Exercise:Valley Needs Disaster Recovery Plan

TOUCHET VALLEY - In anticipation of a severe winter, heavy snowfall and possible flooding this spring, Columbia County Emergen­cy Management gathered as many senior officials in the Touchet Valley as pos­sible last week for a disaster preparedness workshop in Dayton. "For me, it was one of the best - if not the best - workshop I've been to," said Glenn Hagfeldt, a member services engineer with Co­lumbia Rural Electric Asso­ciation in Dayton. Attendees were presented with a mock flood disaster of catastrophic proportions to work through. The purpose was to provide a forum for discussing strategic and ex­ecutive

level issues related to disaster preparedness, sharing strategies and best practices, and enhancing co­ordination among officials. Flooding is an issue of top priority in Columbia and Walla Walla counties given the history of such disasters in the valley. The scenario presented in the workshop isolated the county from all outside resources to see what officials would do. "The cross-section of folks there was fantastic," said attendee Ted Pater­son, who participated as a citizen of Dayton and also as a member of the county hospital board. "The com­munication and coordination that has to happen between agencies is so important." The wake-up call for local leaders, Paterson said, came during mock recovery. "As soon as something like this is over, people go back to work," he said. "We forget about recovery. There is still a tremendous amount of work to do to get busi­nesses and community infra­structure back in place." Caldwell agreed. If last week's workshop showed her anything it was that the county needs to spend more time planning for what hap­pens after a disaster.

"Everyone is usually fo­cused on preparing and planning for the emergency itself," she said. "And when it comes to the recovery phase, you're just drained." The county has multiple systems in place for re­sponding to an emergency and for alerting the public to any risk or danger. A com­puter system in Caldwell's office uses a Reverse 911 technology to phone resi­dents with land-lines inside areas that may be affected by a disaster. Residents can also sign up for emergency e-mail or text message alerts through the county's website at www.columbiaco.com.

But recovery remains a weakness.

The Institute for Busi­ness and Home Safety has claimed that at least one-quarter of all businesses that close because of disaster never reopen. Federal ex­perts have reported that this number is higher, at 40 per­cent, for small businesses, which make up the majority of commerce in the Touchet Valley.

"We need to look close­ly at our recovery phase," Caldwell said. "We plan to take a look and see what we truly have in place and where we can improve."

That's where having members of the local busi­ness community, like cham­ber of commerce director Lisa Ronnberg and Hagfeldt from Columbia REA, came into play during the work­shop.

"Having the private sec­tor involved was huge," Caldwell said. "We dis­covered

that right here in town we have access to resources we hadn't thought about with Puget Sound Energy, REA and Vestas. People right here in town, we learned, could and would step up and help us."

REA's Hagfeldt, who be­came the county's first recip­ient of the Columbia County Emergency Management Preparedness Award during the workshop, agreed with Caldwell.

"If there were an emer­gency, we're not just going to sit by and watch," he said. "We're an asset. We have manpower and people trained to respond to certain things, like downed power lines. We could also occa­sionally help out with bucket trucks and other equipment." Hagfeldt is a member of the county's Emergen­cy Management Advisory Council, the Local Emer­gency Planning Committee and the Multi-Jurisdictional Hazard Mitigation Commit­tee. He was awarded for the vital role he's played locally by acting on those commit­tees and attending every meeting and workshop given between 2009 and 2010. Hagfeldt and Ronnberg were just two of 32 par­ticipants at last Wednesday's workshop. Others included all three Columbia County commissioners, the mayors of Dayton and Starbuck, the director of emergency management in Walla Walla County, the Washington State Region 9 Homeland Security Coordinator, the Dayton Chamber of Com­merce, Puget Sound En­ergy, Vestas, Dayton General Hospital, the superintendent of Dayton schools, Colum­bia

Rural Fire District 3, Columbia County engineers, Washington Department of Transportation, public health and more. This was the first time the county's emergency man­agement team had gathered all these players together in the same room for disaster planning, according to Lisa Caldwell, Columbia County Emergency Management project manager. Her goal for the day was to work on communication, coordina­tion and planning. "We wanted to find out what resources we have in the community and in the region in the case of an emergency," Caldwell said. "With weather predictions for a severe winter and high­er

than normal precipitation, we want to make sure we're doing everything we can for our community." The level of attendance by elected officials, com­munity leaders, the business sector and members of the general public was a surprise to Darrell Ruby, the state Homeland Security coordi­nator for this region. "I attended that same training in Spokane, and it was not as well attended," he said Monday. "It shows a real commitment on the part of Columbia County at large. For these folks to give up an entire day to attend, that's a tremendous sacrifice of their time. And the feedback was that they didn't think it was a waste of their time."

For Caldwell, it was im­portant to have such repre­sentation present. In the case of last week's mock disaster, the flooding isolated the en­tire Dayton community. Elected officials are busy with the day-to-day routines of their positions and are often not prepared for the roles they'll be thrust into in a disaster situation, she said.

The county treasurer or school superintendent might not think they have a role, but they do, Caldwell said. The county uses the schools, for example, for emergency shelters.

"His (Doug Johnson's) plans are going to have to match our plans," she said. "So we don't have any sur­prises during an emergency." And people such as the prosecuting attorney, who will have declarations and mutual aid contracts to sign, and the assessor, who could access county maps to aid in fighting a fire, for example, also play vital roles.

Touchet Valley haz­ards include flooding, fire, drought and severe weather in addition to man-made problems that could arise from the transportation of hazardous materials on the highways, Caldwell said.

Residents here are fortu­nate, she said, not to have issues with earthquakes as Walla Walla does. The val­ley

is also not downwind, as Walla Walla residents are, of Hanford or the Umatilla Chemical Depot, which is one of six U.S. Army instal­lations that currently store chemical weapons such as sarin, VX nerve agent or mustard agent.