Federal plan provides policy overview

The Mineral County Commissioners approved the Emergency Operations Plan, which was prepared for the county commissioners as well as the Town of Alberton and the Town of Superior. The plan was prepared by the Mineral County Disaster and Emergency Services (DES) as well as the Mineral County Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC).

George Gupton, DES coordinator, presented the plan to the commissioners during a meeting earlier this month. In addition to approving the plan, the commissioners also approved the LEPC member list and the LEPC bylaws.

There was some discussion on the plan, mostly regarding a phrase used in the glossary where the citizen corps program is defined. The phrase, administered by FEMA, is used.

Dennis Hildebrand brought up that, in his mind, having that phrase in there, would give FEMA control if a situation ever did occur. Upon further discussion, Commissioner Roman Zylawy didn’t see the relevance of having the definition of the citizen corps in the glossary when it’s not even mentioned in the plan. Ultimately, the commissioners ended up accepting the plan as is since changes can be made after they’ve looked into it further.

Gupton said that he put the definition in there purposely because they do have a citizen corps council, which gives them an edge in possibly getting some grants and such. He said that the LEPC and council will do a lot of things that will be parallel to each other.

Citizen Corps increases community preparedness and response capabilities through collaborative planning, public education, outreach, training and volunteer service. Additionally, programs like the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) train members of the public in basic disaster response skills, such as fire safety, light search and rescue, team organization and disaster medical operations.

Gupton and the LEPC committee spent six months reviewing the plan and preparing it to go before the commissioners last week. He said that they plan to have it reviewed and approved annually.

Basically, the planstates who is responsible to take care of an icdident should one occur. The plan provides an overview of emergency organization and policies. It describes the overall approach to disaster response and recovery operations and assigns responsibilities for emergency tasks.

The plan is intended to be both “generic” and “hazard specific” and covers the entire range of emergency and disaster situations from age old natural disasters to the technological hazards created as a byproduct of our modern society. The plan also serves as a reference of emergency/disaster information.

 “Responders need things like this themselves,” Gupton said. “They need to know who is responsible for when something happens. This is a general plan for the county. Each agency should have its own standard operation procedures so if there is a semi upside down in the river, this is who responds.”

Gupton said that the plan is important to have in place because when something does happen the response needs to be immediate without too much thought.

“When you’ve already looked at what could happen and you have a plan in place, it speeds up reaction time and ability,” Gupton said. “You don’t have to stop and think, ‘ok, what am I going to do?’”

Gupton said that the plan looks at everything that could potentially happen in Mineral County. He said that there is actually another plan in place, a Pre-disaster Mitigation Plan, which goes through and lists out what could be of concern in Mineral County.

“We can’t prevent anything, but we can do things in advance that would mean it might hurt us less,” Gupton said. “In Oklahoma, they focus heavily on tornadoes. Wild fires is a big one here and we do pay attention to earthquakes.”

Gupton said that sometime this year, they are planning to hold a full scale exercise to essentially practice responding to events. From doing table top exercises where they’ll get together and move through what they would do in a particular instance to role-playing and responding to a scenario, practice helps keep responders sharp.

LEPC will be planning the exercise. Gupton said that LEPC has been in the county for around ten years. Counties are required to have LEPC by law. They were established by the Federal Emergency Planning and Community Right-To-Know Act, as Title III of the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986.

Originally, the LEPC was designed to provide a forum for emergency management agencies, responders, industry and the public to work together to evaluate, understand and communicate chemical hazards in the community and develop appropriate emergency plans in case of accidental release of these chemicals.

In recent years, however, the LEPC’s planning efforts have been refocused to include planning for a variety of disasters that may affect the community. Floods, hazardous material spills, wildfires, natural disasters and even terrorism all constitute real challenges facing community leaders today. Federal and state planners have advocated for development of “all-hazards” planning, which prepare towns for any disaster; not just those from chemical releases.

Gupton said that anyone concerned about emergency preparedness is welcome to come to the meetings each month. They are held in the commissioner’s room of the Mineral County Courthouse on the first Thursday of the month at 4 p.m. He said that they are continuing to work toward a number of things.