Douglas County Emergency Management provides flood guide workshop to key leaders
East Fork Fire Protection District, serving as Douglas County Emergency Management, provided orientation to 98 individuals from around the county during flood response guide workshops held earlier this month.
The purpose of the workshop was to gather partnering agencies together and provide education on the functional, operational and strategic direction that would occur under flood conditions in Douglas County. All of this information has been assembled into a simple ‘guide’ extracted from the comprehensive Emergency Operations Plan for those who would be assigned key roles in emergency management operations during a flood.
“With recent flash flooding here in Douglas County, combined with the future potential risk of a major flood event, we felt it was important to bring everyone together to refresh and in some cases redefine the various roles and responsibilities of those charges with the management of such an event ,” said Tod Carlini, District Fire Chief and Emergency Manager. “Douglas County’s combined strength during such events is vested with our ability to all work together in a coordinated manner regardless of the jurisdictions, agencies, or volunteer groups we may represent.”
Among those participating included Douglas County government, local general improvement districts, towns and fire district employees, the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, the Visitors Authority, the Chamber of Commerce and community volunteer group leaders such as Douglas County Search and Rescue, Posse, CERT, and WAVE.
Douglas County has not activated it the Emergency Operations Center to full capacity to address any countywide situation in the last 20 years. The last time a full deployment was necessary was in the 1997 flood event.
The two hour long workshops, presented by Deputy Chief of Operations, Dave Fogerson, walked each participant through the Flood Guide document. Group exercises were included where attendees were able to work with other attendees who under normal working conditions, would probably not have any interaction. During an emergency situation of great magnitude, such as a large flood event, the likelihood of individuals having to work with others they may not even know is quite high.
“We are very fortunate to have so many talented and dedicated people, either in public service, the private sector, or volunteering in this County, “said Chief Carlini. “I am quite confident in our ability to manage a large flood event after this training. Our hope is that we can apply the same methodology ,via response guides, for other major events such as an earth quake.”
The Flood Guide was primarily developed by Deputy Chief Dave Fogerson and funded by a grant from the Nevada Division of Emergency Management.
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