Norcross To Talk Weather and Resilience at IBTTA Annual Meeting

With so many tolling authorities taking a fresh look at their emergency preparedness and management plans, Bryan Norcross’ keynote appearance at IBTTA’s 81st Annual Meeting and Exhibition next month in Vancouver, Canada, will be especially timely.

Norcross is the Senior Hurricane Specialist and Senior Executive Director of Weather Content and Presentation at The Weather Channel, based in Atlanta, Georgia. So he’s much more than just the guy who stands in front of a TV weather map. (Not that there is anything wrong with that.)

It’s no mistake that Norcross leads the lineup for this year’s Annual Meeting, or that emergency preparedness, severe weather, and resilience have been major themes for IBTTA over the past year. Member agencies were on the front lines when Hurricane Sandy slammed the northeast of United States last October.

Less than three months later, at a special forum in Miami, tolling executives from New York, New Jersey, and Florida shared experiences and lessons learned from weather disasters that wiped out key systems, calling for extraordinary courage and resourcefulness from front-line personnel.

Heavy Weather on the Horizon

Weather and climate specialists expect more frequent, severe storms in the months and years ahead. At IBTTA’s 2013 Organization Management Workshop in Baltimore last June, participants heard about the foreseeable weather impacts and emergency preparedness options for toll roads in different parts of the U.S.

For Bryan Norcross, that kind of news and analysis is all too familiar.

In 1992, he gained national recognition after he “talked South Florida through” Hurricane Andrew, the fourth-costliest storm in U.S. history. The stint earned him the 1993 David Brinkley Award for Excellence in Communication.

After Andrew, he served on Florida’s Academic Task Force on Hurricane Catastrophe Insurance, and on a Governor’s Committee that recommended changes to the state’s emergency management system.

From 2008 to 2010, he headed America’s Emergency Network, Inc., a system that allows local governments and other agencies to stream live emergency news briefings to the public and media.

The Solutions Begin in Vancouver

Norcross will bring his extensive expertise to the IBTTA stage at the general session on Tuesday, September 24. The session will include a lightning tour around the world, where members from Europe, Asia, and South America will present the approaches they use to keep customers safe during extraordinary weather events.

The conversation will continue the following day, with a panel of tolling executives from Austria, China, Israel, Italy, South Africa, and the U.S. They’ll talk about the changing landscape of world events and the strategies they’ve adopted to keep their services safe and predictable.

For the latest updates on IBTTA’s 81st Annual Meeting and Exhibition, September 22-25, 2013 in Vancouver, Canada visit www.ibtta.org/events.