A horrifying five-column picture of Asbury Park's boardwalk being battered by Hurricane Carol in 1954 accompanies this article in the print edition only. In Times of Peril, a Heavy Responsibility: Preparedness - In Times of Peril, a Heavy Responsibility - NYTimes.com <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/31stormnj.h\ tml?pagewanted=all> / http://tinyurl.com/58qht9 <http://tinyurl.com/58qht9> August 31, 2008 Excerpts: In Times of Peril, a Heavy Responsibility SHE may be hypothetical, but Richard Cañas still worries about her, because he knows there are thousands of real people like her. He calls her Betty, and she is homebound, perhaps bedridden, somewhere among dozens of New Jersey shore <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandposse\ ssions/newjersey/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> communities. And there's a major hurricane headed her way. Mr. Cañas is the director of New Jersey's new Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, and as the hurricane season gathers, he is responsible for seeing that someone has a plan to rescue Betty and the thousands like her, while also safely shepherding the roughly one million other New Jerseyans who live within two miles of the ocean to higher ground. If conditions are wrong enough, that two-mile strip of coastal plain will be under water, according to Mr. Cañas. That means that hurricane planning starts with getting counties and municipalities up and down the state talking to each other and deciding which is going to do what before the storm clouds gather.
Disaster planning in New Jersey is divided between two state offices. Mr. Cañas's office is in charge of planning and preparing for the next disaster, whether it is caused by weather, criminals or terrorists. The boots and trucks and ambulances and everything else on the ground are dispatched by the emergency management section of the State Police Homeland Security Branch. Much of New Jersey is a peninsula defined by the Atlantic and the Delaware River, so it is not surprising that emergency planners focus on seven southern counties that either lie along the ocean coast or the wide waters of Delaware Bay: Atlantic, Burlington, Cape May, Cumberland, Monmouth, Ocean and Salem Counties.... Evacuation remains the principal tool in the 14 hours that emergency officials say modern forecasting will give them from the time a storm's track is fairly well known to the moment it strikes. The work begins, as Mr. Cañas noted, with making sure that local officials know where the shut-ins are, how many ambulances they will need and what the evacuation routes will be they can be found online at www.state.nj.us/njoem/plan/evacuation-routes.html <http://www.state.nj.us/njoem/plan/evacuation-routes.html> . Everyone in New Jersey involved in emergency preparedness is expected to have completed a 15-point emergency response plan, which means they know the answers to questions like, Where are the sandbags? and Who has the key to the National Guard truck parking lot? Emergency planners have also conducted preparedness sessions for shore communities, so residents know what they need in an evacuation at least half a tank of gas, a destination, food and water, flashlights and so on. But while the physical elements of evacuation planning, like making multilane roads one-way inland, are straightforward, Mr. Cañas finds the psychological dimensions to storm responses much harder to deal with. Continued at Preparedness - In Times of Peril, a Heavy Responsibility - NYTimes.com <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/31stormnj.h\ tml?pagewanted=all> / http://tinyurl.com/58qht9 <http://tinyurl.com/58qht9>
