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0:00:00.2 Bailey Dickman: Nestled within the upstate region of South Carolina, the city of Greenville rarely considered hurricanes a point of critical concern. That all changed, though, with the arrival of Hurricane Helene in September of 2024, leaving Scott McIver, Greenville’s fleet manager, with lessons that forever changed his understanding of emergency response.

0:00:16.6 Scott McIver: When the situation hit the fan, there was no major hiccups, no major stress or pain. Everybody knew what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. And that was a real bright silver lining, I think, that we had in there, that what we’re doing pre-incident is the right way to be going.

0:00:33.8 Bailey Dickman: With news coverage constantly hitting the airwaves about unpredictable weather patterns, Scott’s message is crystal clear. The critical value of FEMA training cannot be overstated.

0:00:42.3 Scott McIver: Everyone has got the basic of FEMA training, 100, 400, and 700. Even though it wasn’t totally prepared for a hurricane event and all the high winds, having that basic framework already down really did, really did help us.

0:00:56.8 Bailey Dickman: Resiliency in public works is about preparing, adapting, and recovering. And as Vincent Olsen, the director of equipment and fleet management for the city of Dallas, Texas, describes it, our old friends coordination and communication play a major role in preparation.

0:01:11.2 Vincent Olsen: You can sit there and go, geez, I mean, how many times have we said this? Oh, that’s right, we took on 900 new officers. You gotta keep saying it.

0:01:19.6 Bailey Dickman: Welcome back to Public Works Radio, the official voice of the ɫ��AV. This week, we’re talking about fleet preparedness, resilience, and dealing with unpredictable weather patterns. Public works agencies are crucial pillars for building both sustainable and resilient communities. This episode was inspired in part by an article that Scott wrote for the ɫ��AV Reporter. It’s entitled lessons Learned as a Fleet Manager During a FEMA-Level Event. If you want to check the article out, we’ve left a link in the description. Now, let’s get to it. Here’s my conversation with Scott and Vincent. Scott, let’s start by just talking about the entire Hurricane Helene experience.

0:01:55.1 Scott McIver: Actually, in the beginning, it was not tracking over us the night before when we left out. So when we got up the next morning, it was on top of us. It had made a shift change. And so we were kind of, we were semi-prepared. We were looking at being on the fringes of a hurricane, not in the direct path of a hurricane, which again, is even on the fringes is very rare for us here in the upstate. This far inland, it’s very rare. So being prepared for an ice storm or not for us much snow, but mainly ours is ice. It was amazing how we were pretty much prepared for the hurricane because a lot of it crossed over. As we got into it, we were realizing that a lot of our preparedness through FEMA really did crossover from the ice to the hurricanes because what we ended up with was a lot of downed trees, power lines, flooding, which ironically is a lot of the same thing that happens with an ice storm.

0:02:51.4 Bailey Dickman: You just touched on it here. You had done FEMA training to prepare for other emergency response.

0:02:58.4 Scott McIver: Yes. One of our biggest things with public works here, and fleet being part of public works, is everyone has got the basic of FEMA training, 100, 400, and 700. So all of that really did prepare us for an emergency event, how important it was to have a plan in place, have the hierarchy in place, and have the coordination with your local divisions, county, state, and be everybody on the same page ready to tackle whatever came. So having all that already in place was a really good precursor setup. It didn’t catch us flat-footed. So we were, even though it wasn’t totally prepared for a hurricane event and all the high winds, having that basic framework already down really did help us.

0:03:46.4 Bailey Dickman: How do you prepare your department to work with federal agencies such as FEMA in the lead-up or response to an emergency event if there’s a state of emergency declared? How do you prepare your people to work within those guidelines?

0:04:04.8 Vincent Olsen: Well, oftentimes, a lot of it is the paperwork. Our direct staff usually have very little interaction. Now, we’ve done some support at the state level several years ago with some of their equipment that kind of passed through. And that’s, you have to do a little bit of cheerleading for the cause and remind us what we’re in here for. It is public service. And fleet is one of those things that has to be competitive with private sector 80% of the time, but that 20%, we have to be able to do extraordinary things when everyone else doesn’t want to come to work. When I get in front sometimes of a city council or have discussions, I remind them that when we have these events, you were talking about FEMA, and I wanted, there was one other comment I want to make, but you have to remind folks that we make arrangements for staff to be here, whether it’s hotels or accommodations or whatever it takes so they can get to work because they have to come to work, where my vendors and my outsource vendors are calling me saying, hey, don’t send me anything, or, we’re not gonna be here for the next three days.

0:05:57.7 Vincent Olsen: It’s too cold. Our folks are making sure sanitation trucks run. But the other side of the preparedness for how do we account for fuel, how do we account for man-hours, labor, emergency, I can’t stress enough, if you don’t have a good shop management software system, it’s gonna be a lot of work, man-hours outside of that. Do you have your equipment code books? Because FEMA speaks a certain language, and they want all their submissions done to that horsepower range. And if you don’t have those things already worked out, you’re gonna be, oh, no. Well, how many horsepower was this truck? I don’t know how many. It can create a lot of questions. So going back and making sure that all of our equipment entries up front were accurate helps us get to those points.

0:06:06.9 Bailey Dickman: A key point that you touched on in your Reportelr article that I think sometimes is overlooked perhaps is the documentation that you had to do to get FEMA funds, make sure that everything was in order. Can you talk a little bit about that?

0:06:25.0 Scott McIver: Yeah, that was an eye-opener through the FEMA training, how much documentation they required in order to get that reimbursement on the funding. And one of the things too, and you don’t think about it until it happens, is making sure that you keep that documentation when the power goes down. Because now what you were relying on, all of your automated systems within your software on your computers, all of that, all of a sudden you don’t have that. So you have to make sure that you go back to have the process of the old pen and paper, that you can make sure everything is written down and everything is taken in. And then at the end, you’ve gotta take and convert all that back into your software so it matches up with all of your paperwork that you have. You can lose some stuff in the translation between the two. So you’ve gotta be really cognizant of that, that you’re not losing any of that information because FEMA is really strict. They really want to know, and I get it, and I agree with it, because you don’t want any fraud going in there.

0:07:24.0 Scott McIver: You don’t want any excess that shouldn’t be getting paid for. So having that exact, this employee was doing this job at this exact location at this exact time is something you gotta really keep up with. And that’s another added layer of stress because you’re trying to deal with the situation to get the emergency taken care of, but at the same time, you gotta remember you gotta have that documentation. So in our theory, what we have was like a two-person setup. One person was along with those supervisors, along with those teams, documenting. That’s their job, was to document while everybody else could take care of getting the situation under control.

0:08:05.1 Bailey Dickman: Have you guys changed your approach to that documentation since Helene?

0:08:10.5 Scott McIver: Not so much the approach, but the way we do it. We learned the pen and paper, we didn’t quite have a uniform pen and paper when we went to pen and paper. So now we do. We have a more uniformed setup to make sure that if we have to go to pen and paper, everybody’s on the same, without, no pun intended, same page. All the pages look the same. They’re all set up the same. So everything is, when it comes in to be moved back over into our software, it’s easy and ready to go.

0:08:38.6 Bailey Dickman: What other changes have you implemented since Hurricane Helene?

0:08:42.6 Scott McIver: Well, I think one of our biggest changes that we’ve implemented is making sure that our fueling program, that we were stocked on fuel, that we have the fuel out, we can get the fuel out to where we need it to. We kinda got caught a little bit flat-footed with our generators that were running City Hall, the zoo, and such. We thought we had a plan. Again, one department thought they had it, the other thought the other department had it. But we didn’t have a plan set to make sure those generators were getting fueled on a prolonged period. Usually with our ice storms here, a day or two, everything’s back up and running. So we had that longer, prolonged, we had to keep those generators up and running. So that was something that we changed. We have a better plan in place to make sure those generators are kept up to speed and a dedicated team to do nothing but fuel those generators.

0:09:34.8 Bailey Dickman: Micromanaging is not gonna work in a time of unprecedented emergencies. Scott McIver’s philosophy centers around hiring great people, giving them the proper training and resources, and simply letting them do what they do best.

0:09:46.6 Scott McIver: So the way I set up my team is I give them intent. I give them all the power to do what they need to do because they know what they’re doing at their level better than I do. So on my daily basis, I’m just overseeing what they’re doing, of course, giving them some guidance where they need it, but they’re running the ship. I am just basically there to cheer them on and give them the higher-end guidance that they need, but they take care of all of that. Following that same philosophy, when we went into the emergency event, I was again able to look at the big picture and help coordinate, but my team members already had that strength behind them and that training, that they were taking care of their sections. I knew they could take care of their sections, so I didn’t have to micromanage. I could sit back, look at the big picture, and let them take care of what they needed to take care of. So I was in the Army myself for several years, so I make a lot of, I like a lot of military references back to my good old days.

0:10:46.6 Scott McIver: So General Hal Moore said it. He said, you know, you learn the job of the person above you and you teach your job to the person below you so that if anything happens, someone is right there on the spot, they can fill in and take over almost seamlessly.

0:11:04.4 Bailey Dickman: What is the impact that emergency planning and emergency preparedness has on fleets?

0:11:11.7 Vincent Olsen: It’s been talked a little bit about the ice that we’ve seen here in Texas over the years. So there’s been a little bit of a learning curve to deal with some of the ice. I think historically it had been, well, we’ll wait it out because the ground’s not really that cold and it’ll be warm tomorrow. But two years ago we had a longer stretch of that and it was a little bit more intense and people got a little bit impatient. Not to mention people are moving all over the country and people that come from the north might have a little bit different expectation. They expect to see the snowplows and they expect to see the brine trucks and the pre-wets and if they don’t see the lines in the road two days before things, they automatically assume you’re not doing things. And so it was a little bit of a learning curve. We’re kind of pushing back and forth on these things with the departments that actually lay the material down and why that’s important. And then there was a couple of other things that were surprising.

0:12:12.0 Vincent Olsen: Monitoring how much material you spread so that you could have some type of lane-per-use report or miles-per-use or some measure per use per mile on salt and spreading material so you knew what was getting into your water systems. And there’s a lot of things. Preparedness for snow up north started in July. You were looking at plows and parts and things so that you didn’t have this big rush in the middle of a snowstorm. Because if you get to the day that it’s in the news that the snowstorm’s coming, it’s too late.

0:12:45.4 Bailey Dickman: How do you get buy-in for other departments in the city or other agencies that you work with in Texas to prepare your fleet for the worst-case scenario, for the ice storm that lasts two weeks, for snow, for all of that?

0:13:02.5 Vincent Olsen: That’s a really good question because the buy-in part is very hard for all fleets. Fleet is already a misunderstood science mostly. It really helps when you have a group, ɫ��AV I’ve been in for a number of years, but having that reference material that talks about those things from professional organizations. So have that alliance. You need to attend these snow conferences. You need to attend, and not just about snow, but about anything, whether it’s the ɫ��AV conference. I can’t talk enough about that because having this network of these fleet professionals, sometimes you can borrow their experiences to help drive a point home. But be involved in fleet. It helps. I started as a technician. I had 26 ASEs. And so I’ve kind of come from the bottom up. I didn’t get my degree till a little bit later in life and I worked really hard for it. So to get to this level and have those firsthand experiences, a good network of peers whose experiences you can talk about, and then when you get to the seat, say, yes, I’ve lived this, I’ve done this, I’ve seen it, and this is what we’re after. And so it helps give you that credibility.

0:14:20.7 Bailey Dickman: When it comes to that emergency plan that you guys had already made for a different type of event, but something that the bones were still good for for a hurricane.

0:14:31.5 Scott McIver: Right.

0:14:31.9 Bailey Dickman: What did it take department-wide to make that plan? Do you guys have emergency preparedness check-ins every quarter? How do you make that plan?

0:14:42.6 Scott McIver: We do. We have, I wouldn’t say quarterly, more semi-annual for the entire Public Works that we’ll get together, make sure the plan is still good to go, it’s still up-to-date, it still works. Then on a monthly basis through our safety trainings, we also go through all those same steps. More of like my fleet would just concentrate on fleet and streets would concentrate on their part, and everybody would look at those parts of those plans and tweak them to make sure everything is still staying up-to-date. Because we’ll get a lot of new training, a lot of new equipment that has to be retrained on or everybody trained on and make sure it fits into that plan and where does it fit in that plan so that we can put it to use correctly. So I guess it’s more of a monthly safety training slash looking at the plan and then semi-annually everybody together as a huge team making sure it’s all fitting together.

0:15:32.9 Bailey Dickman: In the past five to ten years, Texas has had an uptick in these sort of special events, these ice storms, these blizzards that they didn’t used to see before. How do you manage new events like these?

0:15:47.8 Vincent Olsen: Be smart about your truck builds. Up north the strategy was every dump truck would be snow capable. Well, that adds a lot of expense to a dump truck. But you gotta get the core of your fleet up for that. So instead of having these silos of maybe a parks dump truck or an asphalt dump truck, everything’s got hydraulics on the back so it can run a V-box. But when it comes to plow-ready trucks, it’ll have those hydraulics plus frame extensions and all these other features. You have to be really smart, really selective. Know your department’s snow plan. And then once you read their snow plan or they at least brief you on it, you kind of have to coach them in certain directions. And then there’s other things you can do that they’re not accustomed to. So our shop trucks, well, they’ve never had plows. Why do you want a plow on it? Because I still need to get trucks in and out of here and I can’t wait for, nor should I put that burden on my streets department to show up and hit my street while they’re out here fighting snow and ice. Driving long hours, they need to be out servicing the citizens.

0:16:51.7 Vincent Olsen: We can add this $6,000 upfit to our plow. There’s a lot of little things that way.

0:17:05.2 Bailey Dickman: When it comes to emergency preparedness in Texas, Vincent Olsen encountered a few surprising lessons about communication.

0:17:11.5 Vincent Olsen: This is, I think, generationally has occurred. People are really bad at communicating. We can all have good ideas, but the innovators are the ones who make the ideas, bring them to fruition. They’re the ones that make it happen. And when the creative person comes up with the idea and the innovator is mulling it over trying to make it work, and it does or it doesn’t work, or it needs this piece to work, it can create this really bad friction. And you have to be really good at reading both of their issues and finding the solution in the middle. Communication has gotten really bad. It’s almost like I think people have ideas, they spit partially the idea out, and you’re trying to figure out where the idea came from and then can we actually do it. And examples are from tire in the parts department to making sure we have the right tires, because that’s generally what we lose first when there’s a disaster or a tornado, to having police officers stay off the roads to the best of their ability when we have floods.

0:18:18.2 Bailey Dickman: What do you, as the fleet director, what’s your start to ramp up to prepare for a potential event?

0:18:25.2 Vincent Olsen: Well, it’s Texas, so beginning of December, our fuel additives go into our fuel tanks for diesel. So, and then we’re putting that notice out there to departments to say, hey, make sure you’re cycling. Sometimes there’s some utilization issues in public fleets. So it’s nothing for a truck to sit there for a short period of time, not get a new tank of fuel. You have to make sure that these additives are in these vehicles. To me, it starts a lot with the fuels and the parts. If I’m a few days out or even a week out, I make sure that we’re filling. So you had to fill your fleet up ahead of time, then make sure your tank was full so that you had the most possible, given you weren’t sure how long the storm was gonna last. And if it’s gonna be a bad enough storm, we start looking for hotel rooms. Being a city, we’re blessed to have access to some of our local convention centers that have hotels attached to them where, again, communication being the greatest tool we have is having those relationships.

0:19:27.0 Vincent Olsen: We can say, hey, I need to get 10 to 15. Well, last event was 35 rooms. And then we make sure that there’s… Because these folks are gonna go into 12-hour shifts of on and on and on. We put an emphasis on… And we’ve been training this way on some of the truck talent, making sure that those folks that are familiar with how PTOs work and how trucks are built so that we don’t do more damage.

0:19:55.3 Bailey Dickman: What’s your day of? It’s a Thursday morning. Ice storm is coming in that afternoon. What’s your final checklist items that you take care of?

0:20:06.2 Vincent Olsen: Yeah, by then we’ve checked and double-checked with our parts departments. We know that we’ve got our reserves of fuel. I mean, our fuel islands. Staffing’s taken care of. By then we’ve got five service centers, there’s managers at every location. We’ve been in deep communication with staff. Everybody knows their positions and what we’re doing. Last minute with the departments themselves, they’ll kinda flood us with a little bit of stuff in terms of equipment to making sure it works and hooked up. And that’s where you’ll get your baptism by fire in some regards for the new staff. And then the parts preparation, because that starts real early too. We’re working with a lot of different departments. So I talk about snowplow, but there’s emergency services and response. There’s animal care. Especially we’re getting cold weather, how do we take care of these equipment that move these trucks that are recovering animals? There’s a lot of different layers of people who need to be able to respond. And then there’s the stationary generators as well, the fueling and things associated with that. I think that’s probably one of the most misunderstood functions of emergency response.

0:21:21.2 Vincent Olsen: It’s not directly ours. It fits in with the building department, but we work with them on some of those stationary generators that keep facilities running in case of a power outage. And those are often misunderstood because I think people think, oh, there’s a generator, everything works. Uh-uh. Those generators are not generally fit to make everything work. So sometimes your HVAC is not what’s on these things. So you don’t have heat or cooling. So day of is generally a couple of, now we’re having meetings with City Hall as well and they’re putting out their public statements. We’re checking the preparedness as we had just mentioned. A lot of communication with departments, a lot of visual inspections through GPS system, see where trucks are at, where they’re stationed, and then maybe check some reporting features, make sure they’re working. And that’s more or less specifically to snow, rain, and might have some other, but that’s our most familiar one is the snow and ice.

0:22:27.7 Bailey Dickman: Resiliency isn’t a new idea, especially in public works. The strategies that have stood the test of time are still around for a simple reason. They work.

0:22:36.5 Vincent Olsen: When you set up your fleet or you’re preparing stuff within your fleet, never forget a lot of the good old strategies are really the best, whether it’s making sure your parts departments are using commodity codes. All those things will come in handy. And I use commodity codes, I use equipment code numbers. Making sure those things are entered in your system will make your FEMA responses and your emergency responses go much smoother. Well, if it’s a chore every time you have a response and you gotta go, oh, I need overtime to figure this and figure that, there’s a way to make an improvement. And usually the traditional strategies that have evolved over time were really the right… There’s a lot of value in those.

0:23:27.5 Bailey Dickman: What are some silver linings that you’ve had since Hurricane Helene? How has it served as an opportunity for you for growth?

0:23:36.7 Scott McIver: Definitely. The best laid plans, there’s always room for improvements. And it showed us, like with the generator, making sure the plan to keep the generators fueled up and going. I think the silver lining that we found out, and I found that the way that we are training our group throughout all of public works is right, because when the situation hit the fan, we were able to everybody fall in, get the job done. There was no major hiccups, no major stress or pain. Everybody knew what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. And that was a real bright silver lining, I think, that we had in there, that what we’re doing pre-incident is the right way to be going.

0:24:24.6 Bailey Dickman: What is some advice you would give to somebody, like another fleet manager, who feels like they’re not prepared for emergencies? What advice would you give to somebody who was in maybe your position two years ago?

0:24:41.9 Scott McIver: Definitely, I’ll look up FEMA. FEMA’s got a, I mean, all kinds of training, and a lot of it’s free because they want us to be able to be trained up on. So hit FEMA up for all of the training that you can. And then reach out, reach out, join your local committees, like here in the Southeast, we have the Southeast Government Fleet Managers Association, which I’m a part of, and you can draw on their resources and their knowledge, their preparedness for what have they done. And it’s a lot better when you do it regionally because in the region you have more things in common. I could be with, and of course, I’m definitely part of ɫ��AV, but being as part of the national part, California’s got something totally different than South Carolina. Washington’s got totally different than Florida. So being more towards the regional area, you can gain a lot of that knowledge from the other team members that are there in those areas that’ll be, I’ve got access now to people who have more hurricane awareness than I do still down in Florida because now I communicate with them better. So I would say, yeah, definitely join your regional areas and get with FEMA, get that training.

0:26:00.1 Bailey Dickman: With communities around you, outside and around Greenville, how did you all help each other out? Was there mutual aid there in those initial days?

0:26:10.2 Scott McIver: Oh, definitely, yeah. Especially between the city of Greenville and Greenville County. Well, do the FEMA training, you definitely learn how to bring everybody together: the state, county, the municipalities. And there’s already a preset mutual agreement. This is what you’re gonna do, this is what I’m gonna do, this is how we’re gonna take care of each other and get through the situation. And then once we’re done, of course, then you can take care of your own individual sides. The county brought in the tents and everything to help feed everybody, to help with the fueling, to help with getting the resources out to the far reaches of the area. We helped provide personnel to go out to those areas outside of the city to help, this is what we can do to help the county to get these roads open and get this done, and pool our specialty equipment that some of that we had here in the city that the county didn’t have. And as we got our local areas taken care of, then we were able to branch out and help some of the other outlying areas. Unfortunately, we had enough we weren’t able, of course, to go across the state line to North Carolina, which was really hit even harder than we were, because we had so much to take care of ourselves. But having that FEMA training that brings in all those aspects of mutual agreement already and on the table so that you know who’s gonna do what, when, where, and how, and that was a very big help because there’s some things that we had that we couldn’t handle that we needed some bigger, heavier hitters.

0:27:38.0 Bailey Dickman: As we’re wrapping up here, is there any last thoughts about your experience that you think could help other public works professionals who might one day find themselves in the same situation?

0:27:48.3 Scott McIver: Train your team members to be able to do the job without you being there. That will so help you, especially because during these situations, you’re gonna lose communications. You may have radios, but radios can go out. You can hit a situation where you don’t have the communication going on, but you could feel confident that your team members know exactly what to do and they would do it as if you were standing right there because they know what to do. Give them that intent, give them that responsibility, that ability to fulfill the mission. That’ll take a lot of the stress off of you and off of your community because they know that the people’s been, they’ve been trained properly and that they’re there to help and they’re gonna take care of it.

0:28:30.2 Bailey Dickman: Thank you for listening to Public Works Radio, the official voice of the ɫ��AV. And thank you to today’s guests, Scott McIver and Vincent Olsen. Make sure to subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcast, rate it, review it, forward it along to a friend, and don’t be shy about dropping us a note over at podcast@apwa.org so we can hear your feedback directly. We’ll catch you next time.