Recovery

It could be argued that recovery is something paratransit agencies of all sizes do daily as part of normal operations. Schedulers and dispatchers arrange trips for the coming day, matching up vehicles and drivers. Vehicles come in off the road and are fueled, cleaned, maintained, and prepared to go back on the road again. Recovery depends on the right things happening in the right sequence.

Paratransit providers that experience a disaster event must have a plan for post-event recovery. The recovery phase starts after the immediate threat to human life has subsided. Recovery efforts involve getting paratransit employees back to work; re-establishing a reliable supply chain; inspecting and servicing vehicles; repairing or replacing essential equipment; and restoring power, communications, and computer systems. A significant effort to document damage to facilities, vehicles, or equipment will be needed to pursue cost recovery through insurance or liability settlements. Costs incurred during emergency response operations may be eligible for reimbursement through FEMA or state or county authorities, but only if carefully documented and verified.

6.A Reconstitution

6.A.1 Essential Life-Support Services

Providing life-sustaining medical trips, such as transportation to dialysis centers, is the top paratransit priority before, during, and after emergencies or disasters. Your paratransit agency may generally know which customers need life-sustaining medical transportation services, but you may not be certain where these customers are located at any given moment. Thus, your agency needs to plan as much as possible to provide essential life-sustaining transportation for pre-identified customers. This planning should include a system to track customer locations even though this may become a challenge during community emergencies when evacuees take up temporary residences and basic communications systems such as phones and the Internet are often disrupted.

If local medical facilities are closed due to adverse conditions or damage to their facility, trips may need to be scheduled to medical facilities outside of the area. Conversely, people who have been evacuated out of their areas of residence and into your jurisdiction may add to paratransit demand.

In an emergency, paratransit customers may find shelter at the very care centers, medical facilities, and senior centers with which paratransit normally works. Customers may also end up at emergency shelters established by the American Red Cross, Salvation Army, churches, or other voluntary organizations. Paratransit managers or supervisors may need to coordinate with shelter providers to identify people with critical transportation needs and develop strategies for scheduling non-emergency medical trips more efficiently.

Considerations

• Lack of information regarding the medical needs of evacuees can result in paratransit providers being deployed to transport evacuees who may require a higher level of medical or psychological care than paratransit is able or qualified to provide. This is more likely in populated urban/suburban areas where the sheer number of people involved may become difficult to manage effectively.
• Paratransit providers should carefully document and track passenger information such as facility dropoff location and phone number, passenger personal cell phone number, passenger emergency contact information, and passenger functional equipment needs.
• In rural/tribal environments, paratransit is more likely to have an existing relationship with area residents that have access and functional needs. Also, the smaller number of customers makes these individuals easier to track and manage.
• In advance-notice events, customers may be able to schedule medical treatments in advance of the disaster and otherwise prepare to "weather the storm."

Effective Practices

• Communities with disaster experience often establish a transportation group within the EOC to manage critical transportation needs. Incident managers may also establish a special advisor on the topic of access and functional needs. The paratransit agency representative is often tasked with one or both of these roles based on his or her knowledge of and experience working with the disability community.
• Some agencies will deploy paratransit staff to shelters to coordinate transportation needs with shelter managers. This type of face-to-face interaction can help establish better strategies for triaging medical trips between ambulance, paratransit, and public transit resources.
• Due to vehicle size, available floor space, and the wheelchair lift, paratransit vehicles can provide a practical solution for transporting essential life-supporting goods as well as people. As a result, in early stages of recovery, paratransit is sometimes pressed into service to transport ice, food, water, oxygen, medical supplies, and other essential goods.

Strategy

• Your paratransit agency's commitment to its regular customers, and to the community at large, underscores the importance of sustaining essential life-support transportation services as long as possible during emergencies, as well as reconstituting suspended paratransit service as soon as possible after emergencies or disasters. When resuming service, your agency may also have to consider strategies to provide transportation outside your normal service area due to disaster impacts on local medical treatment facilities.

Tool: Essential Life-Support Services

Resource for Urban/Suburban and Rural/Tribal Areas

• Prioritizing Trips

http://bussafety.fta.dot.gov/show_resource.php?id=4182

This excerpt from "Guidance for Paratransit Emergency Planning" presents examples of the trip-priority procedures of several agencies that were interviewed for a study on paratransit emergency planning.

6.A.2 Restoring Service

Restoration of service involves returning paratransit service delivery systems to their pre-emergency conditions. Elements critical to restoring service include facilities, vehicles, and information and communication systems. Depending on the severity of the emergency, service restoration may have to be addressed in stages, most likely concentrating on life-safety transportation issues first, and then ramping up service as mission-critical resources become available.

Considerations

• Urban/suburban transit systems are more likely to have established disaster recovery plans, although they may not consider issues unique to paratransit operations.
• Rural/tribal paratransit providers are less likely to have devoted time and effort to developing disaster recovery plans. As a result, they may find service restoration more challenging.
• In rural/tribal service areas, it is more likely that the paratransit providers know their customers and their travel patterns and, therefore, can more easily address restoration concerns.
• Advance-notice emergencies provide a window of opportunity to develop recovery plans before disaster strikes.

Effective Practices

• In community emergencies, many paratransit agencies rely on guidance from the EOC regarding when to resume service. In local emergencies, paratransit agencies often make that decision themselves.
• A common threshold for resuming regular paratransit service is the resumption of fixed-route transit services and school bus transportation.
• Paratransit managers have found that the situational awareness needed to make good decisions about service resumption depends a great deal on interagency communication, coordination, and cooperation.
• Most paratransit agencies will phase in service resumption, beginning with non-emergency medical trips, then adding additional service based on resource availability.

Strategy

• Advance planning for reconstituting paratransit service increases efficiency and resiliency when an emergency occurs or disaster strikes. Develop service restoration plans in coordination with other transportation modes and providers. This may involve entering into MAAs with industry partners. Share your service restoration plans with paratransit customers, partner agencies, and emergency management.
• Since normal procedures may be modified or suspended following an emergency, work priorities during the recovery phase must be communicated clearly and consistently to employees.

Tool: Restoring Service

Resources for Urban/Suburban and Rural/Tribal Areas

• Managing Transportation Recovery

http://bussafety.fta.dot.gov/show_resource.php?id=4158

This excerpt from the USDOT "Recovering from Disasters: The National Transportation Recovery Strategy" resource provides recommendations on preparing for and managing the transportation recovery process.

• Frequently Asked Disaster Recovery Questions

http://bussafety.fta.dot.gov/show_resource.php?id=4159

This excerpt from FTA's "Disaster Response and Recovery Resource for Transit Agencies," published in 2006, provides answers to some pertinent transportation questions about disaster recovery.

6.B Reentry

Reentry is the returning of people to the residences from which they were evacuated. Estimating the number and types of paratransit vehicles required for reentry service can be challenging. In addition to communication gaps that sometimes occur between shelter managers and paratransit providers, people staying in emergency shelters will often make their own transportation arrangements for reentry, skewing the numbers shelter managers are tracking.

Paratransit providers returning people home after disasters have encountered a variety of difficulties en route, including access hazards caused by disaster debris and a lack of power or other utilities that make homes habitable and safe. This issue is of particular concern for people with access and functional needs and can be largely prevented through better interagency coordination.

Another important consideration when planning for reentry is a method for documenting who has been transported and the location and time of the dropoff, as this information can be essential for emergency managers as well as the families and friends of those utilizing paratransit services.

Considerations

• Reentry is a challenge in urban/suburban and rural/tribal environments.
• In the rural/tribal setting, there may be a greater propensity to initiate reentry before infrastructure is fully restored. This, combined with greater distances of travel, can be a significant concern for people with access and functional needs.
• Due to the size and scope of operations, it is more likely that paratransit personnel in rural/tribal environments understand the support needs of their customers.
• Evacuees from advance-notice emergencies are more likely to have identified their own sources of transportation and are less likely to need the support of paratransit during reentry.

Effective Practices

• Close coordination between emergency management and transportation agencies, including paratransit, helps alleviate some of the resource management challenges involved with mobilizing for reentry.
• Close coordination between paratransit and public utilities, public works, fire and rescue, law enforcement, and human service agencies helps relieve some of the challenges of reentry, particularly for people with access and functional needs.
• Assigning two employees to paratransit vehicles can help reentry operations significantly. One staff member is able to maintain passenger manifest information and provide personal assistance, while the other concentrates on operational safety.
• In cases where local paratransit resources are not fully operational or are overwhelmed by demand, drivers and vehicles from neighboring jurisdictions can be used to augment local paratransit resources.

Strategy

• Pre-planning and close coordination between paratransit, emergency management, public utilities, public safety, law enforcement, and shelter managers will help alleviate problems often associated with reentry, particularly as it relates to people with access and functional needs.
• During reentry, your paratransit agency may find it necessary to track the identity of customers, as well as the location and time of each passenger pickup and dropoff, and then share this information with emergency management at the conclusion of reentry missions.

Tool: Reentry Concerns

Resource for Urban/Suburban and Rural/Tribal Areas

• Reentry and Return to Readiness

http://bussafety.fta.dot.gov/show_resource.php?id=4168

Chapter 8 of FHWA's "Evacuating Populations with Special Needs" discusses the issues that need to be addressed before and during reentry, and also post-event.

6.C Post-Disaster Service Assessment

Disasters can radically affect the demand for paratransit services and require your agency to alter hours of service, days of service, and areas served. Long-term recovery can be hampered if your agency is unprepared to adjust to possible new service demands.

Increases in the demand for paratransit services may be temporary as disaster victims recuperate from injuries or identify resident care centers that curtail their travel needs. Changes in demand for services may also be long-term due to migration patterns caused by the disaster. Paratransit agencies must be flexible in their approach to managing increased demand.

Considerations

• Changes in service demand are partly a function of the magnitude of a disaster. The larger the disaster, the greater the change in riding patterns.
• Disasters tend to have a more significant effect on travel patterns in urban/suburban areas, as current residents relocate and new residents move in.
• Rural/tribal areas tend to experience fewer changes in demographics and demand than urban/suburban environments, but with fewer resources, rural paratransit agencies can find it more difficult to adapt to such changes.

Effective Practices

• APTA, CTAA, and some state DOTs have established registries that allow transit systems to volunteer to assist other transit agencies during or after emergencies. Many paratransit providers have relied on these programs to temporarily augment capacity, utilizing drivers and vehicles from other transit agencies across the region.
• Some paratransit agencies have instituted an expedited paratransit eligibility certification process or temporarily waived eligibility certification requirements in order to meet the increased demand for paratransit services during recovery.

Strategy

• The possibility of an increased demand for paratransit services following a disaster underscores the need for a post-disaster service assessment. This demand may necessitate expanded days and hours of service, alteration of normal routes, and, if your agency is not a provider of general public demand-response service, a temporary waiver or expediting of paratransit eligibility certification.

Tool: Post-Disaster Service Assessment

Resource for Urban/Suburban and Rural/Tribal Areas

• Post-Disaster Service Assessment—Del Norte EF-1 After-Action Report

http://bussafety.fta.dot.gov/show_resource.php?id=4122

This report from the CalACT website details the disaster response activities of Del Norte County transportation during the tsunami of March 2011 and documents strengths and areas for improvement in the Del Norte County transportation emergency management system.

6.D Restitution

6.D.1 Post-Crisis Counseling

A significant post-crisis consideration is whether employees are ready and able to return to work. Emotional stress, physical injury, loss of loved ones, loss of property, and disruption of normal routines may limit the availability and energy of essential paratransit personnel. Restitution plans need to include the availability of therapy or counseling services for employees traumatized by an emergency.

Considerations

• Urban/suburban paratransit systems are more likely to have Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) to support crisis-counseling needs. On the other hand, it can be more difficult for larger agencies to foster the informal peer support that can also help alleviate post-traumatic stress.
• Rural/tribal systems tend to rely on informal peer support more than formal EAPs, although many have identified local counseling resources for employee referrals. There is no substitute for professional counseling or other supportive interventions for employees suffering from post-traumatic stress.
• Post-traumatic stress tends to be more prevalent after no-notice emergencies and disasters than after advance-notice emergencies where individuals can prepare themselves and their loved ones for the challenges they may face.

Effective Practices

• Agencies that make employee support part of their emergency planning efforts have found that a high percentage of their staff reports for work both during and after an emergency.
• Agencies that provide employee support as part of their emergency planning effort report higher employee retention rates following serious accidents, emergencies, and disasters.

Strategy

• When developing plans for restoring paratransit assets to their pre-emergency conditions, it is vital that paratransit managers consider the needs of their most essential asset: paratransit human resources. Ensure that all paratransit employees have access to some type of therapy or counseling to help them deal with any psychological trauma brought about by an emergency or disaster.

Tool: Post-Crisis Counseling

Resources for Urban/Suburban and Rural/Tribal Areas

• Managing After a Disaster

http://bussafety.fta.dot.gov/show_resource.php?id=4143

A disaster creates unusual challenges for management if staff are suffering from its effects. Emotional stress, physical injury, bereavement, loss of property, and disruption of normal routines may limit the availability and energy of employees. The suggestions in this excerpt from Chapter 6 of "Handling Traumatic Events-A Manager's Handbook" are general principles that can help a business structure disaster response.

• Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Report 22: Helping Airport and Air Carrier Employees Cope with Traumatic Events

http://www.trb.org/main/blurbs/162365.aspx

This report provides insight and practical guidance to address the difficult emotional and psychological implications in response and exposure to traumatic events. These traumatic events can be the result of human-made accidents, acts of terrorism, or natural disasters that have occurred at, in the vicinity of, or resulting from the operation of an air carrier at an airport.

6.D.2 Documenting Damage

It is a standard practice to fill out a report following a paratransit vehicle collision with facts carefully documented, statements noted or recorded from witnesses and those involved, and photos taken of the scene and relevant damage. Along these same lines, damage to buildings, facilities, equipment, or vehicles related to an emergency event or disaster response needs to be accurately documented and reported for risk management, insurance, and cost recovery purposes.

Any work-related personal injuries need to be reported and processed through the worker's compensation system, the agency's risk management function, and other internal administrative reporting processes as appropriate.

Insurance may cover costs for buildings, facilities, equipment, and vehicles damaged in a natural disaster event. Local government may provide additional blanket liability coverage if losses were incurred under its authority. Though there are typically additional forms and reporting requirements, state and federal government may provide additional coverage for uninsured and underinsured losses suffered during a state or federally declared emergency.

Considerations

• Paratransit agencies that are part of a government entity in urban/suburban environments are often self-insured. Urban/suburban paratransit agencies that are managed separately or contracted to a service provider will typically carry their own insurance.
• Some urban/suburban or rural/tribal systems may be part of a state-wide insurance pool or other group insurance consortium that increases the risk pool and helps defray costs.
• Some rural/tribal systems buy insurance policies that have a high deductible, making the policy affordable but devastating to the agency if it is involved in a catastrophic event.
• Contracted paratransit service providers may not share the same liability limits as governmental entities and may not be eligible for state and federal disaster aid.

Effective Practices

• Transit and paratransit agencies with robust risk management and system safety programs have established mechanisms to accurately document accidents, incidents, and damage incurred during emergencies or disasters and the subsequent emergency response.

Strategy

• Encourage staff to maintain logs of their actions during an emergency. In the recovery phase, compile an overall summary of actions that details key statistics of services rendered. Commit the chronological timeline of events to writing.
• Immediately debrief all personnel involved with emergency operations to capture details about the events, activities, and difficulties encountered. Ensure that staff does not feel intimidated to report the truth about events that occurred. Conduct a more systematic debriefing within two weeks of the incident. The resulting assessment of response and recovery actions will provide valuable information for you to modify your EOP.

Tool: Documenting Damage

Resource for Urban/Suburban and Rural/Tribal Areas

• Emergency Recovery Documentation—After-Action Reports, Debriefing, and Assessment

http://bussafety.fta.dot.gov/show_resource.php?id=3749

This excerpt from the "Guidebook for Emergency Management Planning for Texas Transit Agencies" discusses what should be included in AARs and the topics for debriefings. It also provides a form to record information on vehicles/equipment used during an emergency.

6.D.3 Reimbursement

Following large-scale emergencies or natural disasters, state officials will make a formal disaster declaration and request federal aid if recovery costs exceed the combined resources of local and state governments. If a presidential declaration is made, the way is cleared for federal resources and funding to support recovery efforts.

To be eligible for reimbursement, paratransit providers should be NIMS compliant and have accurate records of emergency response mission assignments that were formally directed by the EOC. There should also be an MOU in place with emergency management regarding the provider's disaster roles and responsibilities, particularly if the service provider is a quasi-governmental or non-governmental agency. If the above standards are not met, the paratransit provider may not be eligible for reimbursement it might otherwise have been entitled to for vehicles, fuel, staff, and other resources used during emergency response activities.

Reimbursement challenges are often greater when contracted paratransit services are involved in emergency response. The contractor normally will comply with service requests from the controlling agency, and such requests are usually billed at prevailing rates. However, if the controlling agency is not reimbursed for monies it has paid out to a contractor, this can negatively affect its budget and possibly hinder its ability to support normal operations in the future.

Considerations

• Both urban/suburban and rural/tribal paratransit providers should proactively work with emergency management to develop systems that ensure eligibility for federal, state, and local disaster relief funds for paratransit resources utilized during a community emergency response.

Effective Practices

• In locales where paratransit and emergency management communicate and plan ahead, paratransit providers have established cost-accounting systems that enable them to provide fully allocated cost/hour and cost/mile expenses for resources used during emergency response and recovery. Providers that have carefully documented all mission assignments and related tasks improve their position in the reimbursement process.
• Many state DOTs provide guidance to paratransit systems on federal and state reimbursement requirements.
• While local government is the normal conduit for disaster aid, in certain cases, state agencies and national associations have stepped in on behalf of transit and paratransit agencies experiencing difficulty receiving state and federal reimbursement.

Strategy

• Reimbursement for the services your paratransit agency provides in support of community emergency response efforts may come from the local government based on existing agreements, state and federal disaster aid programs, and/or insurance.
• Be familiar with requirements, processes, and documentation necessary for reimbursement, such as FEMA's Stafford Act. Capturing the required documentation should be integrated into emergency procedures, as necessary. To ensure you understand all reimbursement documentation requirements, you are encouraged to coordinate with the state DOT, state emergency management agency, local FTA region, and other key stakeholders.
• To be eligible for disaster cost reimbursement, have a signed agreement with emergency management that details your agency's emergency response roles and ensure that services were delivered in accordance with mission assignments coming from the EOC and were performed within the "incident period," as defined in formal disaster proclamations. Formal agreements should detail deployment protocols as well as reimbursement strategies.

Tool: Reimbursement

FTA, in its "Disaster Response and Recovery Resource for Transit Agencies," provides the following information on paratransit post-disaster reimbursement.

Resources for Urban/Suburban and Rural/Tribal Areas

• Incident Management Overview

http://bussafety.fta.dot.gov/show_resource.php?id=4157

This diagram, excerpted from the USDOT document "Recovering from Disasters: The National Transportation Recovery Strategy," presents a brief overview of the federal disaster declaration process, incident management, and financial assistance.

• FEMA and FTA Disaster Funding Information

http://bussafety.fta.dot.gov/show_resource.php?id=4160

This excerpt from Chapter 3 of FTA's "Disaster Response and Recovery Resource for Transit Agencies," published in 2006, provides information on funding that FEMA and FTA can provide toward disaster response activities.

• Possible Funding Sources for Paratransit Agencies for Emergency Preparedness

http://bussafety.fta.dot.gov/show_resource.php?id=4223

This resource outlines possible funding sources for transit agencies to enhance their operational capabilities in reference to safety, security, and emergency preparedness concerns.

• Disaster Declaration Process

http://bussafety.fta.dot.gov/show_resource.php?id=4224

This resource outlines protocols for disaster declaration at the federal, state, and local levels.