In the wake of the Wood River Valley's prolonged power outage on Dec. 24 and 25, emergency services personnel, along with elected officials from Blaine County and its incorporated cities, are using the event as an opportunity to find ways of improving their response during similar situations.
"It went fairly smooth, all things considered," said Ketchum City Council President Baird Gourlay, who manned phones at Ketchum City Hall for about five hours on Christmas Day.
Gourlay said about a dozen people called Ketchum City Hall, which has a backup generator to power its land lines, and another 25 to 30 came into the building after Gourlay put a sign on the door welcoming questions.
Gourlay was working in conjunction with an emergency operations center established at the Blaine County Public Safety Facility in Hailey. Blaine County Sheriff Walt Femling said that once officials realized early Friday morning that the power outage would last until later in the day, he designated a room at the facility as the center, which was manned by officials and personnel from around the county.
Wood River Fire & Rescue Chief Bart Lassman said the center is activated "when we have the potential for something to go big." In this case, the center was used mostly to field phone calls that were flooding the county's emergency dispatchers.
"The abuse of the 911 system is an everyday issue for us," said Lassman, who noted that the vast majority of the calls received by the emergency dispatch center were not actual emergencies. "We got a call from someone wondering when the lifts on the mountain were going to begin running. In the case of a power outage, people need to call Idaho Power instead taxing our 911 system."
Lassman said the majority of the calls coming into the center were the result of the activation of the county's reverse 911 program, called Swiftreach, which is used to call residents that have registered with the program and leave informational messages and updates on the unfolding situation.
Lassman said the Swiftreach message was to let residents know that Idaho Power would be gradually turning the electricity back on grid by grid, and that people could help the transition by not turning on non-essential power to prevent a spike in demand that might cause the system to fail again.
However, with many land lines not working, answering machines were not able to record the message, leaving it up to residents to use their caller ID to return the calls to the center.
Lassman said that out of the 12,000 people the program tried to call, 4,000 actually received the message.
"This was the first time Swiftreach had been used and we will review results carefully because of the reports that it didn't reach some people," said County Commissioner Tom Bowman, who helped man the phones at the center throughout the morning and early afternoon.
Bowman said communicating with the public was made more difficult given the fact that cell-phone service wasn't working properly in the valley and that the lack of power made it impossible to post or read any emergency messages online.
Had the power outage lasted longer, the county was in a position to take more drastic measures.
Femling said members of the Red Cross in Boise were in Hailey on standby, ready to transport residents by school bus to Carey High School, which had its power restored early in the day Friday. Femling said the plan would have provided people with beds, blankets and meals had the blackout lasted another night.
Femling said this situation highlighted the need for backup generators at more local facilities, ideally schools in Ketchum and Hailey.
Gourlay echoed that sentiment and also said the city could use its two electronic signboards to help provide emergency announcements to the public.
Furthermore, Lassman said emergency communications could be improved if more residents registered their cell-phone numbers with the Swiftreach program, which can be found at blainecounty911.org.
"Swiftreach is an important component. But importantly, if only a few people have information, they need to go door-to-door to spread word because a lot of people might not be getting calls," Lassman said. "Everyone needs to work within their own neighborhoods. We can't depend on governmental entities 100 percent."
Femling also said that while the cities and county will continue to do everything in their power to help people, residents need to take some responsibility about sheltering at their own homes, including stocking up on water, food and firewood.
Blaine County Commission Chairman Larry Schoen said county officials would be discussing the issues that resulted from this event with representatives from Idaho Power at a commissioners meeting on Tuesday, Jan. 12, at the Old County Courthouse in Hailey.
Jon Duval: jduval@mtexpress.com
