Hello and welcome to the Talking Operations web conference on Transportation Operations for Planned and Unplanned Events. My name is Jennifer Symoun and I will be giving a brief introduction to the web conferencing environment before turning the session over to Laurie Radow who we are very pleased to have as our moderator for today’s seminar. Please be advised that today’s seminar is being recorded. Today’s seminar will last approximately an hour and 30 minutes, with 60 minutes allocated for the presenters and the final 30 minutes for audience Question and Answer. During the presentations, if you think of a question, you can type it into the smaller text box in the chat area on the lower left side of your screen. Indicate who your question is directed toward, unless your question is intended for all presenters. Please make sure you are typing in the thin text box and not the large white area. Please also make sure that you send your question to Everyone rather than just the Presenters. Presenters will be unable to answer your questions during their presentations, but Laurie will use some of the questions typed into the chat box for the question and answer session in the last 30 minutes of the seminar. A file containing the audio and the visual portion of this seminar will be posted to the National Transportation Operations Coalition’s or NTOC website within the next week. I will type that address into the chat box shortly. We encourage you to direct others in your office who may have not been able to attend this conference to access the recording. The PowerPoint presentations for today are available for download in the file download box in the lower left corner of your screen. In addition, a list of useful web links is also available for download. The PPTs will also be available within the next week on the NTOC site. Attendees will be notified of the availability of the PowerPoints, the recording, and the closed captioning of this seminar. At this time I would like to introduce Laurie Radow, the moderator of today’s web cast. Laurie Radow joined the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) in 1996. As a member of FHWA and emergency transportation operations team, she manages the agent's special events and evacuation's program. As a team member citizens and reduce suffering while improving probability in times of needs. That exist for traffic incident management plan special events and perjury transportation. Components of the team's responsibility. Prior to assuming the special events or responsibilities to emergency coordinator acting and alternate, to ensure that emergency transportation plans that are developed are all response recovery homeland security advisory system and our multijurisdictional. Government affairs now transportation association. Received her bachelor's degree in history graduate university of California Santa Barbara. I'm going to turn things over to Laurie to start things off. Participants good morning and welcome. Jennifer said today's Webinar is transportation operations for planned and unplanned events and what an appropriate topic. As we speak some of our colleagues are either involved in the operations of one of the nation's political faction conventions or getting ready as the next one gets underway. Has about 7 years or so to prepare or a bit longer if you include the time to develop their plan while preparations for the DNC and RNC are about 18 months in length. We're all in presentations. I read through them I was taking with the amount of information the three speakers will provide. Each will discuss a specific phase of either planned or unplanned event. Those phases are planning, implementation or operations and after the event or after actions reports. For the two planned events we'll learn about the planned events in a young city, provisions celebrates 150th anniversary this year. Plans are under way for the 2010 Olympics. Very big way. We'll see how that DOT participate in that celebration. The unplanned about is this spring's floods in Wisconsin. It was not the first mayor weather event that the DOT had to face during 2007-2008. And snowstorm this past winter. Let me now introduce our first speaker. Worked in the transportation of engineering services at the city of Vancouver for the last 8 years. Master's degree in transportation and is experienced working with municipal and provincial governments in the government. Transportation and is responsible forked mating the city's transportation planning organizing committee and other transportation . Okay. Good morning to all. I'm going to do a presentation that's probably fairly quick pace for a Webinar. I thought I would give you more information, give you a full understanding of the planning we're doing for the next Olympic games here in Vancouver. Hopefully you won't find it too fast and interesting. The media is now reporting what we should be doing in terms of transportation and reading this morning transportation is going to be crucial. Vancouver sun one of the notable else elements is about Olympic lanes. They are telling us similar system also be in place in Vancouver. Letting us know what we should be doing. So for Vancouver, we are the host city and for us the success of the games goes well beyond the competition, the schedules, of the athletes. It's going to be measured by the quality of the environment we provide. The quality of transportation is a key component in terms of how people are going to remember the games here in Vancouver. As a branch, as a team; not doing this individually, there's a whole bunch of engineers and planners doing this in the city. The lend that we're looking at the transportation for the games is slightly different than van rock and the other partners. What sets us apart we want to have a successful game that provides accessible reliable, and sustainable transportation but wanted to do it within an urban environment. We do want to have a downtown that allows our businesses and residents to go about doing the things that they need to do during games time in addition to all the list of activity we're going to see. For us that means we're going to minimize impacts to our residents and businesses at the same time maximize Legacies. If you are familiar with the Vancouver area. Significant work up to Vancouver where the relationship building with part nears and the kind of behavioral aspects for the games this year. Transportation team so the organizing committee and the city of Vancouver, where the mountain venues are. They've got their own transit authority. Translink the ministry of transportation which is a state organization. It's our provincial. Regular transportation planning. It's all about land use and it's all about security and transportation planners and engineers. What also has been good about the formalization of the responsibilities. We each have our own scope. Each of us is being leaned onto provide certain expertise in an area. For the city that's while we're the ones that know our city best. We're looking at the route planning, traffic management, all of the athlete movement an the Olympic family clients. Transportation modeling. Show you a bit of the work going on there. And the pedestrian flows. There's things at the bottom I highlighted. We need to be partners on particularly communication and coordinating a transportation operation center for 2010 is one we need to do jointly and sharing the leadership on that. This for me, this is my first large special event and we like to show this slide to our public and stakeholders. The games themselves in 2010 will be 17 days, yet the transportation impacts the whole city feels can be anywhere up to 60 days. That's because the main media center for us will open a month before it actually opening ceremonies and that's situated right downtown. Motor coach activity, even in a month in advance. There's the transition between the Olympic and the par Olympic games and then the exiting. It's about a 60 day overall impact. That needs to cover that time period. To give you some context of what kind of lift we're expecting on the demands. That's we see about 6 million trips, that's all modes. Within the city we're only a quarter of the entire metro population but we see almost a [ Indiscernible: Speaker/Audio faint and unclear] we've got the stadiums, we've got the convention center and a lot of the hotels. We see a greater share of trip making within or to or from the city than the rest of the venue. We've done in the past, don't a lot of forecasting and we think that our peak day for the winter games expecting another 400,000 new trips to and from all venues. Roughly speaking that's about 300,000, to and are from competition or non-competition venues that will be managed by van rock. The city as well as the province are looking at celebration sites in our downtown can actually participate in the enthusiasm of the games for free. So we're expecting another hundred thousand there in terms of trip making. Not insignificant in terms of what's happening in our city and the region. Fairly management as it relates to over all background trips. Having said that, everybody knows this, we're working in the environment have a reduced supply. Exactly how much more of a limited network as it relates to the venue par perimeters and security, we're not sure. We're going to have less to work with. Also given the significant amount of event attendees we'll have to work with our road space. To reallocate for pedestrians to way find them. To and from our rapid transit stations and other connections to facilitate walking and cycling and transit as a primary modes. Routing and traffic management. If it were equally spread across our city it probably wouldn't be as bad. For example, from our downtown directly to the airport is one of note. So then the city we're going have to respond with the appropriate traffic management measures whether that be turning restrictions and timing signal changes or looking at the parking restrictions or lane allocation. Of course to help us we're looking at reduces the number of trips that are being made on any given day and focusing those that are made by vehicle. We'd like people to shift modes encourage tell computing or celebrating the games just take holiday and maybe be one less person in the car going downtown. For everything to work together. Olympic lanes, that was one of the things I was reading to you that was quoted in the media. I didn't go to myself but something we've already learned from for Reno. It's still undetermined. What they are of course similar to a transit lain or HOV lane providing that kind of priority for Olympic clientele. It would also be in conjunction with providing for us translink who provides the transit service that would be a good thing in terms of approaching from a spectator perspective. Just going to talk a bit about one of the models that we've been doing and getting ready for the games. DVTEMSs we realize as we do lots of large special events. Where would I then reallocate road space to provide for pedestrians. Is it simply stripping the parking, die actually feed to think about one north southeast west Street to create a pedestrian mall temporarily for the games. It centered around the stadium districts which is highlighted in red. We have two stadiums within that precinct. As well as the live sites the two the city is actually formalizing fall within that area. The next slide now showing you some of the output and those two white bubbles are the smaller one is our hockey venue of 18,000 and the larger one is BC place where we have actually our football and large concerts and that's got a capacity of 60,000. That's the opening ceremony on February 12th. What you are seeing the model output which is showing graphically that the width of the bars is showing how many pedestrians are trying to move along certain street sections. Each of those sidewalk widths have been measured in the field. The color is representing a level of service. A all the way up to F. Doesn't mane failure. You've been in an event jam packed. You can kind of move your way along at that kind of snail pace. What this is allowing us to do particularly in streets where we can look at reallocating space we could look and say if we provided more for pedestrians maybe the orange and redding may go down to green. Respond to providing a robust network for the pedestrians as they move in and around the stadiums. For the games this is particularly important because at the hockey venue where there will be three hockey games during the games. When we have our we incomes playing that's only once a day but when we have 18,000 coming in and out of the venue three times a day and in addition to the opening ceremonies the BC place is going to host the medal ceremony every night. That could be 40,000 every night in that stadium as well. Models into more of the street permitting and how we're planning on working around managing the rights of way. We have a successful kind of construction development information called the road ahead here in Vancouver. We're calling it for 2010 purposes the Olympic road ahead. We've began with our partners and to say where on the city street space do you think you're going to do some business to have successful games? Prescreening forms where our partners have declared that these are parts of the network of the things we need to do. Receiving those and now we're processing them to get back to our partners an say we can improve that or actually the benefit is to identify. Our partners don't necessarily know where they're both asking for the same street space. It's allowing us to coordinate and making sure we're not permitting to say we're going to use the same parts of the street for doing the same purposes and realize that in the last few months where we got to all the operational planning. As compared to salt lake which hosted the last winter games in North America. We're not going to get a really one developed before 2010. Having said that, there's a lot of effort on the partners to determine we do need something. We do need to be shoulder to shoulder in terms of being able to make the operation and dealing with any contingencies or emergencies that happen during the games. So we've got some stuff that are working in that, what will it be? We know it will be staffed 24 hours a day. We in the city are involving have been putting more cameras in the city to be in the some places that are most significant for the games. Big part of transportation in Vancouver is public engagements. We're not doing consultation per se to how we think we should do it. We find it's important to talk to them and we just wrapped up a whole series of public meetings and stakeholder engagements. We used to hold the [ Indiscernible: Speaker/Audio faint and unclear] we're getting ready for the games. But for that event we would just roll out the information in a news release. Here are the street closures we're doing. Everybody understanding it. We're not doing major capital work so we don't do full consultation. We're balancing something in between in how we're engaging our residents. Our goals, are accessible, reliable and sustainable. We do want to make sure it is reliable. We want to make sure we're taking care of all modes and all levels of ability in terms of moving. Focusing on the modes that are consistent with Vancouver policymaking. Let people know as much information as they can as early as possible so they can make their decisions whether they want to leave town or participate in the games or if it's business hours etc. Even creased transit ridership, any type of shift out of vehicles because that's going be a big emphasis for the games. This is a slide showing you the types of graphics we're coming out to the public meetings. It's hard to see but the darker lines are the higher frequency transit services whether they are rail lines or just our frequent bus network within the city. This is an interesting map, probably hard to discern exactly what it is. The purple are venues or areas with we actually expect high games related use. That's essentially most of our downtown. We're engaging our develop and construction industry as well as utility companies saying as a city, it's our street space and we need to let you know for the games we're going to need our sidewalks and road space to be able to make the movements necessary to support the successful games and have a functioning urban environment. These are all the theses and -- streets and areas that might have limitations. Street work, please don't expect that in 2010 for that 60 day period in this point in time. As we refine the plans, of course, this will be a lot more detailed. That kind of summarizes a lot of the planning work we're doing. I'm going to jump in for the last few minutes some findings for special events we already manage in the city. This has been a fantastic learning experience. To benchmark and do data collection on things you are already doing. We did a hockey game of 18,000, a rolling stones con it is of over 50,000. A celebration of light where we have fire works in our downtown every year and we did a dual stadium event where we had a hockey game an football game right beside each other. We looked at all sorts of travel characteristics including market research and the implications for 2010. This is showing where we staff an did manual counts or host counts or market research. So we had between 60 to 100 staff out there. Most of that was consulting staff as well as city staff doing some of those surveys. We did them over the last couple of years and went over the capacities. The fire works event is reportedly up to 400,000. What we validated is that's not the number of people we're seeing in our downtown. Briefly you can see all the types of surveys we conducted. So this is a snapshot of some of the findings. We looked at mode split. It shows you here that car while more than 50% it's ready for a hockey game not 60%, so we've got a good walking and transit component to our stadiums in the downtown. Showing samples of the output work we had shown. Showing in this case the peak 15 minutes. E guess out of the stadiums. Just to the far right is the sky train station that is located within that. Again, just showing that in bound versus the outbound how of course you get a stronger peak in the outbound. Just kind of telling us some things that we already new and showing a quantitative way to plan this area for the games on specific streets and what we should or shouldn't be doing to do the best things for the games. This is an interesting finding. The market research, encourage you to think of this. You can't do this by counting bodies. There were more people that came from Vancouver island than some of our outer lying municipalities, sur re, white rock annealingly. A lot of people came from out of town that we didn't expect for a rolling stones concert. It's a good benchmark data how much the tickets do we expect to be locals versus visitors from out of town, including just south of us Washington state. Data just parking location, showing exactly where and how the behaviors are from where people parked for the stadium events. The market research really useful because it showed a lot of the visitors don't remember how they parked. Just an interesting finding of how much did they know or didn't know about their environment. Lastly here, this is the fire works, to be able to know whether there were 400,000 people downtown, we did a full screen line count along those two red lines. Every lane and street had somebody counting the number of people that went in and out of the event both in the downtown and the other side of the false street there. Huge effort. But for this kind of event how it's different than a hockey game N. this case you are essentially see ago third, third, third. Now you're seeing numbers in the screen lines of peak 15 minutes, almost half of our hockey stadium for almost 10,000 in the in pound and now for -- inbound in the peak 15 minutes we saw over 30,000 people. The event for what we counted was the people on the street, not necessarily the people watching from their apartments was about up to 150 to 200,000. Half of what the media was reporting was the likely attendance. I think a useful piece of information if you are hearing about what you think your event is, try and find out what that source of information is. If you can, try to validate it. So with that, I'd like to conclude and I think I'll be available for some questions, which are coming either by chat or voice in a moment. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you Dale, that was very good. Our next speaker Michael wash board the concern administration is the Virginia Department of Transportation. Mike supports statewide field operations incident management an traveler information programs. Prior to V DOT Michael worked for the require Department of Transportation where we worked for 13 years within it's traffic operations and public information department. And ITS operations manager. Mike. Good afternoon. [ Audio feedback on the line. ] Give you a break down of how things went with our 400th anniversary of James town. As we mentioned feel free to follow up with questions and even following today anything that comes up, get in contact with me. I'll be happy to share any other information. Basically wanted to jump in and share the mission from the America's 400th anniversary of James town was a national and international celebration as we brought in some very significant VIP from overseas. Really, the mission as you read here, breaks down into two objectives. Those objectives were for the arrival and movement of our VIP that occurred. Queen Elizabeth. That first weekend was significant in managing that type of operations. The next weekend the 11th through the 13ths at the venue of James town concerts, fire works and multiple speakers and activities going on. Wrapping up on Sunday with President Bush speaking at the anniversary event. As I mentioned it was and international, national event. But one thing that was very pin cent here was that the event itself was very much locally chaired and planned for. James city counsel county was the chair for the multiagency planning and V DOT was one member of the committee. There was more than 48 involved including state police, National Guard and coast guard. The planning authority event upwards of 21 months prior to the anniversary weekend. Going from that 18 month window out. That's when the roles and responsibilities for the different travel routes and that nature. The Williamsburg area transit was one of the -- transportation lead agency. I will get into some of the things that was very vital for that lead. The travel routes and the Williamsburg area and the Jamestown site was very clearly the huge role for both the move in of people but then also the security aspect of the event. This included both interstate and primary and secondary routes in and around the area. As I mentioned with the area transit sounded like parking was a necessity. There was absolutely not enough parking in the venue area. Multiple sat light parking locations were implemented and installed and then the transportation from those locations to the venue areas was key. Participation with assessments for the venue site. V DOT we're very, very involved in with our Virginia state police. V DOT has it's own transportation security group. Was actually led by our V DOT's transportation security group in carnation with VSP. The parking lots that we mentioned, the sites that we mentioned for the speakers the ferry was vital for security assessment. Also, the changeable message board and signage that you can imagine were deployed was exactly brought about for our primaries around the site and V DOT was very much involved and looked to for that lead also. I mentioned the queen of England, the week previous to the actual anniversary weekend. This is the May 3. She arrived at the Richmond airport and she basically had traveled the area, she had several events lined up. This is something that was grouped as part of the whole anniversary events. We basically had to coordinate with the Virginia state police to close the interstate 64 and interstate 95 around the Richmond area and the airport for her motorcade to travel to the capital for speaking to the legislature and also the public. She Len made a return trip from Richmond back to Williamsburg previous to May 4 when she visited the venue site of Jamestown. This was the Thursday, Friday time period an one of the things that we did here within the common wealth of Virginia, because she was coming to Richmond to provide a state holiday to limit the number of travelers and congestion within the downtown area, the huge event drawing spectators and public for her visit, we had all the state workers except who were absolute in the personnel who were not at work that Thursday. Traveler as you can imagine because of the impact on the roadways specifically interstate traveler information was very much a huge roll. V DOT's transportation operation centers in Richmond. We very much used portable method signs to get the word out upwards of a week pre use and utilized our 511 system. Telephone service and using extensive flood gait messages anyone calling that system would get all the information. As I mentioned we were working with personnel necessary within the commonwealth and that required remote site staffing for support and communications personnel. I touched on the special motorcade system the traveling that occurred working again with Virginia state police to use newly installed 64 lane reversal gates. We have -- gates. This is along interstate 64 between Richmond and Hampton roads. We were able to use a good portion of these gates to block off entrance. 30 vehicles was in route, we were able to maintain better control. VSP was the lead agency with the movement of the VIP motorcades. I guess if you can imagine V DOT was to provide a number of equipment, portal message boards, but we had upwards of 20 portable message boards around the area. Portable lights. Structures we had around the area. Also, all of the maintenance of traffic devices. We were also -- as I mentioned we had 18 months of planning but one thing that I guess I would share with everybody a lesson learned for this type of thing is you all know, you need to be flexible. Two weeks previous to the event, we were getting new requests to increase the number of some of this equipment or relocate or things of that nature. Also, one thing as you can see from the map, kind of small here, but the James town venue is along the James river. We have route 31 which is served by ferry operations. The ferry operations was very much impacted due to all the security concerns. It was shut down multiple times for upwards of an hour during the VIP visits and the speakers and so it was very much a needed outreach with message boards, 511 program and media outreach to get the word to our customers and motorists of those impacts. Other services that V DOT provided was permitting into the entrance of the venues, that's for the services that were needed for that. We also graded and graveled some of those locations for sat light parking areas. We hat to do prep work to get those in condition to receiving traffic. Mowing and as I mentioned the ferry operations, basically went to 100% inspections for each and every vehicle during this timeframe. Road closures of secondary around the area. And static trailblazer scenes that had to have manufactured and in place. This site toll the success of the event. Having multiple personnel on stand by to be able to react to any realtime adjustments was vital. We had people that were able to adjust basically based on the security aspects. As you can imagine you have the U.S. secret service and the British secret service there's a lot of adjustments that needed to be made realtime an quickly. The investment through our parking lots and the on site work for material, labor and equipment. Also at the anniversary venue, it was an investment of $500,000 and this again takes in the personnel and the labor. The static trailblazer science for the parking and route management. I touched on several times, but as you can imagine, it was vital to use our intelligence transportation systems, both for realtime and then also in preparation for the venue. We actually added five portable locations for cameras locations and get back information back to our transportation operation centers. Changeable message sign, portable and fixed. 511 was essential to get the word out. Flood gate messaging for the week previous. Get the ward to the computers and travelers coming through the Virginia area. During the queen's visit I95 and I64 was really in the central part of Virginia. It really affected the traffic in those locations. We did not make this a regional event. We wanted to make it a statewide event to get the word out. I also wanted to mention, we really added safety service patrol program. We added a number of our units along the interstate 64 area but also helping out with the primary routes around the venue. That really helps not just for traffic but also for security concerns also. Break down and stop, we would immediately try to get the service patrol there to assist and get them moving again. Communications interoperability. Going across a number of agencies was sinal and using the nils system was how we work. This was not just for the weekend of the 11, 12, 13. Also for the VIPs. The state police for both the queens visit and the movement and also at the anniversary venue. We were very close working with them on communications and also at command posts making sure that information flow was immediate and information that was needed was received. Wrap up, we're very happy that we were able to report a successful ehaven't. Attendance was expected up to 90,000 over the three day anniversary weekend, actual attendance failed below that. It was very much a substantial event on going through the ten day period. Again, with so many public safety agencies involved, it was an ongoing both the months moving up to it and also following. We did several debriefing on the event. That can also help out in the future also. With that I want to thank you once again and turn it back to Laurie. Thanks mike. That was very informative as well. We move to the center of the country. Steve sierra is a fellow with practice leader. Registered private and public sector experience. Operations of ITS. Steve currently served as a consultant project manager. Times is a state wide comprehensive traffic program. Steve is supporting the development of an emergency transportation operations plan and involved with other ITS projects nation-wide. Steve has authored numerous presentations and currently represents IT on the coalition and counsel N. addition to his private sector work, public work cities of Dallas, and Anaheim, California. Thank you very much Laurie. Good afternoon to who all are online. Thank you for joining us to talk about this fantastic topic. I want to commend Dale and mike for excellent presentations. Hearing everything that has to go into the winter Olympics and mike from a recent big special event. I especially perked up when you talked abouts in debit command and debriefings and things like that. That's actually the debriefings or after action reviews is the topic of my discussion today. I'm going to provide a little bit of after action reviews, 101 or kind of a short course on it. Talk a little bit more about how the Wisconsin DOT applied after action reviews for some major flooding that we had back in June as an input to their emergency traffic operations plan that's considerately under development. While the floods were obviously an unplanned event, I don't know if you are hear in the background the harry pipes that are roaring down the street, but today is the first day of the harry Davidson 105th anniversary. There's 105 specific routes that are converging on Milwaukee with their mics and stuff. There's going to be a crazy planned special event coming up here. So for our presentation today, I wanted to mention, talk about what are after action reviews, where do they fit in? Give all the folks tips conducts after action reviews. Talk about the Wisconsin flooding from this past June and how that can be a case study for dealing with these things. Then wrap it up and then I have a conference announcement that Laurie and I kind of want to talk about that pertains to both planned and unplanned events in next March. The structured northern judgmental review of a discussion of activity or mission. One analogy I'd like to use for those who are into sports or played or coached sports it can be looked at as a post game chalk talk. Basically where you sit down and see what went well, what didn't go so well, what are we doing to do next time. One of the most important goals for after action reviews is enable or establish some regularity to them and create a state of mind where everybody is assessing themselves, their units, their organizations and asking how they can improve. As we work into these planned and unplanned events and basically being in the operations world we have to be doing that. That's the only way we're going to be able to improve upon what we're doing. Lastly and after action review is simply a seizing of opportunity to learn. There's no substitute for actually learning from an example and that's really what the after action reviews are all about. Doing an after action review, you basically have to ask these four questions here. What was set out to be done? What actually happened? Why did it happen? Most importantly, is what are we going to do perhaps differently next time? Within the context of emergency transportation operations, you can see here from this slide where the after action reviews fit in. This is the structure that's been laid out for the Wisconsin DOT that I mentioned is currently in a work in progress. But as you can see from the boxes here. Two components of the ETO plan. You have to have a program. This can't just sit on a shelf without a sustained and regular program associated with it. Within the program you've got the plan maintenance, training, budgeting, contracting, vulnerability, mitigation, evaluating your performance. Then the other box T other component of the plan that's the more hands on while the event is going on, while the emergency is going on. That's the response stuff. You have threat assessment, incident notification, following the incident command system response and public information. That information should not be considered complete until and after action review is done. That's under the response element because it's important that you conduct an after action review fairly shortly after the incident or situation has occurred. Then obviously, from the slide there, that looks back into on going performance evaluation. Even merely doing after action reviews can be a quantifiable element of your performance evaluation of your ETO program. So just a few tips here on what to do in an after action review. As I mentioned previously, you need to schedule these shortly after the event, so if things, the information is fresh, also indicated that you've got to get into a habit of doing these things. Make them routine. Facilitation is very important to conducting an effective after action review. You have to have the objective supporting data available so you know what the facts are. Establishing ground rules is important and proceed systematically. Those four questions that were on a refuse slide are really the agenda that we used here in Wisconsin when we went through the various after action reviews for the flooding. There's no after action review that can be successful without the right people around the table. This is where it's really important to invite and involve all the participants so that you get some good feedback and good information. The facilitator and others can probe for the underlying cause and affect relationships. Why something happened the way it did? Why didn't it happen? Then it's very important to identify activities to be sustained. I call those the 30s sieve as well as any errors. That's the negative side of after action reviews. Things to not do in an after action review are sometimes just the correlations of what to do. A few here, you should not conduct an after action review without some planning and readiness for it. To do them infrequently, irregularly. You have to have that regularity to doing these things. Got to watch the debates. They can easily bog down the establishment of facts and you don't want to digress far off the target topic. This is part of the facilitation part, try not to have dominating leaders or managers facilitating the after action reviews. It should be a third party, somebody who's very objective. The middle bullet here is very important. To not base individual performance evaluations or any promotions on a mistake admitted in a review. That's one of the challenges in an after action review. Having people speak up and state that. Maybe they made a mistake. Maybe they need to do better next time. You can't really use that information against them and that's very important. I mentioned the meandering and disorganized discussions. Blame or fault this. Is not a finger pointed session and you have to make sure you avoid that. Probably the most important thing is that you can't conclude the after action review without a list of items learned to be applied in the future. So getting back to the case study here, Wisconsin experienced some unbelievable rains beginning June 7th and really lasting through June 24th of this past summer here. So it was basically a 17 day unplanned event that really had the Department of Transportation, county maintenance organizations, law enforcement, other public safety, Wisconsin emergency scrambling during these 17 days. Getting back toward the transportation side of things, the event caused multiple interstate closures and one in particular I'm going to talk about in a minute, really was a major one and it wasn't something that you could wait until the water receded a little bit. It was a longer term thing. The state emergency operations center, obviously was activated and there was let eye sons tonation dot help staff and I'm going to talk about what those folks are in a minute. But then as I mentioned, the after action reviews conducted in all five regions of the state. One was done here at the state traffic operations center and central office between July 1st and 21st. You can see shortly after the event it kind of quieted down. We were jumping right on the after action reviews. Continuation DOT has been very proactive in developing a formalin emergency transportation operations plan and this is kind of a work in progress. Based on even some winter weather planning. We did for a serious winter we had. Lot of folks had said that with the blizzards we had this year and the floods that these events kind of set us back and introduced some delay in the ETO plan. That's far from the truth. These events were really learning opportunities and really mother nature gave us an opportunity to learn from these things, which is really gone to hone the information that we put in the ETO plan. So some of the successes from the after action reviews, this is a quick graphic. Wisconsin is broken into five regions. Had excellent learning cooperation an coordination of the flooding was some what concentrated to the southwest, southeast, a little in the north central regions but the northwest different have a lot of the flooding or providing personnel or resources, northeast was providing structural engineers to help with the review of bridges and things like that. Really a great regional cooperation and coordination from the DOT's perspective. More of the success.Continuation help became -- was a concept and became a reality in four weeks. Prior to the floods we had been talking about Wisconsin needing representation or Wisconsin DOT needs representation in the emergency operations center. This is basically how continuation help personnel were borne. They generally are responsible for uation dot emergency operations coordination to ensure that the appropriate agencies and communication is available as needed. These positions get activated when there's a partial or full activation of the Wisconsin statewide EOC. So we had been talking about those and really when the flooding came about, we said we've got to put these things into motion at this point. The folks that had been identified as uation helpers really did a fantastic job of going in there without any sort of a play book and helping out with that coordination with Wisconsin emergency management. -- emergency management. Came from some of the folks that were working the event. As I mentioned Earl why I the strong support from the struck yule folks within uation dot and bridge inspections. That's really what the problem was. There was a lot of rising water and actually making some of the bridge decks float. The struck yule people had to get this there and take a look at that. As I mentioned before I94 between Milwaukee and mad sin there was a severe impact to westbound traffic and basically essentially westbound traffic was closed for a number of days. The southeast region and southwest region, they put their heads together and designed and contracted for and constructed a 94 cross over in four days which essentially moved traffic own to the eastbound lains to move things westbound. That was a phenomenal feat to do that in contract with high way vendor contractor to construct that. The state traffic operation center as I mentioned earlier served as a hub coordination and communication. There was a lot of good communication, for example with the Illinois toll way and providing information on what roads to take and not take in Wisconsin. The pitching in spirit was phenomenal. That happened to be father's day weekend and doing all the after action reviews there was a lot of dads that came to work on the fun day and pitched in to help. That was a phenomenal elements of the cooperation of the group here. As I mentioned before, what a fantastic basis for further development of the uation DOT emergency traffic operations plan. That gave us some things to think about and I think it's just going to make the plan that much more usable and relevant. Some of the recommendations that came out of the after action reviews, doing seven of these around the state, there were nearly 150 specific recommendations and we prioritized these in immediate, short and long term implementation. Some were pretty easy. This person needs to print out this map and laminate it and send it off to people. I didn't want to list all the 150 recommendations but some of the key ones include deploying a more sophisticated mapping system for tracking emergencies roadway closures and other information. Having a mechanism in place for implementing emergency contractor support and procurement. A lot of discussion, most of the regions kind of threw together a situation room in each of their region offices. Some had problems because these were conference rooms that were in the middle of the building an they didn't have cell coverage. Some were very tight in terms of getting the amount of people in there. A lot of them didn't have enough provisions for power for laptops and internet connections and things like that. The state as a whole is going to be looking at more of a standardized situation room in each region. While the unified command add-ins didn't command was generally followed an had some really good direction and support from the division of state patrol, which is actually a division under uation DOT, we recognize there's some areas we could improve in with that. One of the key elements of the ETO plan is going to be a major training component that's going to require some pretty detailed incident command training for all transportation staff. Another thing that rose to the surface and again, everybody was working real hard, but recognizing and set work hour limitations and develop staffing plans. There was some folks here at the TOC that were working 36 hours straight. While it gives the appearance of working hard, after probably ten hours or so you start losing your effectiveness. That has to be recognized when you are looking at these things. Clarification of roles and responsibilities from the state patrol, WEM, EOC, others. There was a little bit of confusion with that and we hope the ETO plan is going to clarify things with that. In conclusion. As I said before the management of a significant incident or emergency is not complete until an after action review is conducted. These would be formal. But for minor traffics in didn'ts we routinely do these debriefing and after action reviews for dailiness didn'ts that occur on the free way system in the Milwaukee area. They can be informal sometimes as long as you're documents what you need to do differently next time. As I medical examined, there's no -- mentioned there's so substitute for getting these things in every bodies vocabulary. These things are fantastic opportunity to learn. There's no substitute for hands on learning. The result has to go into an on going ETO program that is constantly looking at improving. Before I turn it over to questions, I have a quote I wanted to leave with everybody. This is one from one of my favorite books. The former NASA flight director for most of the gemini and Apollo missions. Failure is not an option. There's no feeling in the world to compare with the feeling you get on you know you blue it, you have to explain -- blew it. There's nookie'ses. I guess what I'm saying is it's okay to say that you blew. It's okay to recognize that it's a learning experience and you can going to be doing it better next time. It also tells you you have to be prepared for these things. Lastly, I want to put in a plug in and Laurie can jump in here as necessary. The past -- these presentations that we just provided to you today are really a snapshot of a major conference that's in the process of being planned for next March. The title of the conference is transportation operations for planned and unplanned events. It's going to be March 25-27 in Phoenix, Arizona. In coordination with the institute of transportation engineers 2009 technical conference which the team and title of that conference is transportation and operations and actions. When we were looking for a home for this conference which is a follow-up to the previously highly successful conferences on planned events, we recognize that there's a very strong connection and continuum for both planned and unplanned events and wanted to put it together in a conference to point out those similarities. That's what this conference is all about. We are looking for additional volunteers to help with it. I terms and conditions E is going to take a lot of the Admin -- I terms and conditions E is -- ITE. Like mike and Dale to present these key topics. As you can see from the slide here, Laurie and I are serving as co-chairs for the conference and our email addresses are there and we'd be delighted to have you join us for our planning teleconferences, which we actually have one tomorrow afternoon. If anybody is interested in joining us, drop us an email and we'll get you on the list and put you to work. With that Laurie and Jennifer, that's all I had for my presentation. Thank you everybody. Thanks Steve. That was a very good presentation. Which talked about the three key phases. Before we move onto questions, in addition to looking for volunteers, if you have a topic, we'll send a a question for abstracts. Keep an eye out for that request. Looking for paper submissions. We're just about finished with the design of the conference. Nationals in tent management system. Get comfortable with using those headers as it is the conference to be designed. We heard a lot of discussions in all three security management. Let's go to the first couple of questions. See how well I can read. The screen is far away and my eye site isn't very good. -- eyesight. We have a question for -- mike. Did you get much public feedback on the effectiveness on the 511 messages? Did you have a spike in call volume during the event state? Yes. We had a definite spike in number of calls that came in. We didn't get much editorial comment back, but we kind of look at our numbers to tell us a story and that weekend, we had approximately 18,000 calls. This was just over 20% the normal. We were getting a significant amount of calls. More significant to that, when you get into the 511 system, you are able to ask for specific interstate or city regional area. We also saw that our William's berg area on a typical month has less than 100 requests we were up to close to 1200 for that one weekend. We definitely saw that increased numbers. We definitely saw increased going to that Williams berg area object what's going on in that area. Also something that was key was the interunit 64 normally places third in number of requests for interstate 64 for traffic and it leads the state for that month and that weekend. We thought the numbers served the purpose of giving good feedback. A little bit of information, in our Williams berg included after the information regarding road conditions and traffic, we also included for James down events the planning number to their number 800 number so that if anyone wanted to get more information regarding the venue events they could call directly. That was real received also and well used. We wanted to make it as easy as possible to get the information that they wanted. I have a question for Steve here. From the Utah DOT traffic operation center. Did the Wisconsin groups organize as their own ICS incident commander or did they break up a sub unit resources to a larger ICS structure? Was there one multiple incident commanders. That's an excellent question and for this event, Wisconsin DOT was not the in didn't commander for the emergency on a state-wide basis. That really was the responsibility of Wisconsin emergency management. Was the incident command system followed to a T by whim. In some respects yes, but a lot of respects no. That's a lot of things we want to clarify under the ETO plan under development. Basically fell into more of a unified command structure an for many events and probably most events that would happen are emergencies in the state is typically going to be the situation unless there's a catastrophic bridge failure like the twin cities experience. So we're really trying to look at recognize that unified command is going to likely be the structure for dealing with and in didn't but recognizes also that under unified command you have to have your own house in order and we're going to certainly follow this in didn't command structure to make sure that happens. Thank you. I have another question for you Steve from the city of Vancouver. The Google map was it used for internal services this. It was largely used for internal purposes but it was also shared with the public to show where the closures were. Another purpose for it that I really didn't mention was that it was used for the over weight trucking and permitting type situations as well. It was shared during the event with the public but I'm not sure that we got any really good feedback on it's effectiveness. Thanks Steve. Any other questions? We don't have anything typed in, but I encourage you to think of anything in the meantime, we'll open the phone lines up. If you could give instructions on asking a question over the for. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one. Unmute your phone so that we can obtain your name. Once again, to ask a question, please press star one and to withdraw your question press star two. One moment. Once again to ask a question please press star one. While people are thinking of their questions, I have one for Dale and mike. I'll let you answer them after Dale. How are you building in your traffic incident management plan as you build your plan for the Olympics. How was your plan designed and how did you put it to use. Deal with during the [ Indiscernible: Speaker/Audio faint and unclear] I'll start with Dale. What we're doing right now is we actually think we're going to finalize the plan and details by the end of the year. What we're going to do then in tan dumb with getting operation already, we plan or formalizing what's the city's traffic incident response, how's it going to relate traffic management center that we'll be pulling together. In essence, that worked is going to be more structured an formalized in 2009. We look forward to hearing more about that. Mike? The incident management the VSP was our lead for coordination and determining response. In preparation for those types of issues, we use staging both VSP units themselves and then also for our safety service patrol, we expanded the number and increased the area for the safety service patrol. Also, around the local venue area, they also had some staged record type vehicles and equipment. But VSP was the lead. Really, we did not have anything significant that occurred. We had a couple of disabled vehicles that had to be attended to refuse to shutting down the road way to the VIP movement. That VSP would immediately do that and either coordinate for the removal or literally stay with the motorcade came through. VSP with our IM coordinator on that and we worked closely with them to respond accordingly. Okay. While we're waiting did we have any questions come over the phone? We do have one question that has come up. We have a question from Bob fry. You can ask your question. A table top exercise. I was curious what type of training protocol weren't through before that. What type of training was required before moving to a full exercise? Unfortunately, I don't have the specifics because we haven't formalized what they're going to be. It's going to be lead through our emergency management office. So they're taking the lead and formalizing that and they're going to include transportation in most, if not all the types of exercises that will be pulled together for our games time planning. If I could share with you federal highway produced a document last year it's available on the website how to conduct a table top exercise, the roles and responsibilities. Done for a table top exercise for planned and unplanned events. We did one at -- we held one during the plan special conference. Steve just held something like that, a section on the table top exercise at the IT conference last week. If you are interested in more information, send me an email and I'll be happy to help you out. At this time, we have no further questions on the audio. I guess the question that came to mind, they figured out how to handle the security so that people only had to go through a security check when they came into the venue and then they could go to the what tern cube or the birds nest. I guess that's a big question you're sorting out right now Dale and one you had to figure out in preparation for the event mic. Any thoughts -- mike. Any thoughts on how to handle these sorts of events, they'll continue to happen [ Indiscernible: Speaker/Audio faint and unclear] You go first mike. Well on our experience, the assessment was key and around the venue and the specifically, we were looking at the parking lot locations, distance, all the uniqueness of the locations, how it's related to the roadways and things of that nature. We were very cog any Zen to close down any roadways and work around that would create any type of opportunity. So the assessment was key. That was done months before and the plans really started for traffic control for access and both pedestrian and motor vehicle. Then also the traffic operations, as I mentioned from the ferry and from the primary route that weren't by the venue was very much controlled upon the activities within the venue. The assessment was key and also to make sure you had the right roles and responsibilities of the personal fell to do different things. Inspections. Moving MOT around. That was in the best thing that we could pull from is that we really applied the best practices for any assessments with maritime and the coast guard and pedestrian and motor vehicle. Okay. We do have another question on the audio portion from Chris of Utah DOT. You may ask your question. This is for Dale related to the Vancouver organizing. Here in salt lake I had direct involvement with salt lake games here and there's a number of things that we want to share with you guys but we can't go through it all here. We experienced various experiences with our building. We didn't plan on there was going to be a secure venue until a couple months before the games where we had to secure the par perimeter and put a barrier around it and credentialing people around the building. That created headaches when we were in the final planning stages. Also one head ache was some of our staff was directly involved in the salt lake organizing excite tee to get their venue issues worked out. Then we had to be called in to train our internal staff. That created an additional burden on schedules and getting your job done. Think about those things as you go into the final months here. It will start getting interesting soon. We started putting up way finding signs for venues and park an rides. A lot of the public consumed a lot of our time that we weren't pointing them in the right direction. A lot of people they can't go to the venues the way they normally do during nongame vents. Work through that to understand that locals can't go to the venues that they normally would for a regular hockey game or some other event. As far as transitioning out of the games to para Olympics, we didn't seem to have an immediate back rush of traffic. Things scale down very fast. Security almost evaporated and it was not nearly as difficult to get through. We kind of coasted through our para Olympics. It was very easy. A lot more roads became open. Our DOT didn't quite plan on how soon. I'm glad you guys had the timeline further ahead. Not sure when things were going to happen downtown. Going to go into the Olympic schedule seemingly the day before opening ceremonies and I said no we need to start a week before because that's when we start making mayor closures and putting our team in to place and dress rehearsals were opening before the ceremonies. Finally, the currency patrol issue of getting people out of the road. That was great. A couple other things I made notes on. Anyway, we'd like to spend more time talking about that. I know there's a tour coming here soon from folks in your area to meet with us. So hopefully we can cover more of that. A lot more details of what happened that's hard to plan for in some of these big huge events. Thanks for an opportunity to share that. That was very helpful. I think you made very clear, when these things get underway the planning that's needed, how do you capture that information so you can share it with the next group that handles an event. It shouldn't stay in the room. In any way any you have done these major events to help us get the word out on how to keep that knowledge and information alive and moving along so that what Chris learned doesn't get lost in the next event would be valuable. One more quit comment. The security sweeps that took place at the venues, we didn't have good lead time. We close the street by the date but the resources of the security teams to sweep the venue and have their doings go through and call it clean, needed to happen a few days, sometimes prior to when we anticipated when we closed that roadway. That caught us by surprise at a couple of venues. It's hard to plan for all those things. When you tell the public it's going to be a surgeon way, it's -- certain way, it's hard to deal with. If you could just follow up an get me your contact info we can talk again some time soon. I took your email off the website and I'll send you my contact information. That's very helpful. If we don't have any additional questions, we'll go ahead and close out for today. Thank you to all three presenters and Laurie for moderating today's Webinar. To wrap up this webcast I'll give a little information about NTOC. Organizations of NTOC. You can go to the website. To find out more about the organization. The NTOC website also contains information about webcasts as well as the webcast ash keeps an the recording for these. All previous operations webcasts there as well. There's also two discussion forums. One focused on high level or strategic issues and ITS deployment issues. I believe those forms have been upgraded. I encourage you to take a look. Extensive set of resources and links in the ITS area. Also the NTOC newsletter. It's available online and also available through a free sub quick. You can sign up for the emails through the NTOC website. That concludes our webcast for today. Thank you to the presenters, Laurie and to all the attendees. Have a good day. (end)