Audit: Emergency agency lacks own recovery plans

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - The state agency tasked with coordinating disaster recovery in Virginia lacks plans to get up and running should a catastrophe strike its own offices, according to a recent audit that also found a host of accounting and turnover problems.

State auditors said the Department of Emergency Management’s lack of recovery plans “places the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the commonwealth’s sensitive and mission critical information at risk.”

Statewide disaster efforts would be hindered if the agency were inoperable.

The report also found that significant turnover had led to financial mistakes that included missing payment dates and lacking documentation for financial transactions.

The audit was released last month and covered the prior two fiscal years, though the results are still current, Auditor of Public Accounts Walter Kucharski told The Examiner Wednesday.

The agency didn’t lack disaster recovery documents, but “what we found was problems with the one they had,” Kucharski said. “They are in the process of making changes.”

The problem stems from a change in crisis-management software, which the Richmond agency is just finishing rolling out, said Virginia Department of Emergency Management spokesman Bob Spieldenner. The agency hasn’t learned how long it would take to bring the software back into operation and how much it would cost should a disaster strike the offices.

“Our goal is to finalize it by the end of this year,” Spieldenner said.

While Richmond isn’t typically in the path of natural disasters, such calamities are not unheard of. Torrents from Hurricane Gaston inundated the city in 2004, flooding the agency’s critically important Emergency Operations Center. The storm was part of the reason why the department moved its new center to the State Police headquarters, Spieldenner said.

The department is in the midst of aiding in recovery efforts in Suffolk and surrounding communities that were ravaged by tornadoes last week. The twisters caused more than $20 million in property damage but resulted in no deaths.

wflook@dcexaminer.com

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