28 Tornadoes in One Day? Illinois Plans for Such a Scenario
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“We cannot wait for severe weather to begin the discussion about our response to and recovery from an incident,” Cook County’s homeland security executive director says.
How would Illinois respond if a series of severe storms spawned 28 tornadoes, in the middle of a heat wave, all on a single day? Operation Power Play, a statewide emergency exercise, intends to find out.
In early April, 11 tornadoes—including the biggest to hit the Chicago area since 1990—devastated the small towns of Fairdale and Rochelle, and another outbreak of bad weather Memorial Day weekend caused more than $80 million in flood damage in Texas.
Upwards of 30 state, county, municipal and private agencies across more than 100 communities in Illinois will participate in the operation citing increased “severe weather events.”
“We cannot wait for severe weather to begin the discussion about our response to and recovery from an incident,” Michael Masters, Cook County Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management executive director, said in a statement. “We need to build these partnerships and run through multiple scenarios so we are adequately prepared to protect the residents in our jurisdictions.”
Enhancing public-private partnerships is one of the operational objectives, along with testing multi-agency disaster communications and coordination and gauging responses to low-probability, high-risk scenarios.
While Operation Power Play will span multiple locations, the primary site is Cook County’s new Emergency Operations Center—staffed by host Commonwealth Edison. Illinois’ largest electric utility in the nation’s second-largest county, ComEd is in charge of coordinating all response for Friday’s exercise.
ComEd increased EOC staffing in early April to prepare for severe weather and introduced a mobile app for smartphones so customers can report power outages and manage their accounts.
“The recent devastating tornado in Fairdale reminds us that weather is becoming more severe and unpredictable, underscoring the need to better understand how we work together to restore critical services following an extreme weather event,” Anne Pramaggiore, ComEd president and CEO, said in the announcement. “ComEd has already implemented more than 100 storm process enhancements made since 2012 to further improve storm restoration and recovery for our customers.”
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