It wasn’t the war room before a hurricane, but three top minds in preparing Cranston for a potential natural disaster came together Friday to discuss the city’s strategy for everything from cyclones to blizzards.

Fire Chief William McKenna, Public Works Director Ken Mason and Traffic Manager John Corso talked with the Herald at City Hall to give an overview of how Cranston tackles severe weather events, ranging from evacuation plans to who deals with the fallout.

“It’s very well organized amongst the people sitting at the table,” McKenna, who is the EMA director for Cranston, said, “Seventy-two hours out you should be contacting your people, getting your contracts in place. Forty-eight hours out you should know where the storm is going to hit and solidifying your people, who’s going to be available.”

The final day before a storm sweeps in would be dedicated to making sure shelters are operating, generators are primed to go and that everyone is in place.

“Twenty-fours, you’re waiting for the landfall of the storm,” McKenna said. “There is a working schedule to it. Having been through it many times, there are other organizations within the city that we want to make sure we get on the right schedule.”

McKenna said every community has its own evacuation plan. Ocean and Seaview avenues, to name a couple of the evacuation points, would be sent up Park Avenue, toward Route 10 before eventually funneling on to Route 95.

The preparation framework, contained within an enormous 3-ring binder that McKenna brought to the interview, has changed very little over the past several years. The coastal flooding plan is in place, but McKenna and Mason said most of Cranston’s shoreline would not be affected.

“I think Houston was a totally different animal,” Mason said of Harvey, which dumped as much as 51 inches of rain on parts of Texas. “That storm stayed there for six or seven days. I don’t think we’ve ever had anything that bad and I don’t anticipate having that. The one thing about Houston is you could go to the shoreline of Houston Harbor, go five miles inland and have about a 1-foot grade difference. You don’t have that here. Cranston has a fairly short shoreline, it starts at Pawtuxet Village and goes up Narragansett Boulevard.”

Mason said the city’s main source of flooding, as it has seen recently, is rivers.

McKenna has been in Cranston for 30 years, so he has seen everything from Hurricane Bob to Superstorm Sandy, but the worst flooding he’s witnessed was in 2010. Two storm systems combined to drop 16 inches of rain on Cranston and submerge parts of the city.

“I was amazed,” Corso said. “[On] Wellington Avenue it tore up the pavement. It [the Pawtuxet River] ripped up the road, the water was so strong. I was riding around looking at the stuff and when you see that, you’re, like, ‘Wow.’”

McKenna said that during the early 1980s there was flooding along the Pawtuxet toward Perkins Avenue, but the rains in 2010 swelled the river to nine feet above flood stage for about five days.

He said that, although the city had a response plan in place, it was difficult to prepare for such a large volume in a short time span.

“We weren’t ready for that volume of water so quickly,” McKenna said. “We were down there on Perkins Avenue with sandbags at 7:30 a.m. in the morning and by the time they were set we were backing up and backing up.”

“Every time we got there with another load, we were going further up the road,” Corso recalled.

Since then, Irene and Sandy have both passed through Cranston without much of an issue. McKenna said he deals with departments across the city, ranging from the enrichment center and the schools to the administration.

The enrichment center is the city’s primary shelter, but some schools like Hope Highlands also act in that capacity as well.

“We start passing out paperwork at the 24-hour range to document these things for FEMA,” McKenna said. “Most people around the city are ready to go. We open EOC [emergency operations center] and sit everybody down, meet 48 hours prior, everybody gets home and gets it all straightened out. A lot of these things are dependent upon the mayor and administration opening up the shelters.”

Cranston does have an advantage over other municipalities with RIEMA headquarters on New London Avenue, eight minutes away from City Hall.

McKenna said the city uses RIEMA as a logistical and informational source, but if electricity went out during a storm it’s only a short trip.

“If we needed additional manpower, additional equipment they’re available to us, they could tell us where to pick up the equipment,” McKenna said. “It’s good for every community that they’re located here, but if power goes out and phones go down we could drive up the street and operate out of there.”

Wind has been a more significant factor than flooding with those systems, but Mason said the city has contracts with Stanley Tree Service and Northeast Tree Service to help with removal.

“We plan dump sites on different sides of the city for the debris, where we’re going to stockpile it,” Corso said. “Parking lots, fields. If it’s too bad we get everything off the roads, then go into the next phase of starting to remove it.”

Flooding could still have an impact if rainfall is anything like 2010, but Cranston has tried to reduce the amount of houses affected.

Mason said the city has taken steps to purchase and remove homes in areas such as Perkins Avenue and Amanda Street, which are nestled right near the river.

“In the flood-prone areas, the city has actively purchases quite a few homes,” Mason said. “I think 15 houses were bought and demolished. I think [the city has] plans for 10 or 12 houses in those repetitive flood areas.”

Hurricanes are the source of anxiety for millions in New England right now, but all three men agreed the worst weather event they have witnessed wasn’t a hurricane at all.

In fact, it didn’t even happen in the summer or fall.

“I was in North Providence, at a volunteer fire station,” McKenna said.

“I was a student at URI,” Mason said.

“I was on my father’s bulldozer with no cab pushing snow,” Corso said.

They were referring to the Blizzard of ’78, which dropped four to five feet of snow and caused 100 fatalities. McKenna, who had just returned from Hawaii at the time, recalled that the forecast initially called for only six to eight inches.

“It took everybody by surprise,” McKenna said. “Providence was completely shut down. We had about 300 people come through the little station, we had 15 or so stay for three or four days in a station that was not equipped. The only thing that saved us then was the Stop and Shop behind us was snowed in and their food was going bad so they cooked and cooked and cooked.”

For Mason, the circumstances were less dire.

“We were driving around the next day and the biggest crisis that hit URI was the beer trucks couldn’t get down from Providence, and we were starting to run out of beer,” he said.