Emergency Call Center Helps Kentucky Rescuers Locate 167 Missing Persons
Communications disrupted after December Tornado Outbreak
“We had to mobilize one of the largest search and rescue efforts that have ever been mobilized in Hopkins County…That was a large undertaking. We had a disaster that extended way beyond our local capabilities. I mean I’m talking, light years beyond our capabilities.”
ITDRC’s Tech Task Force was activated within hours after a tornado outbreak that ripped through five states last December, just 2 weeks before Christmas. Tech teams were dispatched to Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, and Kentucky to conduct needs assessments, and ensure first responders and emergency management officials could communicate.
Hopkins County, located in Western Kentucky was struck by multiple tornadoes, including a deadly EF4 which completely overwhelmed every resource they had available. The damage was so widespread that nearby cities, counties, and regional response jurisdictions were equally overwhelmed.
“We immediately requested federal assistance because it was huge. It’s really hard to plan for something when you lose nearly 75% of a local community. It’s hard to plan on that level,” said Nick Bailey, emergency manager for Hopkins County, who’s in charge of response and recovery efforts.
Search and rescue teams are typically looking for a single individual or maybe a group of people that have gone missing while on a hike. After the Kentucky tornado though, Bailey and his team were responsible for locating 167 missing people. A task the county had never surmounted before.
Where do you even start? Hopkins deployed 500 people, sifting through rubble for almost 4800 hours. But as Bailey pointed out, you can’t find that many people by walking through the woods knocking on doors.
The search and rescue teams kept running into one critical obstacle — Communications.
“We had to rely on a lot of local communications, we had to rely on local port to port radio communications. And we had to rely on really good briefings to get people situated because the lack of cellular service, the lack of internet connectivity, the lack of fiber connectivity, and our county’s public safety radio system went down — and it just presented a big challenge to coordinate that,” Bailey remembers.
Then Bailey connected with an ITDRC Tech Team. It was rounding out to day 3 after the storm and still 167 missing, no one had stopped working.
The biggest gap the county needed to fill was a call center, so loved ones could report missing friends and family members. Officials also needed the phone lines to contact friends, family members, and employers of missing persons to document when they last spoke, obtain their last known location, and gather contact information to notify relatives once individuals were located.
A call center was not in the emergency plan. They had never needed one before now, a situation Bailey describes as “just chaos.”
“I remember saying hold on, don’t leave, let us get a couple of things in motion. When I heard what ITDRC could offer, I was listening…and he sparked an interest here,” said Bailey “The one thing that I am thankful for is that ITDRC showed up in the middle of everything.”
In addition to providing a call center at the county’s Emergency Operations Center in Madisonville, ITDRC was able to work alongside the county in another capacity; helping to search for missing people online. A team of remote volunteers scoured the internet looking for digital footprints of people reported as missing. The process, sometimes referred to as open source intelligence, or OSINT, involved searching social media profiles for recent posts or other activity.
As Bailey would later point out, not everyone on the list was in the hospital; some people don’t keep their phones in their pocket or right next to them. It could be in another room charging when a tornado strikes, and suddenly you have a large number of people without phones and everyone they know is calling.
Within 90 minutes of Bailey’s request, the call center was online, and Hopkins pushed the phone number out across social media and local TV stations with a simple message — If you need anything, call. Emergency management utilized the platform to share information regarding food and shelter services for survivors, as well as a way to follow up with family members who reported the missing. And quickly the chaos organized.
“It ran on every local media outlet we ever had, radio, TV, I believe it actually ran on a couple of national stations as well.”
Five days after the call center was installed, all 167 were accounted for.
“The fact that ITDRC was able to bring in this kit and use it as a call center was a life saver,” said Bailey’’ We were able to locate 100% of the people unaccounted for.”
Hopkins County has a long recovery ahead after surviving the largest tornado to impact the area since 2005, but they can do so whole, as a community that stuck together because as Bailey says, “there’s nothing worse than not knowing.”
Officials admit they’ve learned from this event, and are working to revise emergency plans to include a call center for future emergencies — and engaging the ITDRC team.
“That is something on our to do list. It will be a part of our search and rescue plan, it’s good practice,” said Bailey “ITDRC is a valuable resource to have, especially for these smaller counties that have limited resources.”
The call center is no longer in operation, officially closing in late January.
