TCB At The EOC

by Dereen Shirnekhi

DPW’s Isaias Miranda: “We’re trying to keep everyone calm.”

Deputy CAO Rebecca Bombero watches city camera footage.

An elderly woman reported that her neighbor’s contractor was shoveling snow onto her yard. A woman said her car wasn’t able to get out of Warren Street. Someone said that his neighbor’s car was blocking the road on Fairfield Street. And one caller wanted to let the dispatcher know that he had gotten stuck on Church Street and had left his car there.

All those calls and more were answered around noon on Monday, deep below 200 Orange St. in what is the Emergency Operations Center (EOC). EOC operates a hotline, 203-946-8221, where representatives from different city departments field snow-related questions and complaints. Large TVs played the news. One screen showed security camera footage from across the city. Phones rang and city employees answered.

“I don’t have an ETA [estimated time of arrival] on that,” Shy Floyd, the New Haven Fire Department’s assistant drillmaster, told the woman stuck on Warren Street who needed help getting out. It was the woman’s fourth time calling to follow up. “It’s your vehicle and I don’t want you at risk of being towed, so use your better judgment on that. We’re working on that as we speak, OK?”

Floyd, who has been a member of the fire department for eight years, was working an 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. shift. She would be back the next day Tuesday at 7 a.m.

Floyd explained to the Independent that calls have to be distinguished as low-priority and high-priority calls. “We have to make sure we’re focusing on true emergencies,” she said. That could mean a pregnant woman needing to go to a hospital or a patient needing to make it to a dialysis appointment. The city also has to prioritize calls pertaining to elderly and disabled residents.

“If we focus on every person stuck on the side of the road, we can’t address all the true emergencies,” Floyd said. For low-priority calls, she said, “we don’t even have an ETA” of when they’ll be answered, as there are so many tasks ahead, like clearing main roads and pathways for emergency vehicles and digging out fire hydrants. Floyd logged the calls she received in the city’s emergency response system, where they would be assigned to different departments, and answered more as they came.

All things considered, it had been mostly quiet at the office since the storm began. While the office has seats for dozens of city employees from different departments, only around ten were filled. The hard part would be when the storm was over, and more people began leaving their homes. Sure enough, as the snow slowed down in the early afternoon, more calls started coming in.

Floyd likes the quick pace. “This is my thing,” she said, smiling. “You got to be quick on your toes.”

To the elderly woman who called to report that her neighbor’s contractor was shoveling snow onto her yard, Floyd explained, “We don’t go on private property. We’re just making sure streets are clear for passing and emergencies.” Any disputes between neighbors would have to be solved by them.

As the urgency of callers increased, Floyd said, “People are starting to freak out.”

Isaias Miranda, a management analyst for the Department of Public Works, had been working since 7 a.m. and said he didn’t know when he would be going home. “We’re trying to keep everyone calm,” he said. He understands the anxiety — on his way to the EOC during a snowstorm in December, he got into a car accident himself.

“Thank God everything was OK,” he said.

He was expecting high call volume for plowing requests. “Crews are instructed to just push back snow as much as they can,” Miranda said. He said that snow removal couldn’t happen until the snow was was over, and there is a possibility of more snow later this week.

Miranda encouraged New Haveners to have patience with the Department of Public Works. He said that as long as the EOC is activated, they should call the hotline. After, they can call the Department of Public Works. He said they are also actively monitoring See Click Fix.

Nearby, Deputy City Administrative Officer Rebecca Bombero looked at footage from a camera above Knights of Columbus. She was looking for the service lane into the Air Rights Garage. “I just wanted to check on it,” she said. Another camera, at Grand Avenue and James Street, was completely blurred. “We’re snowed in.”

Livable City Initiative (LCI) Deputy Director Mark Stroud stopped by. He said that LCI had received one call from a household of two adults who didn’t have heat in their home. Stroud said that they were relocated to a local shelter.

Stroud, along with fellow LCI Deputy Director Frank D’Amore, had been assisting the other departments, identifying streets that needed more plowing, and checking blighted city-owned properties for trespassers and calling COMPASS to take them to a warming shelter if needed.

Stroud said he would be working “until I can’t work no more.”

Public Safety Answering Points (PSAP), which fields 911 calls, had its own corner. Communication Supervisors Ray Kline and Frank Scalo said that since the storm started, they had gotten calls about car accidents and some about medical emergencies and domestic violence (“People are enclosed, they fight more”). There were no big emergencies to report on Monday.

They said that they had also received non-emergency phone calls about parking and plow trucks. (Reminder: Don’t call 911 for anything that isn’t immediately life-altering.)

“For the most part people are staying home,” said Scalo.

 (Left to right) Parks Director Max Webster, Economic Development Administrator Mike Piscitelli, mayoral Chief of Staff Sean Matteson, and Isaias Miranda.

NHPD officer Steve McMorris, alongside Floyd: “You can’t be everywhere at the same time.”

Mayor Justin Elicker.

Elicker stepped out for a quick Channel 8 interview.