AWWA JAW62323

This article discusses the Portland, Oregon, Water Bureau's (PWB) extraordinary utility emergency response model to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in the Gulf Coast region. Staffed with management and operations crews trained to respond to earthquakes that threaten the Pacific Northwest community, and backed by city leaders, the PWB responded to an urgent request by the Sewerage and Water Board (SWB) of New Orleans for gate-valve control trucks; it mobilized a fleet of its own service vehicles and 70 employees for a two-month field mission. The effort has inspired several other cities to consider picking up in 2006 where PWB left off in early December. As described by PWB and SWB officials and witnessed by the author, PWB's pioneering response has most likely altered the water utility disaster-response landscape permanently. It brought the water supply community not only a greatly expanded vision of emergency management in these threat-plagued times but also the deeper bonds of family shared for so long by police officers, firefighters, and other danger and disaster frontline first responders. Portland's remarkable experiment in emergency assistance to a seriously wounded water utility some 2,600 miles distant has been as beneficial to volunteer PWB crews as it has been to SWB's suffering employees and customers. The result of PWB's actions could very well mark a transformation in how water utilities think about and prepare for helping themselves and other utilities when disaster strikes.