Q&A with Rebecca Hupp, Director of the Boise Airport

April 29, 2013
Rebecca Hupp has been on board as director of the Boise Airport, also known as Gowen Field, for a year now. As director, she’s responsible for all of the infrastructure for commercial passenger and cargo services, including day-to-day operations and long-term planning. Right now, that includes overseeing construction of a $13 million, 770-space parking garage expansion that’s been in the works for three years.

Rebecca Hupp has been on board as director of the Boise Airport, also known as Gowen Field, for a year now. As director, she’s responsible for all of the infrastructure for commercial passenger and cargo services, including day-to-day operations and long-term planning. Right now, that includes overseeing construction of a $13 million, 770-space parking garage expansion that’s been in the works for three years. Hupp and her office work side by side with the federal Transportation Security Administration, which runs security, and with Alaska, Allegiant, Delta, Southwest, United and US Airways, the airlines that rent space for their planes and passenger services in the terminal.

The airport is also home to the Army and Air National Guard, which employ about 1,000 people at Gowen Field. Next door is the National Interagency Fire Center, with more than 600 employees.

Also sharing the airfield are general aviation services, including Jackson Jet Center, Western Aircraft, Idaho Helicopter, and several related businesses. Life Flight and Medevac also keep their helicopters in a hangar there.

Hupp hears a lot of questions from business travelers about Boise’s direct commercial passenger service to other cities. She answers that Boise actually has a higher number of direct flights than most cities its size. Still, commercial passenger service around the nation is beset by problems, including volatile fuel prices. Boise Airport recently commissioned a study to see if there was room for growth in the airport’s cargo services. The study, by an aviation consulting group called Mead Hunt, showed there aren’t a lot of opportunities for growth in that area. It costs around 10 times more to ship freight by air than by surface.

Hupp is now preparing for an FAA-mandated disaster readiness exercise May 22 that will involve the Boise Fire Department, the Boise Police Department, the Idaho National Guard, local hospitals, and other emergency response agencies. Idaho Business Review sat down with Hupp to hear more about the exercise and look at ways other businesses could benefit from the FAA’s experience with disaster planning.

IBR: What does the disaster planning exercise involve?

HUPP: We simulate a commercial airline to test our emergency response plan. We’ll have volunteers to serve as victims. We’ll test the initial response to the fire with the fuselage of an old FedEx plane on our third runway, on the other side of Gowen Field. We’ll also test other components of our plan, for example the public information component and family support services.

That includes transporting patients to the hospital, so the hospitals will be testing their emergency response plan. We’d like to have 100 volunteers to serve as victims and family members. We’ve asked other city of Boise employees if they want to volunteer. Everyone gets lunch and a T-shirt.

IBR: What will you be doing on that day?

HUPP: Exactly what I would be doing in a real emergency. I’ll receive notification, I’ll set up an emergency operations center in the terminal building, and I’ll execute our emergency plan. We would actually have a joint command at the operations center where the fire chief and police chief would be. There would be an incident commander on the scene of the incident, not in the emergency operations center. We would be communicating via radio, via phone, via e-mail.

IBR: Do the airlines participate?

HUPP: Yes, the airline representatives will serve as airline representatives in the drill. There’s a federal regulation that directs what has to be in our emergency plan, and we make sure it addresses each of the regulatory areas. But really it’s specific to Boise, based on our resources and our facilities, and the type of emergency that we might likely encounter.

The incident commander will probably be the lead person from fire at the scene. I don’t put out fires; that’s not my job. It’ll be a joint command. Our deputy director of operations, Sarah Demory, is spearheading the organizing and planning. I’m heavily involved in the planning.

IBR: What have you learned from prior emergency simulations?

HUPP: I think probably one of the biggest things we find, and I think other organizations find when we look at emergency preparedness, is that communications can always be improved. That includes communications between the responding agencies and the public, in our case to passengers. And it’s critical, for example, when you’re transporting patients from one site to a hospital, or to a temporary emergency response holding area.

One of the findings that came out of the 9/11 review of emergency response was that many times emergency response agencies operated on different radio frequencies and couldn’t talk to each other. Many communities have received federal grants to update their radio equipment. If you have a real emergency, one of the other things that used to happen is that all the circuits would be busy. I don’t know that that would be an issue here.

We use Twitter, and we use Facebook, and we probably would use those mediums in the event of a real incident to provide quick updates.

IBR: Will you stay in character during the simulation?

HUPP: We do ask people to stay in character when they are participating in the emergency exercise. We want people to have fun and enjoy what they are doing, particularly the volunteers. Obviously we know it’s a drill. But we’re there to test the plan, and to learn any areas for improvement, and to learn what works well.

IBR: What is your plan for working with the media in an emergency?

HUPP: When we are responding to a real emergency, the media is not our first priority. The first priority is the safety and well-being of the people who are impacted. We do have people who would be handling the media as their role in responding to the emergency. That person’s role would be to provide information updates as they become available. We can’t always release information to the media as quickly as they want.

In the event of a large-scale incident we’d perhaps coordinate with a police and fire spokesperson. The airline would have a spokesperson if it was a commercial carrier incident, and the (National Transportation Safety Board) would be involved.

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