In mid-July, Ulster County Executive Pat Ryan declared a state of emergency due to severe thunderstorms, which downed trees blocking roadways, resulted in around 14,000 power outages, and saw both a tornado and macroburst hit the ground roughly along the border of the towns of Hurley and Ulster.
In a Thursday, July 14 press release, Ryan spoke of the storm damage, and briefly touched upon the emergency response.
“I have committed county resources to provide critical emergency services and to clear our roadways safely and efficiently,” Ryan said. “Additionally, we have activated our Emergency Operations Center and are working closely with local officials to respond to storm impacts…”
Last week, Hudson Valley One spoke to Everett Erichsen, the county’s director of the Department of Emergency Services, about how the response unfolded, beginning with a notification from the National Weather Service about an extreme weather report on Wednesday, July 13 that expired at 8:15 p.m., 10 minutes before the storm actually hit.
“The expiration happened because the winds had started to die down and the storm didn’t reach the strength that they were initially predicting,” Erichsen said. “The weather (report) was wrong.”
Erichsen has been in his current role for a little over a year, but has a wealth of experience in emergency management, having previously served as the Ulster County deputy director and fire coordinator for the Department of Emergency Services since 2017. He also works as a volunteer firefighter with the Highland Fire Department and as a part-time police officer in the town of Marlborough. He’s previously worked for the New York State Division of Homeland Security and served as the chairman of the Board of Directors for the Ulster County Fire Chiefs Association.
After the storm hit, the county activated its emergency operation center and moved from standard to enhanced monitoring, an all-hands-on-deck situation.
“That brings in all administration staff from the Department of Emergency Services,” Erichsen said. “Our emergency manager, our fire coordinator…And we started having regular briefings with the county executive and deputy county executive to discuss the effect the storm was having on the county.”
Erichsen said the emergency operation center received 267 calls to 911 between 8 p.m. and midnight, the night of the storm.
“That is a huge amount of calls,” he said. “We ran numbers for the two days prior, and we’re looking at 50 calls in that timeframe.”
Initially, the calls were about wires down and trees blocking roadways. But soon there were reports of downs trees on houses and cars.
“Thankfully there were no injuries,” Erichsen said. “But based off of reports that we were getting from our boots on the ground, the fire service, law enforcement, DPW crews, we decided to request that the National Weather Service come in and look at the damage.”
Erichsen said the reports were similar to an incident on May 15, 2018 when a tornado touched down along Route 212 between Woodstock and Saugerties before crossing the Hudson River and ending in Tivoli, south of the Clermont State Historic Site.
This time around, the county used drones provided by the Ulster County Sheriff’s Department and New York State Police, which helped give an aerial perspective on the damage wrought by the storm.
Meanwhile, the emergency operation center sifted through the high volume of calls, a disproportionate number coming from the City of Kingston, in part due to its dense population, Erichsen said.
The remainder of the calls came from places like Hurley, Lamontville, Stone Ridge, and the Town of Ulster.
Erichsen said there were reports of around 50 road closures, though he added that a closure is identified by blockages. Two blockages on a single roadway counts as two closures.
There were also reports of just under 300 wires down, though Erichsen said Central Hudson responded quickly to those, and roughly 95 percent of those who lost power on the evening of Wednesday, July 13, had it restored within 24 hours.
“That’s really good,” Erichsen said. “Everybody moved really, really fast.”
That response is often slower in other times of the year, he added.
“The weather in July is completely different than the weather in February,” Erichsen said. “Ice slows everybody down in February.”
By Thursday, county officials were meeting with a representative of the New York State Office of Emergency Management.
“Basically, their role was to assist us in bringing in additional assets from New York State to assist with the cleanup,” he said.
Coordinated cleanup lasted over a week, with the goal of returning the county as much as possible to the way it was before the storm hit.
“Let’s get everything back to the way it really should be, Erichsen said.
Despite the expiration of the National Weather Service’s extreme weather report 10 minutes before extreme weather hit the area, Erichsen said the county response worked because they plan for a wide range of potential weather emergencies.
“We do a lot of blue sky planning,” Erichsen said. “We do a lot of tabletops. And that’s helped us prepare for what occurred last week. And after every storm, we do an after action report, or AAR, and we sit down and discuss what went well and what didn’t go so well, and how we’re going to address that moving forward to make sure that we have nothing but the best response for our communities.”
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