Hopatcong: 9/11 Taught Us Better Communication

A decade later, it's all about communication.

When terrorists hijacked and crashed four airplanes, killing thousands, on Sept. 11, 2001, state officials were slammed with myriad problems. Two of the biggest: coordinating aid to the World Trade Center and ensuring threats didn't endanger their own turf.

The story was no different in Hopatcong. While the borough didn't officially send emergency services to New York City in the aftermath of the attacks, Hopatcong leaders had choices to make: Lock down the schools? Ready firefighters for potential rescue or cleanup missions? Assemble the ambulance squad in case it's called? The list continues.

In recent interviews, many Hopatcong officials said 9/11 response was a hurry-up-and-wait proposition. Crucial information wasn't immediately available to authorities at the time. Guidance from Trenton was slow and sometimes frustrating. Talk between departments wasn't well-coordinated.

But 10 years later, lines of communication between state, county and local authorities been streamlined to a large degree, officials said. And the improvements, which they said could be scene during Hopatcong's reaction to Hurricane Irene, were born out of lessons learned during and after 9/11.

"Coordination has changed drastically"

Hopatcong's response to another 9/11-type attack hasn't much changed from a strategic standpoint, Police Chief John Swanson said. The borough doesn't have "any infrastructure that was ever deemed a viable target," he said. "We're not a major transportation hub."

But something is different.

"Our coordination has changed drastically," he said.

Swanson said a number of measures have been taken on federal, state and county levels to inform municipalities like Hopatcong. The goal: faster and stronger responses to catastrophe. The example: the October 2001 Fort Dix incident in which authorities shot to death a military reservist after he went on a rampage, shooting two police officers and a pair of soldiers.

Before 9/11, Swanson said local police departments rarely shared information with each other. "We'd hear about it on the news or read it in the paper and that's about all we ever heard from it," he said. But the shooting occurred just a month after the attacks, and procedures had already turned around. Swanson said the Hopatcong police department received updates from law enforcement officials updating them on the situation, and now that's become regular practice.

And there's much more. Swanson said the Sussex County Domestic Preparedness Task Force, a collection of area first-responder units—from hospitals to heath departments to the Office of Emergency Management to fire departments and more—meets once a month to exchange information.

"Now there's a chain of command"

Hopatcong Fire Chief Mike Rahill also said communication between local emergency services has improved since 9/11. "There's more of an interagency operability," he said. "Previously, even so much as the Byram Fire Department and Hopatcong Fire Department had very different ways of operating. And while they still do, there's a [mutual chain of command]. If there's a major emergency, we can work together well."

"We are now trained under a similar incident management system that gives us a backbone or a structure that we can draw from," Rahill said, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Incident Command System. "Previously, the police had their way of doing something, the [ambulance] squad had its way, the fire department had its way. Now there's a chain of command."

The ICS "provides a flexible, yet standardized core mechanism for coordinated and collaborative incident management," according to a release on FEMA's website, "whether for incidents where additional resources are required or are provided from different organizations within a single jurisdiction or outside the jurisdiction, or for complex incidents with national implications."

Rahill said procedures were already in place to better talk between authorities, but 9/11 acted as a catalyst for immediate reform.

"Absolutely, 9/11 did a lot of standardizing of that," he said. "It was already in the works but it was never fully implemented until then. You realized, OK, something like this could happen. At 9/11, you had police, fire and other volunteer departments responding and those guys would just drive in from Scarsdale or Yonkers, things like that. You didn't have a system to operate under."

Swanson said the Hopatcong police department would hear from the Sussex County Office of Emergency Management at the first sign of trouble.

"Everything goes through a level of increased hierarchy," he said. "Our local OEM would get a call from the county saying that you can send one ambulance to a certain community. We would communicate that request to the squad, and they would tell us if that's available."

Irene as an example

Mayor Sylvia Petillo pointed to Hurricane Irene as a example of how emergency services have learned to work together.

She said Hopatcong's Community Emergency Response Team—created in 2005 to supplement Sussex County's CERT, which was developed soon after 9/11—played a large role in helping the community while the police, fire and ambulance squads collaborated in disaster duties. Petillo also said she was in constant communication with Trenton.

"They wanted information, wanted to know our needs, how we were faring with different things," she said. "All of those communications were important to us."

Rahill said Hopatcong's fire department worked well with the county's OEM. He said the borough was asked to respond to Manville, Bound Brooke and Pequannock due to flooding.

"That's all coordinated through OEM so everyone doesn't rush out of town with pumped to help those people and leave Hopatcong unprotected," he said.

Petillo said "Irene really opened our eyes."

"It was the first time we were ever really prepared for an extreme disaster," she said. "It's nice to have plans, but until you really have to use the plan you don't see its weaknesses.

"Same thing on 9/11. They'll know better next time. They'll know how to respond better. It's educated all of us."