Emergency management workers invited the Emporia city commission to become involved in a hazard-mitigation plan that is being created for Lyon County, its cities and towns.
Rick Frevert, emergency management director, and Steve Samuelson, Lyon County appraiser, presented information about the plan during the commission study session Wednesday in the city conference room.
The men asked commissioners to participate in the plan, which will be used in part to enable the area to gain state and federal funds and assistance when disaster strikes. Unclaimed disaster money languishes at the state level because counties have not turned in their plans or the plans were found inadequate and not approved.
“Unfortunately, by law, they can’t give it to us unless we have a hazard-mitigation plan,” Samuelson said. “We could get money that other areas are not asking for. ... We’re not talking small figures. It’s hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Samuelson gave a brief synopsis of the plan, which is already is 93 pages long and growing. It deals with a variety of hazards that could be expected to affect the county — floods, tornados and ice storms, for example — rather than terrorism or national-security threats.
“We don’t feel we’re the target audience that terrorists would be after,” Frevert said, explaining that hazard-mitigation plans took on a different focus after Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters created immediate and widespread difficulties for a large segment of the population.
The new plan contains six sections that Frevert and Samuelson have been told should bring approval from state and federal authorities. Those sections are:
1. Public Planning Process, which will give a history of how the plan evolved to completion.
2. Jurisdiction Participation Information, which will include copies of resolutions or ordinances as proof of support from each of the county’s eight incorporated cities.
“We don’t want this to be a Lyon County plan,” Samuelson said. “We want this to be a multi-jurisdictional plan for all the communities in the county” so they will be eligible for funds.
3. Jurisdiction Information, which is “like a class in local geography intensively studied,” Samuelson said.
4. Risk Assessment, to determine types and degrees of risks typically expected in Lyon County. These risks are broken down into eight categories that primarily are natural disasters such as floods, tornados and ice storms.
5. Mitigation Strategies, which emphasize the different needs of each town or city.
Bushong already has listed a tornado siren and shelter as primary needs; Emporia’s needs would be different and need to be defined by city officials.
6. Plan as a Whole and how it will be maintained. The local plan will be put on mitigationplan.com, the Web site can be updated or changed as needed. It must be reviewed or updated every five years.
In response to a question from commissioner Julie Johnson about hazardous materials carried on trains, the men agreed that those trains do pose risks to the city. However, data are not now available from the railroad to provide the necessary risk-assessment figures.
“We’re not putting anything in there specifically to mitigate the risks that are coming through with the exception of all-hazard radios, weather radios,” Frevert said. Those radios, which commonly broadcast storm, flood, or Amber alerts, also will alert radio owners to other life-threatening events. The problem, however, lies in the fact that most of the public does not own all-hazard radios.
A reverse 911 system is possible, to send hazard alerts from dispatch centers to land-line telephones. However, the reverse 911 technology is not available for cell phones, Frevert said.
Frevert said that a hazard analysis will be done by an outside company that specializes in those other types of risks.
Discussion also revolved around an alternative communications center that could be used by city and/or county, in case the existing dispatch centers are destroyed or cannot be used, for example, because of a chlorine spill along the railroad tracks.
Some of the commissioners understood that an alternative communications center was to have been established at the water treatment plant in northwest Emporia. Frevert said that the center had not been installed because funds were not available. That information perturbed commissioner Tom Myers.
“Oh yeah, that plan we had? We’re not doing it,” Myers said. “I didn’t get that memo. I thought it was in place.”
Frevert said that the state has a “cow/calf” system available that within two hours would provide communications for city and county. The mobile Communications on Wheels (cows) are located in Topeka and Salina. The “calves” are portable units that will fit into a vehicle and will respond. The system is compatible with existing communications equipment in the county.
“What they’re doing is supplying us a backbone” of a communications system, Frevert said.
“This plan is not going to be complete until we ask you what you want us to put in it and you give us some feedback,” Samuelson said.
The city must form a planning committee to take part in the hazard-mitigation plan.