Disaster Plan Deflects Problems During Downpour

 
Published: 15 March 2004

A late-winter storm in the Midwest could have wreaked havoc at the ARM Program’s Southern Great Plains (SGP) site in northern Oklahoma. Fortunately, the site’s Disaster Plan was successfully implemented. SGP’s 160-acre Central Facility, the heart of the site, is heavily instrumented to collect and monitor atmospheric data collected from in situ and remote-sensing instrument clusters arrayed throughout the 55,000 square mile site. Although the Central Facility is on the highest point of land in the county, extreme rainfall and flooding on March 4 rendered access roads from the East impassable to vehicular traffic, and the West access road through Lamont was submerged in several locations. Local rainfall amounts approached 6 inches in 24 hours.

Putting the site’s Disaster Plan into effect, all operations personnel were safely evacuated from the site that afternoon, except for one emergency contact person to cover site security and act as liaison. In the event that conditions had worsened, this person also would have been evacuated by means of emergency vehicles or by tractor with assistance from one of the many farmers in the area. However, by Friday morning, the floodwaters had receded enough to allow access again from the East. No power or data interruptions were experienced and, other than heavy precipitation on upward looking sensors, no instruments were damaged from the storm.

The site’s Disaster Plan provides, among other things, a checklist of activities that need to be completed in an evacuation of the site. The plan not only allows for the safe evacuation of personnel, but also reviews precautions to be taken to minimize impacts to instruments, data systems, and structures. Such planning also minimizes (to the extent possible) unplanned data loss. Because ARM’s SGP site is the largest and most extensive climate research field site in the world, quick actions by site personnel ensured the safety of workers while also securing the sensitive instrumentation critical to ARM’s mission of collecting long-term data for climate research.