they weren't gonna leave. And we did the best we could. We got a lot of people out. We still had probably about 40% of the population stay for the hurricane though. And then dealing with the aftermath of what had happened. So, you know, communicating that uncertainty to those two different groups and everybody in the middle gets really tough. You have people that are gonna leave no matter if it's a tropical storm or not. And you can have those diehards, including my father who were never gonna leave no matter what. And it's tough when you don't really know what the storm's gonna do. When you cried wolf maybe a few times and that you were in that cone of errand and it goes east for west and people go, it's gonna shift course again. So, you know, in that waning hour, that Friday afternoon, if you go back and look at our social media pages, there were a lot of videos for me saying, look guys, this is not a drill. You need to get out while we are very protected with levee systems and pumps. This could be the catastrophic event that we've always worried about. And luckily for us, you know, as bad as Ida was, it was not really a water event or levees hailed or pump stations worked. It was more of a wind event. We had some catastrophic wind damage but the water was not there and the death pole was zero for us very luckily. Had a lot of people in shelters, a lot of people who evacuated but we still had a ton of people on the ground. And it's a tough message to get across people when they're not used to seeing that sort of thing. Great, thank you Archie. Jeff, do you have anything you'd like to add on uncertainty before we move on? It's exactly what he said. When someone picks up the call from the National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center and said this is going to happen, that somewhat helps remove that uncertainty. And you can tell by the language ramp up both by the National Weather Service and by us, emergency managers, the seriousness of the situation. So there becomes a point where we're confident enough to say this is going to happen. And we can come out with some very strongly worded messaging and news conferences and stuff like that to hopefully get people to listen. Okay, great. Moving on to the next question, Jeff. Both of you have actually already mentioned it sort of the consideration of certain costs or impacts if you pull the trigger or not. And could you just share a few more thoughts on what are these barriers or costs? Do you have pre-event through community meetings and the like where you have certain thresholds that you feel that it's at the right time to pull the trigger and spend money for evacuations? Like you said, putting all those buses into motion. Jeff, how do you deal with that? The barriers or the costs? And also, again, the false alerts and misalerts, this whole fatigue issue. Is that always in the back of your mind or at what point does the current event really take over and you push those things aside? I mean, for us, our stance is there is no cost for life. So we're gonna do what we need to do and the cost of secondary. And there's obviously things that are done to help make us whole in the end. False alarms and all that are more of a credibility challenge for us, right? So you go out there and you say, hey, evacuate and nothing happens. And people sort of won't listen. Evacuation is like a swinging pendulum. It goes from everybody's leaving because they just went through something horrible to, oh, that wasn't that bad. So I'm not leaving again. And so we're never in this happy medium of anything. We're always kind of at one extreme or the other, but there's one saying that I'll never forget actually Bill Reed, the former director of Hurricanes Center said is if you live on the Gulf Coast, you have to be willing to evacuate and have absolutely nothing happen. And that's the fairest evacuation advice I can give to anybody here is, you're gonna have to leave sometimes and nothing's gonna happen. And you have to do it every time because that one time you don't is when this something bad might happen. Thanks, Jeff. Archie, would you like to add anything? Yeah, I'm kind of like Jeff. There is no cost that's too great to get people out. I think what we run into sometimes and we started on Hurricane Ida, right? Where the hurricane intensified on us so quick that we ran into the situation was can we get people out quick enough, right? We can mobilize our school buses. We can call in some national guard and some folks to actually drive them and get them to that mega-shelter up in Monroe or Alexandria, but do we have enough time? Is that HR too close and do we run the risk of people being stuck somewhere or not getting able to get on those buses and then we have a whole bunch of people stuck in a school gymnasium somewhere. So that's not a huge issue for us and we've made contingencies for that. I think the state of Louisiana made some contingencies now where it's easier to put people up in a hotel room somewhere than it is sometimes to get them to a shelter either pre or post-storm. So those non-congregate sheltering options are out there, which helps us in the long run. But that, again, Jeff hit it on the head that uncertainty factor is what kills us in a lot of times is you've cried wolf and then you have populations in some cases that are low to moderate income or don't have the means and they won't leave for nothing, right? They have to know something's coming either get on one of our buses and nobody really wants to go to those mega shelters anymore. So can you stay with family and friends? Do we have the resources to get a hotel room somewhere? And if you don't, then people just stay home and run the risk. And that's what gets us caught in those situations a lot of times. So let's continue with you, Archie. What special actions or planning do you do to deal with, I'll call environmental equity, knowing that you have certain populations that are more vulnerable to their exposure or their lower income? Or how do you handle those situations both in planning and in real time? Yeah, so from a planning standpoint, a lot of our stuff is built around these eight hours, right? When the storm enters the Gulf, you start that clock and you take backwards until you hit landfall, right? So our planning and our evacuations are based on proximity to the coast. And in a lot of cases, as you get deeper into our parish and as you get deeper into I think all of coastal Louisiana, those incomes somewhat change, right? The lower income people a little bit further south, while there's just some wealth down there, you have a higher poverty level down there in a lot of cases and you do as you get away from the water, mostly because those people are still all in gas dependent, job related or they're in the seafood industry or something like that. And those aren't always the best paying gigs around, right? So we plan those things out in the way where we start from the bottom and work our way up. And a lot of cases, when we call that first evacuation outside of the hurricane protection system, there's a very small community down there. So we know they're gonna shift up. A lot of times that first run, they go to family and friends in the upper part of, what I will call the upper part of South Lafuge or the upper part of the coast. And then they'll slowly migrate up based on that evacuation. A lot of cases, we try to work them in the shelter first. We have a couple of schools that are category four rated that have generators that we know we can keep people in for a few days if we have to and bring in the rent crossed and other non-profits who will take care of them and provide food. And as long as they have some medicine and a book to read, then they're pretty okay at that point because they have power, they have a bathroom. It's just a matter of staying comfortable that you can get back, get back home and see what the damage looks like. And then in some cases, we've actually, like I said, we've used that non-congregate option and actually use some hotel room stays. We only had a few people, depending on the intensity of the storm like Hurricane Zeta at the end of 2020. But when you have a mass incident like Hurricane Ida or you talk about Ian or Harvey, especially in Texas with the flooding, you just got to get people out of there, right? You're putting them on buses. You're using every available opportunity that you have of the state, regardless of means to get them to that mega shelter and get them out because you know that's the safest place that they could go. Okay, thanks Archie. Jeff, do you have anything you'd like to add regarding environmental equity and planning and taking action? Yeah, we spend a lot of time doing presentations and working with local leaders, especially church leaders in areas to make sure people, if they don't have transportation to sign up with 211. So we know that we have to go to this address and pick these folks up. And that has worked relatively well, except the only problem here in Texas is you have to redo it every year. So you have to sign up every year and getting that word out and everything like that. One of the biggest challenges I think sometimes we face here is people think they have to drive 500 miles to get out of the hurricane. And evacuation is just to get you out of the seawater. It's not to get you out of the wind and all that. And so you could drive 20, 30 miles and be perfectly fine. Yeah, it's not gonna be nice and great, but you're gonna be safe. You're not gonna drown in the seawater. And I think that's something that we don't push enough here is just getting out of that seawater. You can go to family and friends that are just a little bit inland. That takes that financial burden a little bit off. You don't have to go get a hotel room in another city in Dallas or San Antonio or something like that. It's just to get you out of that seawater. But we spend a lot of time, we do a lot of education. I actually have our, this is our evacuation zip code zone map magnet. So we pass these out at all kinds of things. So if you don't know if you're ABC or whatever, you know your zip code and that kind of tells you and we pass that out and people take it. But it kind of seems like for all of the information we do during the year, no one really pays attention to this until it's happening, right? And I think you see that with a lot of the hazards. And there's this mindset of kind of like what Archie mentioned, oh, it's gonna miss us. It's gonna go over here or it's gonna go over there. It's not gonna hit us or it's not gonna be that bad. And that mindset really got us with Ike out on the Bollower Peninsula. People did not leave and 900 people had to be airlifted off the Bollower as a storm surge was coming in. And so, you know, that lesson was learned for a lot of people, unfortunately. And I think if you look right now where we're at here locally, we're still on that pendulum of, a lot of people are going to try to leave because they remember Ike and they remember Harvey. Now they're gonna leave for Harvey for the wrong reason, right? Because that was a rainfall event and they flooded. And so I think for the next time we have to do this, we have to be paired for a very large evacuation, something similar to Rita, and probably have our plans and our comfortable plans and all that very well in place for when that time comes. And that's just a function of kind of the climate we're in right now with what we've been dealt with just in the recent past. Okay, thanks, Jeff. If we have maybe time for one more question for Archie. I think we heard earlier, Archie, from Jeff maybe before he got here, sounded to me like high on his wishlist would be a longer lead weather forecast from the Weather Service. How about you? What's sort of the top of your wish list to make your job and making these decisions easier or more productive for you? I don't think these decisions are ever easy, right? Whether we had another 15 or 16 hours or we had 15 or 16 hours less, right? The call to tell somebody that they have to leave everything behind and you're not sure what they're coming home to is probably one of the most difficult things you will ever have to do beyond losing a family member, I think, right? It's a tough scenario for us. I think the longer the lead times, the more people get amped up, the more they sit in their easy chairs and they're watching the local news media, weather guys who do a great job running this discounting what they do, but sometimes they tend to amp it up for ratings instead of just giving you what you need to know. And I think that's where people like Dr. King Graham and the Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service is that we get to talk to you, lend us a little bit more than the weather channels of the group, right? And again, nothing against those meteorologists, but they're TV show guys, they're not trying to give us the best available data always. So the longer lead times, I think would help us from a planning aspect because that H hour would back up a little bit, right? You're making decisions based on H hour 120 versus H hour 50. And those things can sometimes help, but again, the longer lead time, the more that system can stray. So you sometimes worry that, well, if you did have another couple of days, does that track shift and then you cried wolf again? And people tend not to believe you and you lose that credibility. I think the top of our wish list would be just not to have another storm and never have to worry about these things again, but that's a conversation between us and God. I don't know that those are gonna work out too well, but look, the emergency management profession is never easy and we have to trust our guts a lot of times. We have to trust the fact that our plans are in place and we've, a lot of us have done this before, right? Like I said, I remember Hurricane Andrew, but since 2011, I've been through multiple storms. Unfortunately for me, I had the worst one that we've ever seen here in LaFouche was under my watch as an elected official, but the team that we work with has been here for decades. So it made decision-making and planning a little bit easier because we've run these drills, we've run these table tops for many years. So we knew what we were getting into, but the effects are always different. Whether it's wind versus water or water versus wind, make sure response challenges and your planning just that much more different. So let's just hope we don't see any more storms along the Gulf Coast or anywhere for a very long time and none of us have to worry about making these decisions, right? Good way to end the discussion. Please join me in thanking our excellent pretend chef and our team.