NJ EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS CONFERENCE SCHEDULED

The New Jersey Emergency Preparedness Association is holding its annual Emergency Preparedness Conference April 28 to 29 at the Tropicana Casino Resort, Atlantic City, NJ.
More than 1,500 attendees are expected to attend the conference, now in its seventh year. Pre-conference training opportunities cover a wide variety of topics of interest to emergency management professionals. These intensive half-day to three-day sessions are taught by leading professionals who are active in the emergency management field. More than 24 breakout sessions in five topic tracks are offered at the conference.

For the second consecutive year a golf outing will be held at the nearby Blue Heron Pines Golf Club.

More than 100 exhibitors are expected. The conference offers products and services for all aspects of emergency management. Exhibitor and sponsor registration is now open. For more information, visit www.njepa.org.

Two bills of importance to the hurricane protection industry are working their ways through the Florida legislature: SB 1232 and HB 835. The bills seek to remove the option of designing for internal pressure for residential structures from the state statute and return oversight to the Florida Building Commission (FBC).

In its 2005 Report to the Florida legislature, the Florida Building Commission—the entity charged with writing the Florida Building Code—is seeking legislative authority from the 2005 legislature to update the standard for Minimum Design Loads for Buildings and Other Structures within the code development process and to remove the provisions that allow for designing for internal pressure for residential structures from the Laws of Florida and grant it the authority to address the issue through the code development process. (For more on this topic, see IHPA News, page 10).

The internal pressure design was removed from the 2004 Supplement to the International Residential Code (IRC) and the 2005 version of ASCE 7 (the structural design standard used in the Florida Building Code) because the structures would be left vulnerable to water damage when the glass windows and doors were broken by debris during a hurricane.

The bills also seek to remove the current prohibition against applying wind-borne debris region standards in the Florida Panhandle beyond one mile from the coast and to allow the Florida Building Commission to address the issue through the code development process because the experts within the Florida Building Commission are in a better position to evaluate technical information and apply it to the building code.

FORMER SECRETARY EVANS PRESENTED EXALTED, SATIRCAL HONORS BY HURRICANE HUNTERS

Outgoing U.S. Commerce Secretary Donald Evans left office in February with a potent reminder of the 2004 hurricane season and his foray into Hurricane Ivan aboard a NOAA P-3 “Hurricane Hunter” aircraft. Evans is the first Cabinet member to venture into the turbulent eyewall of a hurricane aboard a NOAA plane.

The NOAA Corps pilots and navigator and civilian crew of flight engineers, meteorologists and electronics engineers from the NOAA Aircraft Operations Center who flew with Secretary Evans on September 13 provided him with a tongue-in-cheek certificate reserved for the brave of heart.

Secretary Evans was presented with the “Native Hurricane Rovers Protective Exalted Order of Eyeball Penetrators” award, which states in part: “Be it known that Donald Evans has this day joined our loyal order by purposefully penetrating in fearless fashion to the very eyeball of a viscous hurricanomaxious of West Indian Origin. This selfless example of heroic devotion to the extension of scientific lore commends that which is of him remaining to your high esteem.”

Ivan was third in the parade of four storms (Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne) that struck Florida during the 2004 Atlantic hurricane season within a six-week period (see HP, Fall 2004, page 16). During the intense hurricane activity, the NOAA Aircraft Operations Center (AOC) in Tampa, FL, had the two NOAA hurricane hunters and Gulfstream IV surveillance jet constantly flying into the storms and keeping NOAA personnel literally in the air for days at a time. During this period, AOC had to evacuate its facilities while remaining operational. Secretary Evans picked the worst of the storms—a Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale—to fly through.

NOAA ACTIVATES 500TH OBSERVATION, REFERENCE STATION

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has activated the 500th site into its National Continuously Operating Reference Station (CORS) network, which spans the United States, most of its territories and a few foreign countries. Administered under the NOAA Ocean Service’s National Geodetic Survey, each CORS site features a ground-based sensor that provides free navigational and scientific data.

“CORS provides an invaluable tool for navigational, climate and weather-related data that will have a measurable impact on the economy and an incalculable impact on human safety,” said retired Navy Vice Adm. Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Ph.D., under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator.

CORS can be used to track the path of a moving platform, such as a plane, a boat or a land vehicle, with an accuracy of less than a foot. This capability was applied with precise distance-measuring instrumentation aboard an aircraft to produce high-resolution maps for segments of the U.S. coast to assess the damage caused by several hurricanes during last year.

Additionally, meteorologists use CORS data to monitor the distribution of moisture in the lower atmosphere to predict the amount of precipitation that may occur during a forthcoming storm.