damage resulted, officials would estimate. Once I completed the damage assessment of my own home in Westlake Village, which got a good shake but came out of the temblor largely unscathed, I headed into the downtown Los Angeles offices of Caltrans just as the reports were streaming in about severe damage on Los Angeles are freeways. The Traffic Management Center was a beehive of activity. Staffed by Caltrans traffic managers and the California Highway Patrol, the TMC was the “nerve center” of the L.A. freeway system, operating 24/7, providing real-time traffic information to the news media and the public. On this day, as you can imagine, is was packed with people manning phones, video monitors and radio dispatches. Detours were being developed, and changed, and traffic routing information broadcast out of the center, over and over, as conditions changed. That’s how it is in a crisis. In an instant, something bad happens, your life as you know it is flipped upside-down, and you need to act quickly and decisively while under extraordinary stress. For police, firefighters, medical professionals, the military and other first-responders, this is what they train for, year after year. Worst-case scenarios. Disasters. Riots. Floods. You name it, they’ve probably had some training on it and what to do. The world is getting a fresh introduction into this topic with the current COVID-19 pandemic, a Black Swan that no one saw coming, except that we did. Experts had warned of something like this and called for us to be prepared. Some did. Most did not. No matter, when the house is on fire is not the time to talk about fire prevention. You put out the fire. That’s how it is with every crisis. You may 10
Jeffrey C. Bliss (right) was on hand for a tour held May 10, 2019 on the campus of California State University, Long Beach for Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell (D-Long Beach). The tour was of the Caltrans-industry Joint Training & Certification Program, which is conducted on the campus of Cal State Long Beach and also San Jose State University. Also pictured, from left: Dr. Forouzan Golshani, Dean, College of Engineering; Dr. Shadi Saadeh, CSULB engineering professor and JTCP manager; and Caltrans State Materials Engineer Dan Speer. Jeremy Peterson-Self, the Caltrans JTCP program manager, is in the background at left pointing out features of the construction materials lab to Assemblyman O’Donnell.
not have trained on these exact circumstances, but there are parallels with other fast-moving emergencies that can swamp our ability to comprehend them and take decisive action to protect ourselves, our communities and our businesses. In a crisis management plan the priority is protecting human life and property, hopefully through preparation, and as a crisis unfolds, the proper deployment of resources to contend with the crisis. Effective internal communication is an important part of any crisis management plan. In fact, police and fire departments have a well-known and proven system known as the “Incident Command” structure that is built around effective communication and deployment of people and materiel. The crisis communication plan, however,
deals primarily with communicating to external constituents, such as the community, news media, regulators, stakeholders and others. In the case of the Northridge earthquake, the most iconic images of the disaster were those of the damage wrought to several busy freeways in Los Angeles. As I wrote later for an internal Caltrans employee publication: “Perhaps the most visible sign of the devastation—an image the news media transmitted around the world—was that of quake-damaged freeways. On Interstate 5 near Santa Clarita, towering overpasses were severed cleanly as if by a giant surgeon’s scalpel. Yawning gaps punctuated the nearby Antelope Valley Freeway. Close to the earthquake’s epicenter, the Simi Valley Freeway sagged [ Continued on page 12 ]
California Asphalt Magazine • 2020 Special Emergency Response Issue