Beginning on August 29, 2021, Hurricane Ida generated a tornado outbreak that devastated several communities across the United States from Mississippi to Massachusetts. On September 1, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania was hit by an EF2 tornado that hit a maximum wind speed of 132 miles per hour. One of the communities that faced the most severe damage was Upper Dublin Township, Pennsylvania.
In the aftermath of the impact, Timothy Schuck ’19, then Fire Service Administrator of Upper Dublin Township, was on the scene surveying the damage to a community that he had been serving since 2004 to determine how to support not only those residents impacted by the storm but also how to restore essential town services.
Though nothing could have completely prepared Schuck for the devastation that the township experiences, Schuck credits his education at Holy Family University for teaching him invaluable lessons on emergency management. While working for the township, Schuck attended Holy Family to complete his degree in Fire Science & Public Safety Administration and advance in his field. “I went to Holy Family to finish my degree when I was in my fifties,” says Schuck. “I spent five years going to night classes while working full-time. I enjoyed every minute. All of the Fire Science classes that I took helped prepare me for the role I am in now. My instructors, primarily Chief Thomas Garrity and Chief Theodore Bateman ’83, were well-versed in tactics and strategies, and everything we covered is paying off today.”
“Through my training in emergency management and what I learned from Chief Garrity and Chief Bateman prepared me for what was going on,” explains Schuck. “All that training kicked it and it became automatic with what I knew had to get done by helping the Township Manager out by taking over the emergency management while he was taking care of the township.”
One of the biggest challenges Schuck and his team faced in the aftermath of the tornados was communicating with not only those whose homes were devastated by the storms but also those who could provide help and resources. “Every municipality is supposed to have an emergency operations center, but we lost ours in the tornado,” remembers Schuck. “We lost everything from technology to paperwork.”
Something that so many of us take for granted today—the ability to communicate instantaneously—was lost to Schuck and his team. “During the storm, technology was one of our biggest challenges. The storm took out a cell tower behind our township building that controlled all of our township radios and our cell service and also took out our internet lines. We normally deal with flooding here and we know how to handle that, but this was such a horrific event. We actually had no idea that the other side of Montgomery County, like Norristown and Pottstown, was flooding because it was that intense here.”
“Trying to communicate with people was the biggest challenge in the aftermath of the storm,” he adds. “It was a struggle. During the storm, we were shooting from the hip because we did not have much to work with. Everyone became very resourceful.”
Schuck and his team established a team of building inspectors to go door-to-door to do an overall assessment of properties impacted by the tornados. According to Schuck, of 1500 properties that were inspected in the three days following the tornado, 210 suffered major damage—about half of which were uninhabitable. A townhouse community was so devastated that a majority of the homes need to be taken down to be rebuilt. Another 951 properties suffered minor damage, and a further 365 were affected by the tornado. “It was pure chaos for the first three days,” Schuck remembers. “The day after the storm, chainsaws were running throughout the neighborhood and we had power companies from as far away as British Columbia that traveled here to help.”
That experience put faces to all the damage as Schuck met with members of the community who lost everything in the storm. “We walked the neighborhoods and I spoke with the residents to understand the experience that they went through,” Schuck recalls. “I spoke to one resident who was sitting in the second floor of her house and had just gotten out of her bedroom before the roof came off the house.”
In February 2022, Schuck was appointed in the role of Emergency Manager of Upper Dublin Township. Before that, the role of Emergency Manager was part of the job of the Township Manager, but the aftermath of the tornado indicated the need for the Emergency Manager to be a standalone role. Though he hopes the community never faces a disaster of that magnitude again, Schuck is committed to being better prepared to face any levels of emergency that the township experiences. “I am now building a new team and a new operations center along with new guidelines and manuals,” explains Schuck. “We’re starting from scratch. We need to establish more training for ourselves, which we are now in the process of training all the Upper Dublin Township police and emergency management so everybody knows what their roles are if another event happens, though hopefully the tornado was a once-in-a-lifetime event.”
In addition to all that preparation, Schuck notes that a key part of his role involves helping those whose lives have been impacted by devastation. “Working with the community is a big part of emergency management,” Schuck points out. “Our main concern is to bring them peace of mind by letting them know that we, the township, are going to help them get back to normal again.”