Hennepin’s disaster preparedness pays off in tragic bridge collapse
“A bridge in America just shouldn’t fall down,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) in the wake of the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis. But on Aug. 1, fall one did, and in the immediate aftermath Hennepin County officials shared the worldwide spotlight with their colleagues in Minneapolis, the county seat.
Thirteen people died and scores more were injured in the incident. The last body of an unaccounted-for missing person was recovered more than two weeks after the tragedy.
Minneapolis police took the lead as incident commanders of the emergency response. However, at the city’s request, Hennepin County officials played a major role in rescue and recovery operations — and more.
Photo courtesy of Hennepin County, Minn.
Divers search for victims of the I-35 bridge collapse. Recovery operations continued in the Mississippi River for weeks after the bridge collapse in Minneapolis.
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“We’ve taken emergency preparedness and training for disaster very seriously, and it sure paid off here,” said Randy Johnson, chairman of the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners. “It was heartwarming and chilling to see so many people come together so quickly. There were true heroes on August first who put themselves at great risk in order to rescue others.”
Even before 9/11, Hennepin County had been training with its neighboring counties and cities to mount a coordinated disaster response. It embraced a state version of the National Incident Management System (NIMS) several years ago, which outlines roles and responsibilities across agencies and jurisdictions in emergencies. Neighboring Ramsey, Dakota and Anoka counties, among others, also responded to the incident.
A critical link in the regional response was the metropolitan area’s 800-megaHertz (mHz) emergency communication system, in place since 2002, interconnecting seven counties’ emergency radios.
“Our most important role was what we did before the incident,” Johnson said of the county board: “bite the bullet and pay for the 800-mHz, interoperable radios about seven years ago and lead our metro partners to do the same thing.” Using the system, sheriff’s deputies could talk with doctors at the county hospital, city paramedics in ambulances, state police officers on foot and federal responders, among others.
“It paid off big-time,” said Tim Turnbull, the county’s director of emergency management. “I just can’t imagine how we would have handled this kind of an event with as many people involved without an 800-mHz system.”
Among those using the radio system were the Sheriff’s Department’s dive and water rescue team, who were responsible for plucking survivors from the river and collapsed bridge deck, and recovering bodies from the murky Mississippi.
Sheriff Rick Stanek and Andrew Baker, M.D., the county’s chief medical examiner, were perhaps the most ubiquitous “faces of county government” during much of the response. Dr. Baker’s staff performed autopsies to determine the victims’ causes death and signed death certificates. Both men were frequently in front of the international news media that converged on Minneapolis as the story unfolded.
Within minutes of the collapse, Stanek, who had just taken office seven months earlier, was in a boat — a participant in what, in his words, would become a “Noah’s Ark of responding state, federal and local agencies.”
Stanek and Baker might be considered “usual suspect” first responders — from law enforcement and medicine — whom one would expect to be in the forefront. But they weren’t the only county personnel thrust into action.
“Within an hour or so of the collapse, traffic was re-routed and signals re-calibrated on county roads that immediately would have to carry much more traffic,” Johnson said. Within a week, Hennepin’s transportation department had inspected 140 bridges on the county’s road system and declared them “safe,” according to Transportation Director Jim Grube.
County public affairs staff assisted with the “crush” of international news media and advised county officials on communications strategies. It was a county public hospital, a level-one trauma center, which treated many of the injured. Counselors from the county’s mental health department helped survivors deal with emotional fallout from the traumatic event.
Mental health counseling for victims and staff
“We had been working on a (behavioral health) disaster response preparedness plan for the last year, but we were probably a month away from actually finalizing the plan and getting it ready to implement,” said Jamie Halpern, area manager for children’s health services and incident commander for the county’s behavioral health response. Despite the plan’s draft status, Halpern’s emergency support function had “an organizational model” to help set up its response team.
“It was the mutual conclusion of everybody that the county had the deepest resources in terms of staff, in terms of the ability to draw from our contract services network if we needed,” Halpern explained, “so we were asked to take the lead role on mental health response to the disaster.” Early on, this included staffing a family assistance center the city set up for families of the missing, to provide “psychological first-aid.”
The children rescued from the school bus — now so iconic of the disaster — that precariously came to rest near a burning truck, were among those counseled by county mental health staff. This posed special challenges, because many of the children and their parents, who were also counseled, are immigrants whose primary language is not English.
“When the request was made to provide counseling assistance, part of the request was, ‘Can we find people who are familiar with East African cultures, that have Somali language capabilities, that have Spanish language capabilities?’” Halpern recalled. County staff and volunteers from local nonprofits and private mental health facilities met those needs.
For survivors and their families “the initial reaction is shock,” said Susan Littrell, a social work unit supervisor with the county’s mental health center. “As time goes on, people need a chance to tell their story and validate their experiences.” That also applies to county staff, such as the first responders who worked long hours in dangerous, stressful conditions for days on end.
The day Dr. Baker spoke with County News, he and his staff had just finished a debriefing session with a county mental health facilitator. “Everybody got a chance to vent things to share some emotions — to talk about their coping skills, to describe what it was like personally for them to go through this, and that’s an incredibly important thing,” Dr. Baker said.
“When you go through events like this, you bottle up and internalize a lot of stress. If you don’t come up with healthy ways to get rid of that stress, it will come back to bite you in a very bad way at a very inopportune moment.”
Communications ‘not discretionary’
Communications and media relations professionals from the county’s public affairs office were also key players, helping county staff deal with the “overwhelming” media interest in the story.
Public Affairs Director Carolyn Marinan, a former reporter herself, knows the media is not an “end” but a “means” to getting vital information to a concerned public. “It’s essential to the success in anything and especially in a crisis,” she said. “Because when there’s no information people will create their own if there is a void.”
Dealing with unrelenting requests from reporters was only a part of her and her staff’s duties. As part of the incident management team, her office also counseled county officials and prepared them to deal with the media.
Public Affairs set up a special Web page for the medical examiner’s office, where the public and the media could get the latest updates on the recovery and identification of victims’ bodies. This and other efforts gave Dr. Baker “a newfound respect” for Marinan’s public affairs group.
“I never really imagined before this event what they would be capable of doing for the medical examiner,” Dr. Baker said. “But there were very helpful in helping me get information out to the press, getting me ready for my first press briefing, which I had never done before in my life. Believe me, they don’t teach in medical school how to do a press briefing.”
In a crisis response, Marinan said communications expertise is “not discretionary.” However, she was quick to add, “I’m not equating our job to the people who are on the ground trying to save lives and rescue people. I’m not the one who’s going to put on the wetsuit, but I’m part of that team that helps, hopefully, the inside run smoothly so that the people on the frontlines can do their jobs.”
Key to the success of the county’s response, officials agree, is the time invested in training together — across departmental lines of all who would have a role in responding to a crisis.
Turnbull said, “One of the things that I was very pleased with was that as the police resources and the fire resources from Minneapolis immediately were directed to the scene, a lot of the suburban communities with the training that we’ve had, they stated to backfill.
“They got called up, but they don’t go to the scene, they go to the fire stations that are empty because of the Minneapolis firefighters going to the scene.”
Commissioner Johnson concluded: You can’t over-prepare for emergencies like this one, and that even the best response can be improved upon. “Our citizens look to local governments to be ready. That is our job; it’s central to public safety and public health. We will learn from our mistakes and glitches; but for the most part, we were ready to respond.”
Two county officials uniquely qualified for disaster response
Photo courtesy of Hennepin County, Minn.
Hennepin County’s Chief Medical Examiner Andrew Baker, M.D. (left at microphones) and Sheriff Rick Stanek (r) were often the face of the county’s response to the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis.
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Aug. 1 was to have been much like any other day for Rick Stanek, Hennepin County, Minn.’s sheriff of just seven months. It was book-ended with meetings: Rotary Club at 6 a.m.; flipping burgers at a “thank you” cookout for volunteer mounted patrol officers at 6 p.m.
At 6:10 p.m., he was only half way to his meeting in Medina, a city about 20 miles from Minneapolis, when he heard the news on the radio. The I-35W bridge had collapsed into the Mississippi River.
Minutes later — dressed in “a very nice suit and tie” — he would be on the river helping to coordinate the disaster response with the whole world watching.
A daunting task for the new sheriff in town? Hardly. While new to his current job, Stanek was more than up to the task. Before taking office in January 2007, he spent 23 years as a Minneapolis cop, served 10 years in the State Legislature and had been the Minnesota’s commissioner of public safety and director of homeland security.
Because of his varied experiences and “personal relationships,” Stark was uniquely positioned to help lead a multi-jurisdictional response.
“I was fortunate enough to know a number of the first responders, or the leaders or commanders of these different agencies on a first-name basis,” Stanek said — because of his previous public safety and legislative positions.
Stark and Andrew Baker, M.D., the county’s chief medical examiner, both bring distinguished resumes of relevant experience to their jobs. In the weeks that followed the bridge collapse, they would become the face of the county’s response to the tragedy as they briefed the international news media.
As an Air Force forensic pathologist, Dr. Baker previously helped identify victims of the U.S.S. Cole explosion and the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon. In 1999, he spent time in Kosovo, Serbia doing crime scene investigations and autopsies to document evidence of war crimes and genocide. More recently, he aided in the response to Hurricane Katrina.
“The magnitude of what happened here was not as large, say, as a 9/11 attack or genocide in another country,” Dr. Baker said, “but the funny thing is that the emotions that immediately come to the surface are exactly the same.”
The proximity of one of his offices to the bridge site — a few blocks away — made it difficult to “detach from emotionally or physically.” Dr. Baker said half of his 40-plus employees “probably used to drive back and forth on that bridge every day to work.”
With the recovery of the known-missing concluded, he said his office, will have a limited but ongoing role. “For example, the National Transportation Safety Board [NTSB] is going to want to assess things like survivability and survival factors,” the medical examiner said. The causes of death provide data about whether victims, under different circumstances, could have survived.
Dr. Baker explained that some of victims died instantly of their blunt force injuries, which were “unsurvivable,” whether they went into the water or not. For those whose cars caved in or folded, if the car had folded a different way, they might have lived.
“The things that medical examiners can tell you about how people die are responsible for things like air bags, and improvement in seatbelts and automotive design.”
For both men, the bridge disaster only reinforced their belief in the value of advance training and investing in the right resources. “I can’t emphasize enough being able to talk directly with a doctor at Hennepin County Medical Center when you’re out on the bridge tending to a victim,” Stanek said, which was possible using the region’s 800-mHz, interoperable communications system.
“You couldn’t do that 10 years ago or even six years ago in New York,” he added. “And that kept our folks safe. It coordinated our response, and that goes to the County Board and their investment — and their foresight to invest in infrastructure.
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