By Patrick Marley
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Copyright 2008 The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
MADISON, Wisc. — In the midst of the snowstorm this month that stranded more than 1,500 cars south of Madison for up to 12 hours, state officials refused to shut down I-90/39, blocked snowmobilers from checking on drivers and nearly shut down the emergency response center at the height of the crisis.
Those details came out Thursday in a bruising assessment by Wisconsin National Guard Adjutant Gen. Don Dunbar of how the State Patrol and others responded to the episode. Gov. Jim Doyle ordered the report just after the Feb. 6-7 storm.
“I apologize to those people, and we simply have to — the State Patrol, the Office of Emergency Management — just have to respond better not to have that happen again,” Doyle said in a news conference.
But he stood by State Patrol Superintendent David Collins, whose agency was in charge of the response.
“I think Superintendent Collins is a great superintendent, and I think he has served the state well,” Doyle said. “I don’t think he or his agency performed very well in this situation at the higher levels.”
Doyle said any discipline of other staff was up to managers to decide.
But A.J. Bisek of McFarland, who was stuck on the freeway for nearly six hours, said he was frustrated that he and others didn’t have any information about the situation as it unfolded. At some points, people who were stranded called out to people going southbound to ask what was going on up ahead, he said.
“At a minimum, they should have called some radio stations and said, ‘Here’s the update,’ so people sitting on the interstate have some idea of what’s going on,” Bisek said. “To at least have heard something is what I would expect.”
Collins and other State Patrol officials repeatedly refused to close the road, despite recommendations from the Wisconsin National Guard and other agencies. Doyle, Dunbar and others said the freeway should have been shut down by 4 p.m. Feb. 6.
The storm dumped 13.4 inches of snow on Madison. A crash was reported around 11:15 a.m. and later northbound trucks were unable to get up an icy hill on I-90/39 south of Madison, causing a bottleneck that blocked traffic for 12 hours. More than 1,500 vehicles were stranded for at least some of that time.
Dunbar found:
— A state trooper posted on the state Department of Transportation Web site at 5 p.m. that the freeway was impassable, but commanders had the post taken down.
— At 5:15 p.m. — 15 minutes after watching newscasts that led with the traffic backup — the Wisconsin Emergency Management timeline log says officials decided to shut the Emergency Operations Center at 6 p.m. because there were “no pressing reports of large scale accidents or blockages.”
The center, which had been activated the day before, was in place to help coordinate response to major traffic accidents or other emergencies. The only reason the center did not close was because Dane County authorities detailed the extent of the problems at 5:30 p.m.
— Jeff Western, the state Bureau of Highways representative at the emergency center, told his replacement not to come in and left at 5:15 p.m. Because of that, his agency did not participate in a 5:40 p.m. multiagency planning session that was set up because of the Dane County call.
— Even after that session, officials had trouble determining the extent of the problem. Doyle was not advised to declare a state of emergency until 9 p.m., and National Guard officials did not understand the scope of the situation until they flew over the scene just before 11 p.m.
— Dane County dispatched snowmobiles to check on people in stuck vehicles. Rock County tried to do the same thing, but the incident commander, State Patrol Lt. Lauri Steeber, refused to give them access to the road around 9:20 p.m. The snowmobiles were later allowed on the road, Dunbar said.
— Steeber provided little guidance other than to “stay the course,” the report says.
Lisa Durham, a phlebotomist at Mercy Hospital in Janesville, was coming home from work that day when she got trapped for 10 hours.
“I think they did the best job they could under the circumstances,” she said Thursday. “There was a state trooper stuck in the same traffic as I was, maybe 20 yards back. He did everything he could, walking back and forth and checking on people and trying to get people moving. I don’t agree with the criticism. There wasn’t much anybody could do.”
Slow to respond
State officials seemed not to recognize the problems with the response even after the storm. On Feb. 7, Collins, the State Patrol superintendent, at a news conference said: “No injuries. No deaths. No crashes. In my book, that’s a success.”
He backed off on that comment Thursday. “It’s not a success when citizens have to sit out on the interstate for five, six, seven, eight-plus hours,” he said.
He said he had earlier called the response a success to show support for the troopers and local authorities who performed well that night. The governor and adjutant general also said first responders did an outstanding job, but that officials at higher levels made critical errors.
Collins said he had already started adopting recommendations in Dunbar’s report.
“The decision or lack of decisions that caused that situation will never happen again,” he said.
He said the interstate should have been closed between 11:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. Feb. 6, but that after that there was no way to turn traffic around or safely reroute it because of the snowfall.
He said that sometime after 1:30 a.m. Feb. 7 he told Dunbar that he would support closing the highway if there were a safe way to do so, but such circumstances never arose.
Collins said it was too early to decide if anyone would be disciplined.
Doyle showed support for Collins, calling him “as competent a person as you’ll find.” Before he became superintendent, Collins worked as a criminal investigator for Doyle when he was attorney general.
But Transportation Secretary Frank Busalacchi, who appointed Collins to lead the State Patrol, left open the possibility of replacing him. “That’s a personnel decision,” he said.
Busalacchi heard from Collins for the first time about 45 minutes after the governor declared a state emergency.
“The fact that I was not notified until 10 p.m. is just unacceptable,” Busalacchi said.
Collins said in hindsight he should have called Busalacchi and the governor earlier. Doyle called Collins around 7:30 p.m. to find out about the situation and was told the State Patrol was on top of it.
The governor said the interstate should have been closed by 4 p.m. at the latest, and that he should have been informed of the situation by early evening.
“The failure here was not understanding that a crisis was building and building and building,” Doyle said.
He also said, “We’re very, very thankful nothing bad happened that night, but I think we all recognize that was the grace of God.”
The report says at 4 p.m. Feb. 6 the situation had reached a tipping point at which authorities no longer had the necessary resources to properly respond. Officials did not have a full sense of the scope of the problem until almost 11 p.m. and did not alert the Illinois Department of Transportation about the matter until nearly midnight.
But by 4 p.m., media outlets were reporting on the situation extensively. Traffic at that point was backed up for 20 miles, and Dunbar said it should have been clear to the authorities that it would remain so into the night.
“By 4 p.m. the highway had become a clogged pipe, and the added volume of traffic arriving from the south was continuing to worsen the situation,” the report says.
It adds: “There can be no doubt that (the State Patrol’s) assessment was slow and leadership ineffective.
“Interagency coordination was excellent at the start of the storm but non-existent as the emergency grew and darkness fell on the stranded motorists. The State Patrol was ineffective in its incident command role,” the report says, adding that the state Bureau of Highways and Wisconsin Emergency Management had key failings.
Dunbar heads the emergency management agency. He held up some for praise — Dane and Rock county authorities, the state Department of Natural Resources and Dunbar’s own Wisconsin National Guard.
Also Thursday, Doyle officially asked the federal government for emergency assistance to help pay for snow removal and other emergency costs in connection with the same snowstorm. He asked for federal aid for 13 counties, noting that they had record or near-record snowfall over two days.