KC Scout Shout!

At the April 3 Missouri Highways & Transportation Commission meeting, Chief Safety & Operations Officer Becky Allmeroth presented Kansas City District Emergency Response Operator Kenneth Cassway with a meritorious safety award. On Feb. 11, at just past 3:30 a.m., Kansas City Missouri Police Department dispatchers alerted officers of a wrong-way vehicle that was traveling eastbound in the westbound lanes of Interstate 70 at Brooklyn Avenue. Cassway heard the police radio and entered I-70 from Sterling Road and U.S. Route 40 to locate the wrong-way vehicle. In the area of I-70 and Pittman Road, Cassway observed the wrong-way vehicle coming toward his MoDOT truck. He used the truck and the JAWS debris removal tool to stop and pin the wrong-way vehicle between his vehicle and the concrete median barrier. Cassway and the wrong-way driver were not injured, and no damage was made to his MoDOT truck.

The KC Scout board of directors are always prompt with moving KC Scout forward. One director, Nicole Hood has worked at MoDOT for 29 years and 2 months in various roles including Planning, District Traffic, Design, Project Management and her current role as the State Highway Safety and Traffic Engineer. She joined the KC Scout Board of Directors during the Summer of 2017.  She has spent the last 7 years growing the “Buckle Up Phone Down” incitive into a nationally recognized movement. “MoDOT has given me the opportunity to make a difference and touch so many lives.  That’s what really has inspired me throughout my career.   I was empowered to lead engaging projects and teams and influence direction,” said Hood. She will be retiring and starting a new adventure with a career at Transystems. She is excited about the ability to instill her passion for highway safety in other projects across the nation. Her advice to KC Scout is to always maintain a positive attitude and keep smiling! 

On Thursday, April 25 th in a matter of an instant, everything changed for KC Scout. When Scout employees walked into what they thought would be a regular workday, they instead were told to suddenly shut down everything, because they had just been hit with a cyberattack. That day, and for many days to come, were filled with meetings after meetings, scrambling to figure out the best way to go about this situation that no one had ever experienced before. Although the team already had a crisis plan set in place for many of their major critical incidents, they had never been trained on anything to this scale.  Throughout this time employees faced many challenges, but one of the biggest challenges they faced was simply determining which of their many tasks took priority over the others. This was difficult, because KC Scout serves two DOTs with 9 different functional teams and a number of other departments stepped in to help.  This is when Assistant Safety and Emergency Management Director M

During a time of limited funding and increased customer needs, there is always a need to do more without additional funding or resources. Randy Johnson, KC Scout Manger, has embarked on a journey of transformation to help find a solution to this challenge of optimizing processes, reducing costs, and improving quality. For the past six months Johnson has been participating in a program titled “Lean Six Sigma.” For those unaware of what Lean Six Sigma is, it is a program that focuses on enhancing value for the customers by improving and smoothing the process flow and eliminating waste. There are many different fairly intense stages to this program, known as the Six Sigma Belts. Each stage indicates a different level of knowledge, skill and experience and Johnson was able to reach the highest level of belt, the Black Belt, despite it not being his primary occupation. The black Belt “marks a professional’s capability to implement improvement processes in the workplace.” Achieving the Black

KC Scout Incident Management Coordinator Marcus Slaughter and Traffic Incident Manager Owen Hasson recently attended the Debris Removal Workshop through the Federal Highway Administration in Minnesota. This workshop was very highly attended by many states around the country, but Slaughter and Hasson were specifically asked to attend the workshop due to Slaughter’s leadership in the creation of Julie’s Automated Waste Removal system (JAWS). JAWS, mounted on a truck, is a device that features an automated drop-down skid-plate that clears the debris out of the roadway and relocating it onto the shoulder. This system has shed light on the importance of safety while removing debris from the roads, as well as sparked the creation of other automated debris removal systems. “Since we developed JAWS, in late 2016, there have been others who have seen the importance of such a device and its ability to save lives,” Slaughter said. This is a huge honor for Slaughter and a very well-deserved recogn

One April 25, KC Scout was hit with a cyberattack that shut down all cameras and communication to the roadways. Without their normal resources, the Scout team quickly pivoted to using alternative means to continue providing traffic incident management services. Without cameras, the TMC relied on getting accurate lane closure information from first responders including KHP MAV and MoDOT Emergency Response. After further coordination efforts, it was decided that KHP Scout Senior TMC Operator Neil Kornis would assist with KHP MAV in the field for the further facilitation between KC Scout and KHP. “The opportunity to sit alongside with a MAV and witness them doing their job while also discussing how we could do a better job as a team couldn’t be passed up,” Kornis said. During this time, not only did Kornis act as another point of communication between Scout and MAV, but he also used this time to evaluate ways the teams could improve.  “I used the time to put myself in the MAV’s shoes and

This year MoDOT KC got the opportunity to be the host city for the Transportation Management Center Pool Fund Study annual meeting on May 7 th , 8 th and 9 th . There were 23 different states and several FHWA members that attended this meeting to exchange ideas with one another regarding projects that address planning, design, implementation, management, and operations issues associated with TMCs and transportation management systems. Although this event occurred during the peak of cyber-attack restorations, the meeting was still extremely successful and beneficial to all who attended.