Speaker 1
Just a real quick intro of the session. Last year, there was a tornado that struck in the St. Louis, city of St. Louis. And by city, I mean right in the heart of it.

And it was a pretty big tornado. And the SABE Coalition is a group of volunteer engineers, architects, and other building and engineering professionals that is trained in ATC-20 and ATC-45. Those are post-earthquake and wind procedures for safety evaluation after an earthquake or high wind or flood event.

And the SABE Coalition has been around for decades. And I know both Ben and Joe very well, and they have been volunteering with the group for many, many years now. And so, you know, just wanted to invite them on to talk about the lessons that they learned from that tornado response, which we help support as well through some of the data collection tools that we've developed, really in the name of earthquake, but they can be multi-hazard in use.

So without further ado, thanks, Ben, and thanks, Joe, to both of you for joining us today.

Speaker 2
Thank you, Brian. Again, I'm Joe Leahy. Just to give you an idea, I'm a civil engineer, and I live in Poplar Bluff, Missouri.

That's a town that's about 45 minutes, 45 miles as the crow flies to the new Madrid fault. So this program has been very instrumental in me. I'm going to lead off with the first part of this presentation and then Ben Ross is really going to dig down into the events that we had in St. Louis.

What we are is a coalition of engineers, architects, and building officials and we do have some qualified building officials that volunteer to do structural assessments after initially it was earthquakes, but then we found out we could also do these type of evaluations with similar damage with tornadoes and even floods. Next. This program was actually started back in 1991 when the law was passed in Missouri to develop this program.

There were some updates in 2016 that Ben and I and several others worked very closely with our legislatures to get and make some of the deployments a little bit more realistic. Next. What we can do is we have a duration limit for deployment up to five days.

We have some liability coverages. Expenses are covered by local jurisdiction, just like most SEMA, FEMA, or recommendations. And then in case somebody does get hurt, we do have workers' compensation coverage available for them.

We have the ability in the new 2009-2016 is where we actually were able to establish EMAC as a state law, and that allows us to be able to send out teams to support other states upon request. Next. What SAVE does is, like we said, it's a rapid visual inspection is done in accordance with ATC 20 and ATC 45, with just an exterior rough structural evaluation focusing on safety.

And in that process, we determine if it's safe or structurally inspected safe, restricted use, or unsafe. Red, yellow, and blue green cards on that. We do not enter the buildings unless we are specifically authorized by the local public authority.

That is basically making sure we have our team safe. Next, please. What we've done is we have actually set up teams and position descriptions and we put those into format that we are in FEMA's basically call-up system for it.

Basically, we got the templates there and the methodology they would request us. Next. Like I said, we're engineers, architects, and building codes officials spread out across the state.

Majority of our teams and individuals are actually focused around the St. Louis area and on the eastern side of the state. Then we have a good chunk up around the Kansas City area. In case there is a major earthquake along the Madrid Fault, most of the folks in the east part of the state probably would not be rapidly available to do these assessments.

Next. what we have developed is we got a local public agency guide to help those individual governments when they request to save volunteers what's the process what do we do and how do we make sure we give a good product to them it's available on our website and we also make sure when we send our first initial leaders that they have copies with them to give to the entity Next. Through the years since actually our first deployment in 1999, we've done seven deployments to evaluate structures and we've also had nine major exercises.

We've had several at the facility in Jefferson Barracks just south of St. Louis and most recently our exercise we had an EMAC training in 2020-25. Next slide. And this is what the radar was looking like as our EMAC team was coming home from Tennessee.

Next. One of our more recent ones, exercises we did again at Jefferson Barracks, it was conducted also in conjunction with the next slide please. We both had Illinois available, I-beam coming in from Indiana.

One of the nicest things we were able to get coordinated is we had participation with the Missouri National Guard's Air Force and Army detachments, and also we were able to get the Civil Air Patrol involved, realizing that they do have drones that we can utilize. Just to give you an idea of what we did at Jefferson Barracks for the exercise, we did some photoshopping of buildings that are on the site. A lot of these buildings are back from like World War I era.

So some of them we didn't have to Photoshop very much. And Ben did a fantastic job making these photos all work out. It was a good exercise.

And again, it integrated us in working with other folks. And as you can tell there, we had about a third of the people at this exercise wearing green suits that were from the National Guard. Next, please.

Speaker 3
That's Brian Blake giving some training during this exercise.

Speaker 2
Oh, that is right. Yeah, he was really instrumental helping us get up to speed using the new software. And that was really one of the first times we had exercised it.

As I said earlier, we integrated in with the Civil Air Patrol, one of the first times that we had been able to do that. Brought another resource to our teams out there where we could actually get that overhead look, especially useful when we come into dealing with multi-story buildings with flat roofs. Next, please.

we've continued making sure we were active with activities in the state of Missouri regarding earthquakes. We've actually participated and had our members at the earthquake summits many times. This was back in March 2024 at the Cape Girardeau site.

If you see that big looking blue thing in the back, that's actually a communications facility, mobile communications facility for the Department of Veterans Affairs. We had a great time meeting those and come to find out they've got a really good resource available for using in response to these type of events. Next, I'm going to turn this over to Ben and he's going to go in a little more detail of the exercise we conducted and then how that actually led into St. Louis.

Speaker 3
Right, thanks Joe. So yeah, this is some background to kind of give you some information on the training we had going into the st louis deployment this was a pretty large event with the national guard bureau we met with the national guard on site at bush stadium in downtown st louis we met captain john walk who was instrumental during the tornado we toured different buildings our rooms inside the bush stadium that would be used in the exercise and this one the national guard seemed to really like this room i'm not sure if it was the the beer on tap or the buffet in the back with the National Guard pick this room for their use. We had lots of training and practice going into the exercise.

The National Guard was doing urban search and rescue and mass decontamination. And we were doing work around the stadium outside there, Tasman and Hot Zone area on a lot of unreinforced masonry buildings and flat roofs in the downtown St. Louis area at the urban core. We photoshopped damage again like the picture on the right is a parapet wall with some falling hazards and falling glass on a modern high rise.

So this is the kind of stuff that we were practicing just one year before the tornado actually hit St. Louis. We did some simulated drone imagery. We were not allowed to fly drones in downtown St. Louis, so we simulated it.

We got to use the Veterans Administration Mobile Command Center. We had about 50 people, including some air patrol folks during this exercise. And this is my favorite picture, as John Westcott was just commenting on the importance of building relationships before an event happens.

The two people with the red arrows, the one on the right works for the city of St. Louis, and one on the left is the same coalition volunteer who actually works in St. Charles County, Missouri. And those two work together during this exercise. And then one year later, after the tornado hit St. Louis, those same two people were leaders on the actual deployment.

So we had built the relationship ahead of time, which I think is just super important. We used the building safety evaluation app that QSAC helped develop. And then five hours time with about 50 people, we were able to evaluate 212, simulate the village buildings in downtown St. Louis area.

We have lots of lessons learned. Working in a dense urban area for the first time as an exercise, the value of developing relationships, working with the military, we learned lots. Our average SAVE coalition volunteer was 56 years old, so we're looking to recruit younger people into our group.

Working with drones was good, and we validated our SAVE leader training that Joe showed a minute ago on the FEMA resource typing. So prior to our St. Louis deployment, we had progressive exercise experience working with the technology that Brian's group helped develop, and we had developed relationships with some of the people in the area, and we practiced in a dense urban area. We worked with the National Guard, we worked with drones, and we developed and validated our leadership training.

So May 16th was the day of the tornado. We deployed for eight days, four days in one rotation and a little while later, four more days. We had 105 same coalition volunteers who deployed and working with the St. Louis Building Department.

We evaluated over 7,160 buildings. Joe showed the radar picture and this is a classic Echo where the tornado, if you can see my cursor, there's a tornado down here that was kind of going across the south side of, or the central, I guess, portion of St. Louis is going to go in to the northeast. If you were lucky enough to be in the Gateway Arch in downtown St. Louis and looked out the window to the west, you would have seen this image or this view of the tornado coming.

It's not an easy way to get out of the Gateway Arch, so I think this is a pretty scary time for those people up there. Incidentally, the SAVE Coalition was doing a training class right where that picture where my pointer is less than one mile away from the tornado so that was pretty much a coincidence we use fema's urban search and rescue star cop data as a guide for our deployment the gray border kind of growing across the diagonally is the path of the tornado the red outlines are search segments that were used for search and rescue before state coalition got there but we use those same search segments for our own deployment and we use the SARCOP data with the green, yellow, red, and orange, and some purple dots to figure out where the damage was. The purple outlines are city wards, and that was important from a political standpoint.

It's also interesting, we are working for the city of St. Louis only and not St. Louis County. So the border here is our limit of where we worked. So we stayed within the city limits, and we did not evaluate the structures in the county just across this line it was the same street one house is in the next house neighbor is out so with the purple lines there's four separate city wards and we decided to unlike in joplin where we focused our effort on the west side of town and kind of worked sequentially from west to east we knew that was not going to work because the houses down by Forest Park, this is where the St. Louis Zoo is, the houses real close to this area are super nice. They're literally mansions.

And so that's one city ward. And then if you go to the northeast, it's a much more depressed area. Many of the houses are already boarded up.

But we think the people, and we know the people who live in these houses, are just as important as the people who live in the mansions. So we split our effort up and had teams in all four wards at the same time we did a leaders reconnaissance um and we drove around the area on may 20th and uh there was still a fair amount of utility damage and debris in the roads so that's one of our lessons learned we think we in hindsight we probably went a little bit too early and if we would have waited a little bit longer maybe some more of the debris would have been cleaned up and some more data would have been available for us but in this picture you can see a non-reinforced mainstream building with a flat roof and the kind of damage that we were evaluating. The City of St. Louis had pre-printed placards and they wanted us to use those and as you know these placards are not the standard ATC 20 placards or ATC 2045 placards and one of the biggest differences and Joe alluded to it before was the city placards said violators are subject to prosecution in the bottom right and that turned out to be a political firestorm so i definitely recommend always use the the standard atc 45 placards where it says entry may result in death or injury that's the standard placard and people would rather be told you to die than you could be arrested so definitely avoid that that's the lesson learned use the standard placards and we We had people, you know, volunteers there who were sworn in as deputies, City of St. Louis building officials.

So that's the picture of our briefing. We got some apps on the back wall. And we were trying to do the entire deployment paperlessly because we're using the Survey123 Collector app, which QSEC, through NEAR funding, was able to develop that we practiced with.

So we're using that. We did a pre-deployment briefing. We did just-in-time training on ATC 45 as well as the collector app and our safety procedures and how to talk to residents in the field.

We updated our training. We have some guidelines that we've developed in Missouri to help be consistent with the red, yellow, and green placarding for the different types of damage. And because we had so many old unreinforced masonry buildings, we worked with the AHJ, the authority jurisdiction to come up with this criteria just to make sure we're being consistent and also recognizing that quite a few of the residents in this area really didn't have a lot of options on where else to go so we're trying to keep more people in their homes if they were just slightly damaged we implemented incident command system that's part of the leadership training we have in Missouri.

The bottom right picture, again, we see Brian Blake from QSEC is there working with the State Emergency Management Agency's GIS technician. So they were doing real-time data collection and also quality control. And everyone else in the room here is the same coalition volunteer, and we have multiple teams in the field, and these are like division supervisors who are maintaining standard control for the deployment.

The picture on the wall here is the segment areas and we're starting to crosshatch off the areas that are completed. And on the right part of the planning effort, we were counting the SARCOP points in each search segment and trying to figure out where the next team should be deployed to use our resources to do the most good for the most number of people. So we did have a systematic way of deploying the teams in the field based on the damage that was identified by Sarkov.

Here's a picture of one of the teams. Many buildings in this part of North St. Louis, unfortunately, have not been maintained and they're actually uninhabitable. That red board was put up.

This house was already basically condemned and uninhabitable before the tornado hit. You can see in the background some of the damage of the tarps that have been put up. This house was already in repairs.

The windows are brand new. They've got tarps to hopefully prevent rain from damaging the building further. The flat roofs was certainly a challenge for us, and that's a lesson learned.

If we had delayed our deployment by a few days, we might have had some post-event aerial imagery that was available on our smartphones. We had desktop imagery, but we're not able to get that pushed out onto our phones. But I think that's a lesson learned that we've been working on to try and get the post-event aerial imagery into the field.

Here's some more flat roof damage. From the ground, it's just hard to see the extent of that damage. More debris.

We're normally trying to walk around the building completely, but that was impossible in many areas in downtown St. Louis. The buildings are close together and there's lots of debris, so we had to do the best we could. Especially the flat roofs.

In this picture, you can see some of the brick is like piled up between the two buildings, so we were not going to walk in that area. When the roof is collapsed in, you see it through the front window of the house, that's an easy sign that the roof is damaged. But you can see the kind of general conditions the damage to north st louis there's more pictures of our teams walking in the field and we did have one volunteer drone operator who brought his drone out so we did have some live imagery of some of the buildings but that was not enough we needed a post event aerial photo in the field that's probably one of our biggest lessons learned.

So here is a post-event photo that we could have on our desktop computers, and these are our flat roofs. And you can see how in this one the roof membrane is partially damaged. Here the membrane is gone, you're seeing the framing.

And some of the images you can see right down into the living space when the roof structure is completely gone. Another best practice that we started in Missouri or performed in Missouri, and I believe FEMA has adopted it with your resource typing, is they have a technical supervisor. So the guy on the right is one of our instructors, and he's out visiting with the team during a lunch break, and they were talking about their observations and making sure everyone's being consistent and having quality control.

So after the first four days of the deployment, we evaluated 3,740 buildings, And the GIS dashboard that QSEC helped us with is just so awesome to share the data. You can zoom in and click on any one of those colored dots and get more information on that specific structure. Another lesson learned is that we did not have enough people available to deploy.

We have about 900 across the state. The city was asking us to deploy 90 people each day, and we did not meet that request. days like this there's very few people other days there's like 65 or 70 people but there's lots of reasons for this i think some of it was uh there was a holiday weekend involved um the area of st lest uh has kind of got a bad reputation for being unsafe that might have kept people away but that's something we need to work through and figure out and how we can get more people to deploy and future deployments.

Here's a little more information on some of the dashboard. There's always different colored dots. As you zoom in and out, the dashboard automatically counts the dots in the screen you see. And so this is just a 340 dots within this area.

You can have the post-event photo. And if you zoom in, here are some examples where you can see right down into the structure of the house you see people's furniture different levels of damage just in the one structure you know this one here you can see some of the roof membrane still there here the sheathing's gone and then as you move over to this one you see into the house and into the living space if you click on the dot you can see more information about the exact location the address we take photographs that are posted with a dot we always take a picture of the placard in case that gets removed or damaged and just some overall views of the property so after day 7,160 evaluations so the red are lessons that we've learned but we're still working on. Developing the process and the procedure to have the aerial photo on the smartphone before a group deploys is one of the biggest lessons we learned.

Meeting more SAVE members available to deploy. And just trying to recruit more members in general and also trying to recruit younger people. So we're trying to work with the colleges and the younger engineer groups trying to recruit members.

It's a pretty long time commitment effort. We give them a free training class that counts towards their PDHs for their license. And then it's all volunteer after that.

They can volunteer to join and be in our database. They can volunteer to deploy. So if they've got work or family things, they're under no obligation to deploy, but we like them to to see how valuable and worthwhile it is to go out and help people after a deployment.

We're trying not to go on a holiday weekend. We tried to go paperless, but I think having a paper hardcopy map would be better, especially for navigating to the actual work area. I think we need to plan, and I know Dr. Paula Vargas is on the call from Missouri State Emergency Management, so she's our earthquake program manager, and we work for Paula.

But I don't think we're going to have enough people if there's ever a big major earthquake, and we'll need resources from like California or Washington State and request an ENAC assistance pretty early in the process. Confirming the value of developing relationships might be the biggest and best lesson learned, how important that is and why we need funding for future exercises with our partner states and partner agencies. So hopefully that's a good thing that we learned. And overall, we feel our program worked really well.

We've been doing this since 1991. We've had a bunch of big appointments. We learn lessons every time we go out, and every time we go out, we make our program better.

So with that, Joe and I will be happy to answer your questions.