There are no borders during times of disasters

By Nicole Mowers
Headquarters public information officer

It’s the eve of the new year of 2023. People are already popping champagne, making resolutions and ready to ring in the new year ahead of them. What better way to celebrate the new year than with mountains of snow and flash floods across the state of California. Not an ideal way to put the old year behind us and the new year ahead of us.

That was only the beginning. Little did we know, winter was coming, and that it was going to be a long and excruciating three months of storms from January through March.

We got a little preview of what to expect five days before Christmas when a magnitude-6.4 earthquake hit the small quite town of Ferndale, in the northern part of California in Humboldt County.

We were already underway and didn’t even know it yet.

Typically, with any kind of disaster, only a very specific region is impacted. But it’s safe to say that every single region, town and city was, one way or the other, impacted by the diversity of disasters that we experienced. Each disaster is different based on the community that it impacts and its key to identify the needs and resources of each community, in order to help them.

The news headlines were catching the public’s eye with “Pineapple Express” and “Bomb Cyclone.” The mountains where being bombarded with snow, the valley was being flushed out with floods and the coast was having wipeouts and landslides.

Caltrans is one of the largest state departments with staff, equipment and resources. Yet still, it was a huge mission to take on to help the people of California.

It got to a point where crews were working relentlessly, day and night, and equipment started failing on us due to the impact of the storms.

We were in dire need of help and so we reached out to neighboring states Nevada and Oregon for help.

Nevada’s Department of Transportation was equally as impacted with limited resources and it was difficult for them to share their equipment with us.

Then, we turned to the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) and they graciously opened their arms wide open to helping us and the beginning of a beautiful friendship. California and Oregon united to tackle the historic California storms from January through March 2023.

Caltrans and ODOT worked together on implementing an “Interstate Agreement” back in 2012, that states that they will assist each other in operations during times of disasters including but not limited to sharing equipment, salt, sand, etc., overlapping coverage of Interstate 5, as well as “no man’s land” or places that weren’t being taken care of.

At the California/Oregon border, both agencies share a dual use “sand house” that holds sand and salt storage for the roadways. Also, equipment is lined up at the border in case either agency needs to use it.

The good news is that the equipment was prepped and ready to be deployed at any moment; but Caltrans and ODOT never needed the extra equipment in the end because Caltrans was catching up with cleaning the roads.

The inter-district collaboration and movement of mass equipment, as well as staff, was successful in helping the people and communities during these disasters. A rough estimate of 27 storms in total. It was a continuous effect on Caltrans staff and equipment working day and night.

According to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Eastern Sierra had a record-breaking snowpack of 296 percent of normal. This broke the previous record held in 1969 that recorded a snowpack of 270 percent of normal. About 50 percent of Caltrans equipment broke down in the midst of these storms.

Caltrans has so many resources that, in the past, we never needed to ask for help from other agencies or states until this year. We worked with what we had.

"The first step to recovery is transportation and opening up those roads to the community," said Gerald Kracher, chief of the Office of Emergency Management in the Division of Maintenance. "The 'feel-good' is not only districts helping district. It's also helping local communities. Caltrans served a local population and making those connections during an emergency."

After the mayhem, there were definitely lessons learned as with challenges there is always learning on what we could do better in the future. An idea is that there be a Caltrans Strike Force where we pre-identify equipment and staff that are re-deployable around the state of California.

In the end, our limits were tested and as a department and as a state, we succeeded the unthinkable.

The storms we experienced will be in the history books and we will tell stories for years and years to come.