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HUNTSVILLE, Alabama — No one could miss the irony Tuesday that a conference on lessons learned from the April 27 tornadoes would be conducted during a power outage.

“It’s very fitting that we’re here to talk about lessons learned that we are in the dark,” Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle said in a generator-powered conference room at Adtran.

The objective, however, was to shed light on how better to deal with a scenario that perhaps seemed unimaginable on that historic day when 92 tornado warnings were issued for North Alabama by the National Weather Service in Huntsville.

The conference sponsored by Cyber Huntsville and Energy Huntsville was titled “Resilience of Our Critical Infrastructure and Cyber Security Summit – Lessons Learned after the Disaster.”

It included a wide range of presentations that examined how the Tennessee Valley dealt with the tornadoes – both the good and the bad. And even in the good, something could always have been better.

“We have become the model for how to handle issues like this,” said Mike Gillespie, chairman of the Madison County Commission. “Next time, we can do it better. This will happen again. But we’ll be better prepared for events like this.”

Some of the presentations seemed to defy all logic, such as how TVA restored power after losing connections to 11 generation plants.

Tracy Flippo, TVA’s vice president of transmission operations and maintenance, said 98 percent of customers had power restored despite TVA having restored just 25 percent of its structures and 48 percent of its lines.

“Creativity and innovation can be just as important as steel,” Flippo said. Recovery from the storms also demonstrated that “we can take a punch.”

Huntsville Hospital did not take that punch, for which Rudy Hornsby, senior vice president of operations at the hospital, was grateful. But seeing a hospital take a direct hit in the devastating tornado in Joplin, Mo., last month was chilling.

Hornsby said Huntsville Hospital was prepared, having 14 emergency generators standing by. The problem came when the fuel supplier couldn’t access its fuel because of the power outage. The hospital also acquired three rental generators.

“At the end of the day, we need to focus on how to diversify our power generation,” Hornsby said. “Had we had a steam turbine and micro turbine or solar power, we could have done with less rental generators. We would have been in a stronger position.”

How the structure of the hospital would withstand a direct hit from an EF-3 or EF-4 tornado remains a question.

“The main building, we make it look like it’s one building but it’s really 19 structural buildings,” Hornsby said. “How it would behave if hit by a certain size storm is of interest to me.”

Rusty Russell, director of EMA in Madison County, criticized the black screens that came on televisions to announce tornado warnings when local meteorologists were already on air giving detailed information about the storms’ track.

“We’ve got to do something about that,” Russell said.

Russell also questioned the effectiveness of weather radios and siren warnings. With the wave of tornadoes, weather radios and sirens were constantly sounding – feeding a sense of complacency among citizens.

Russell said he would like for Huntsville to take part in a pilot project to make the warning system more precise to the area under threat.

“What we need to do is come up with a digital weather radio that knows where it is and we can send information to set it off,” Russell said. “As a pilot program, I’d like to see us put a transmitter up on (Monte Sano) next to the current tower and distribute 100-200-300 (transmitters) in the community in places where we can get feedback like schools and hospitals where we can get good data back on how the system works and do that for a year.

“That could be a solution nationwide. We have the right people in the right community. I’ve got the right staff. We’ve got the right weather service office to make that work.”

Follow me on Twitter @paul_gattis

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