Officials: Emergency Shelter Plan Education Needed

Councilwoman Jennifer Willis would like to see the county do a better job of educating the public about what to do in emergencies.

“If we have a disaster, if we have a big crisis, if we have a massive storm, we aren't set up to handle that,” she said. “Folks, they don't know where to go, don't know what to do.”

The topic was brought up during a recent county council planning retreat.

Willis said she's not advocating for “a big building.”
“I'm saying we need a plan,” she said. “We need to be able to call on facilities that we can use.”

She used as an example the train that derailed between Norris and Liberty several years ago.

“We had to displace people, Red Cross was there trying to get vouchers to put people in hotels and things like that, people had animals, all sorts of issues,” Willis said. “The time is to figure that out is not when you're in that crisis. The time to figure that out is now.”

Willis said there are facilities available now that can be used as shelters.

“It's having the stuff in place now, so you don't have to figure it out later,” she said. “It needs to be communicated – this is what happens in a disaster, this is where we go.”

County Administrator Chap Hurst said the county has an emergency plan, with predetermined shelters to be up at churches and schools.

“DSS runs the shelter or either the Red Cross,” he said. “That's pretty much the way it's run across the state. Some of them are schools, but then you have the issue where you have to cancel school because you're going to use it for something else.”

“We have a serious issue when it comes to shelters,” said County Council Chairman G. Neil Smith. “We rely on churches, we rely on other people.”

Councilman Tom Ponder said school facilities recently purchased by the county – the former Liberty Middle and Dacusville Elementary sites, could easily be converted into shelters.

“They've got the kitchens, they've got the floor space,” he said.

“But they need to be set up,” Willis said. “We need to move it to the next level.”

Smith recalled a storm system that hit several states several years ago.

“That tornado was on the ground for 300 miles,” Smith said. “We have a responsibility to be telling people what to do. If that tornado is coming towards us, what to we tell people? Not after the fact. The bottom line is we don't have many safe places when it comes to that type of storm.”

Emergency plans must also take prevailing winds into account – as in the case of train accidents, Smith said.

“When you're talking about a train accident, you're always afraid of gas clouds, because of all those chemicals. When you look at what's on those trains, it's scary what's in one car. What's even scarier is when they mix and water comes. It creates a lot of issues.”

“We had a train accident in Norris,” Smith said. “Where was our evacuation center? In Liberty, right in the path of where the wind would blow. We could have ended up with a bigger problem. Part of it is trying to improve what we're doing.”

After the Liberty train derailment, some people weren't able to afford an hotel room after the initial evacuation of the area near the crash site.

“They were staying in their cars, because the hotels were saying 'You've got to pay,' and the railroad was saying, 'We'll reimburse you.' If we knew the railroad was going to reimburse, why don't we put them up and then we'll get reimbursed?. But it took awhile to go through that.

“We didn't think about people not having the ability to rent a room,” Smith said. “We just assumed that was it and it wasn't. Every time you have a plan, you have to tweak it.”

Education should be a big component of the county's plan, Willis said.

“While there may be charts and graphs and a plan at the EOC (Emergency Operations Center), if you ask the average citizen, they have no clue. And that's part of what this plan needs to be. So you could ask any person anywhere and they would say, 'Yeah, if the dam went, yeah, if the tornado hit, here's where I'd go to find the information.' It's not known out there in the great beyond. It's a closely guarded secret and it shouldn't be.”