Overview
On 15 October 2005 at 4:56 o'clock
a.m., a rear end collision caused the derailment and subsequent
explosion of a tank car of propylene located in the rail yard
near Texarkana, Arkansas. About 2000 households were evacuated,
seven people were sent to hospitals and one person living near
the railroad tracks died in the incident. The EAS was not used
as a public alert system. This was confirmed for me through interviews
with the Miller County Emergency manager, the National Weather
Service in Shreveport, LA, and the operations manager of the LP1
Clear Channel Radio KKYR.
FINDINGS
Summary of verified EAS Activation
1. No EAS Transmitted or Issued. LP1 (Clear Channel) Radio KKYR
Discussion
Like Graniteville, Texarkana is located near a state line.
The state emergency warning plan calls for radio stations to monitor
the National Weather Service as well as Arkansas Public Radio
and as in the case of Texarkana near the Texas line, the Texas
Broadcasting Network. In my research I found that none of these
systems were activated during this event. The alerting methods
used in the evacuation were sirens on police cars and door to
door contact with local residents and police officers. In addition
a 9-11 call-back system was employed and contacted residents within
a one mile radius of the explosion. Miller County Emergency Manager
Dave Hall explained the rationale for not using the EAS system
was based on the fact that,
"The emergency alert system has to go
through your contact point at the radio station. One of those
was the EAS station and there was no one there. They would have
to call someone in to do it. If it had been a little bit later
in the day.... I'll be totally honest with you, at nights and
on the weekends in the past is woefully unacceptable. We have
a plethora of radio stations here and after five o'clock and on
the weekends, one or two of them have a person there. So, quite
honestly, in the middle of the night it is of little use to us"
(Hall 2005).
The local area plan for Texarkana allows for emergency managers
to directly contact station personnel at KKYR and in turn they
can manually activate the EAS from the station. Wes Spicer, operations
manager for KKYR Clear Channel radio stated that they began broadcasting
live emergency programming of the event within 15 minutes of the
event. He confirmed that there was no authorization for an EAS
activation, however he added, "An EAS authorization needs
to come from the emergency manager we can activate an EAS from
the station, manually, but it needs an authorization. We are automated
at night but we have someone at the station all the time. If Dave
Hall sends a proper authorization to our city public information
officer, who is Sean Vaughn, he does have the responsibility and
the authorization to activate it. But it never went through those
channels, because we could not contact Dave Hall. In this instance,
of the derailment our disaster protocol, that was set up a few
months ago, was not followed" (Spicer 2005).
It should also be noted that officials in the Texarkana system
also chose not to use an available cable television interrupt
system stating that, " We did not access the cable override
because at five o'clock in the morning not that many people are
listening to television." Furthermore, the decision to not
use weather radio for the event stemmed from having a "fairly
good handle on the evacuation and to be quite honest with you
in that neighborhood, I don't know how many people have a weather
radio" (Hall 2005).
Bibliography
Hall, D. 2005. Interview with Dave Hall, Emergency Manager Miller County, Arkansas. Dallas, TX 17 October 2005.
Spicer, W. 2005. Interview with Wes Spicer Operations Manager
for Clear Channel Broadcasting KKYR Texarkana, Arkansas. Texarkana,
AR, 17 October 2005.
REF: NTSB: RAB http://www.ntsb.gov/publictn/2006/RAB0604.pdf