Preparedness and Communications

The county dispatches for 12 townships, Hamilton, Oxford and the villages. Fairfield, Middletown, Monroe, Trenton and West Chester Township have their own centers.

March 25-29 is Emergency Management Week in Grady, County, Okla., which is an initiative to raise awareness of the role of emergency management.

Rollout of the new system was initially scheduled for this year, but several setbacks have pushed the project’s completion to 2022 at the soonest.

An emergency shelter-in-place warning was issued not because of the smoke, but from dangerously high levels of the invisible, cancer-causing crude oil compound benzene that were detected just outside of Houston in Deer Park.

With FirstNet’s designated network in all 50 states and dozens of apps available in its catalog, the niche market for first responders originally envisioned by the 9/11 Commission has come to fruition.

Newsom also waived environmental regulations to speed up almost three dozen local forest management projects, which will cost a total of $35 million, and will be paid with forest management funds in the 2018-19 budget.

The Emergency Video Assistance app connects the caller to the first responder, providing real-time situational awareness and saving critical minutes on scene. The app is a Samsung Solve for Tomorrow contest finalist.

More than 100 people died in wildfires in California in 2017 and 2018, and more than 875,000 acres burned, but mountain-top cameras and high-resolution mapping systems are beginning to make a difference.

As FEMA works out new NFIP rules, residents and officials look forward to more accurate mapping, but worry that the price of flood insurance for some property owners may significantly increase.

The CodeRED system is used to distribute information about emergencies such as evacuation notices, utility outages, water main breaks, fires, floods and chemical spills, according to information on Somerset County’s website.

The action came after a report about hydrant connection problems and a failed hydrant near the site in Valley View, Pa.

Sauk County Emergency Management Director Jeff Jelinek said the county’s current hazard mitigation plan was prepared in 2005. An advisory committee has been looking at potential updates, and stakeholders, such as villages, towns and cities, are seeking feedback from citizens.

To join the ranks, a candidate must have a high school diploma, a clean background check and an active driver's license. Then they must complete several hundred hours of training on their own time, which takes at least several months to accomplish.

Federal, state and county emergency officials urge West Virginia families, businesses, hospitals, nursing homes, schools and government agencies to use the test alert to simulate what actions would be taken in the event of a real tornado emergency, and to update emergency plans as needed.

The checklist should include three emergency contacts, two of whom should be located nearby and the third far enough away to be unaffected if the whole region is engulfed by disaster.