VITEMA serves as center of storm response

ST. THOMAS — Virgin Islands Territorial Emergency Management Agency Director Mark Walters, working on no sleep, was on a conference call with Gov. John deJongh Jr. and his cabinet when he saw the canopy fly off the Domino Gas Station across the street and land on a car.

It was a little after 10 a.m., and it was going to be a long day.

The lobby of VITEMA’s St. Thomas headquarters was filled Monday morning with people looking to get hurricane curfew passes. From Cost-U-Less to the V.I. Justice Department, everyone seemed to have someone who needed to be on the street Monday night.

“Every time we have an incident, you have this mad rush to the door,” Walters said.

“In the middle of an operation, it’s not fair to take time from a staff person who could be contributing to the operation to do curfew passes,” he said.

The door to VITEMA’s lobby opened and closed so many times Monday morning that it broke and flapped open during wind gusts. Another door, which required a thumbprint to open, separated the disorder in the lobby from the interior of the building, where more than 50 federal employees and dozens of V.I. officials coordinated the government’s response to Hurricane Earl.

VITEMA’s emergency operations center — a windowless room with dozens of computer terminals and two oversize high-definition screens displaying weather updates — was mission control.

About two dozen people, representing diverse local and federal government entities, were split into four teams to address the storm — operations, logistics, planning and finance.

Emergency Operations Center Director Joseph Hodge on Monday morning asked each team what, if any, deficiencies they found in their operations and assigned someone to fix the problem.

The agencies worked under the National Incident Management System — a set of standard operating procedures developed during the 1970s California wildfires to allow local, state and federal authorities to sync up in a disaster situation.

“One of the key things is building relationships,” Walters said. “Every-one here now is getting the opportunity to work with each other.”

Monday afternoon, Hurricane Earl finally took the northward turn forecasters had been predicting for three days. At 3 p.m., the eye of the storm passed about 65 miles from St. Thomas at its closest point. Earl was a Category 3 storm at the time, with sustained winds of 125 mph. It grew to a Category 4, with sustained winds of 135 mph, by 5 p.m., when it was about 70 miles from St. Thomas.

In an interview just after the 6 p.m. curfew went into effect, Walters seemed to relax for the first time all day.

“When people first started to experience the gusts, they were really excited,” he said. “Now people are settled in, off the roads, and it’s a lot more manageable.”

Local government officials ate dinner at their terminals, joking and chatting. Occasionally, 911 operators relayed reports of downed trees and dangling power lines, and government officials recorded them in a software system. But crews with the V.I. Water and Power Authority and the Public Works Department had been taken off the road just after curfew due to high winds, and there was little to do but settle in and wait for daybreak.

Department of Planning and Natural Resources Enforcement Division Director Austin Callwood — who led the operations portion of the government response — said that Hurricane Earl, which brought only minor damage, was a valuable training tool.

“This is probably as good an exercise as you can get with it being real,” Callwood said. “You don’t have the real threat of loss of life — unless someone did something stupid.”

Walters said that federal officials will stay on St. Thomas until he is certain that Tropical Storm Fiona — which was projected late Monday to pass 150 miles from St. Thomas on Wednesday afternoon — is not a threat to the territory and Hurricane Earl is well out of range.

VITEMA’s emergency operations center was activated on St. Croix, but it experienced electrical problems Monday morning when the power went out.

A generator started, but then it stopped working. That forced the agency to move its morning meeting with emergency service coordinators to the Port Authority conference room in Rohlsen Airport, said VITEMA Assistant Director Jacqueline Heyliger.

The generator was repaired, and the emergency operations center was moved back to VITEMA by early Monday afternoon.

Emergency activation on St. Croix was partial Monday, with essential agencies — including the V.I. Police Department, the V.I. Fire Service, the V.I. Health Department and the V.I. Human Services Department — activated. Non-government agencies such as the American Red Cross of the Virgin Islands, also participated.

Staff writer Joy Blackburn contributed to this report.

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