Workshop Info

The workshop will include the following breakout rooms:

The Florida Catastrophic Planning (FLCP) project, a joint effort between the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Florida Division of Emergency Management, uses a scenario-based planning process.

Scenario-Based Planning

The FLCP planning process is driven by a planning scenario known as Hurricane Ono. In this approach, a plausible, but fictional, event and its consequences are used to develop core concepts and coordinate existing ones. This planning process promotes communication and builds stronger relationships among federal, state, local, and tribal agencies and non-governmental organizations that are critical in an effective unified response and recovery.

The Hurricane Ono Scenario

After a winter of drought conditions and a summer during which several lingering tropical depressions have saturated central and southern Florida, the level of Lake Okeechobee has reached eighteen feet.

Hurricane Ono, a large Category 5 hurricane, makes landfall at 11 a.m. EDT on Monday, September 10, just north of Fort Lauderdale. The storm travels northwest across the state, maintaining Category 4 strength as it grazes the southwest reaches of Lake Okeechobee. The surge on the lake causes a breach of Reach 2 of the Herbert Hoover Dike (HHD) in the vicinity of Clewiston. Tornadoes spawned by the hurricane also touch down on the dike, causing breaches in Reaches 1B and 1C near the towns of Pahokee and Belle Glade. Wind and flood control actions also cause the S80 structure on the St. Lucie Canal to fail. Ono continues across the state and, after spending 36 hours over land, exits into the Gulf of Mexico at Pinellas County.

Once over the Gulf, Ono regains strength, turns north, and makes a second landfall as a Category 4 hurricane on the Gulf coast of Alabama, between Mobile and Pensacola, before deteriorating rapidly into a tropical storm.

Consequences

Preliminary models show that Ono would prompt an evacuation of nearly 3 million residents, put most of South Florida under 1–4+ feet of water for weeks, destroy the homes of more than 70 percent of the population, leave six million people without electricity; and cripple the state’s transportation infrastructure. The expected impacts of Hurricane Ono are described in more detail in the Consequence Projections documents linked below.

While planning discussions are applicable to a range of catastrophic events, Hurricane Ono and the projected consequences establish the necessary capacity of response and recovery functions. Consequence projections also illustrate the catastrophic scenario and highlight the situational complexities that should be considered during planning. For example, if research and analysis indicate that a segment of the population in the area of impact are projected to require post-storm evacuation assistance, the plan must address the personnel, resource, transportation, triage, staging, jurisdictional, legal, and geographic challenges that such a demand would present.

Workshops

Both the planning workshops and the individual county planners providing direct technical assistance build off of each other, sharing the common framework established by the catastrophic scenario and projected consequences. These workshops provide a venue for discussing planning issues, allowing a range of emergency management personnel—including local, tribal, state, federal, volunteer, and private industry—to participate in the planning. The workshops are framed by the Hurricane Ono scenario. Since they are not exercises, but rather planning workshops, all of the information regarding the Hurricane Ono scenario and consequence projections are presented up front so the information is readily available for discussion and reference as needed. Participants at all levels of government help to solve the planning challenges presented by the scenario, and the operational knowledge and experience captured make the resulting plans more viable.

Five major workshops have been held thus far:

• The November 2006 Phase 1 Kickoff Workshop in West Palm Beach, Florida, allowed representatives from each of the Lake Okeechobee counties to receive technical assistance that focused on direct HHD failure impacts and to list and prioritize actions for the development or enhancement of their county CEMP HHD annexes.
• The February 2007 Regional Planning Workshop in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, joined the two phases of the FLCP Project with the introduction of the Hurricane Ono scenario. It focused on local capabilities and needs and initiated development of decision matrices.
• The April 2007 State Planning Workshop in Tallahassee, Florida, allowed participants to discuss state-level concerns from previous workshops, identify state capabilities and needs, and continue development of decision matrices.
• The June 2007 Regional Planning Workshop, hosted by the Miami-Dade Office of Emergency Management, revisited issues of local importance and provided an opportunity to refine decision matrices.
• The November 2007 State-Federal Integration Workshop focused on coordination across these levels of government in planning to address identified gaps and challenges.