‘What would happen if a disaster hit my town?” That seems to be the question people across the country are asking in light of the devastation of the Gulf states caused by Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing controversy over the government’s response.##M:[more]##
Be it a natural disaster, or man-made emergency (such as a terrorist attack), officials in Plainsboro and West Windsor believe they have plans in place to deal with most catastrophies that could hit their communities.
“It’s not IF, it’s WHEN will the disaster occur?” reads the heading on the Plainsboro Police web page for the department’s Citizens Emergency Response Training (CERT) program, which trains residents to deal with disasters. (www.plainsboronj.com/plainsboropolice/pages/programs.htm)
Some federal officials, defending President Bush from criticism about the slow response to hurricane-impacted areas, have said that emergency planning is a bottom-up process, with the most important component occurring at the local level.
Officials in Plainsboro and West Windsor seemingly agree.
“We operate under the concept that it’s important for us to try to address the situation locally as best as we can,” says Cliff Maurer, Plainsboro director of public safety. “We’re a small municipality in the scheme of things. It’s incumbent on us to try to remain as self-sufficient as possible for a long period of time. In the case of a regional emergency, it’s logical to assume that more populous areas would recieve assistance before we get any.”
Maurer says the situation in New Orleans shows that you cannot always be dependent on paid emergency service workers who don’t live in your community when a regional disater occurs. “That’s one of the reasons why we look at CERT to be extremely important. We see these people as being a valuable resource.”
CERT helps communities deal with the 72 hours following a disaster, says the program’s web site. “The purpose of CERT training is to provide citizens with the basic skills that they need to handle virtually all of their own needs and then to respond to their communities needs in the aftermath of a disaster.”
CERT is a 20-hour program consisting of 10 weeks of training, in two-hour classes one night a week. According to Maurer, township residents and people who work in Plainsboro are eligible to participate. The classes are taught by trained emergency personnel, including firefighters and paramedics.
“I see CERT as replacing the old civil defense programs that existed in this country 50 to 60 years ago,” says Maurer. “We started our involvement about six years ago, and we already have the largest number of CERT members in the county.”
But Maurer also recognizes that CERT alone won’t be enough in the case of many emergencies.
According to Maurer, in the event of a disaster, the township would set up an operations center at town hall, or a mobile operations center, based on the type of emergency.
A set of protocols called the Incident Command System is used to coordinate the efforts of police, fire, rescue squad personnel. Other responders could include public works employees, the chief financial officer, the township administrator, the welfare director, and workers from the township building department, says Maurer.
The ICS was developeed by the federal government to address the difficulty of coordinating emergency services operations. At the heart of ICS is the concept of a unified command where police, fire, and other emergency services agencies meet to develop and oversee a coordinated response.
In West Windsor, the township has an emergency operations plan, last updated in May and approved by the state, that looks to deal with disaster situations, according to Township Administrator Chris Marion. “The key really is to communicate with volunteers (the volunteer fire department and rescue squad) on a regular basis. We have to work together to talk about issues and forecast things that could happen in the future.”
“There are monthly public safety meetings between Jim Yates (township director of emergency services), police, first aid, and fire departments. They discuss these types of issues to make sure we are prepared, but as the Gulf has shown, you can never be too prepared,” Marion says.
According to Yates, the emergency operations plan is federally mandated. “They supply us with a boiler plate package and then we tailor the plan to meet West Windsor’s needs. It looks at things like our vulnerabilities, critical infrastructure, how to deal with social services, fires, hazardous materials spills, weapons of mass destruction, and how we would evacuate the community.”
One key component in any disaster scenario is making sure that residents are warned and given appropriate information.
There are several ways of notifying residents in the event of an emergency, says Yates. If there is enough time, people can be warned through the print media of a major impending emergency. For more immediate notification, the township will post information on its website (www.westwindsornj.org), local radio stations, and the township cable channel.
Yates adds that Mercer County is also working on a reverse 911 system that it hopes to have in place during 2006. “Under that system, we can send out notifications to specific sections of town. Messages like a major storm is coming and people need to leave their homes, or a train derailment happened and their area of town is not affected by it.”
Yates adds that he doesn’t foresee too many situations where all residents would have to be moved out of the community. “What is more likely is that there would be something like a localized wind or rain storm where we would have to move residents from one part of the community to another part of the community.”
In those cases, residents would be evacuated using WW-P District school buses and moved to a shelter. “Under our shelter system we would use schools, the community college, and hotels on Route 1. We would have workers from our social services department at the shelters making sure the needs of residents are taken care of.”
According to Yates, the issue of pets is an unresolved detail in the evacuation and shelter system. “Some people like pets and some don’t want them around. It’s an issue that has really been brought to the forefront with Katrina. We’re not sure how to deal with them. One way might be to have pet-friendly shelters, and others where pets are not allowed.”
Officials in both townships agree that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, drove home the need for emergency preparedness, especially in this region.
“Our planning has intensified since September 11,” says Plainsboro Township Administrator Robert Sheehan. “I’m confident that the the townsip has taken appropriate steps to be ready for a problem, whatever it might be. But depending on the magnitude of an event, we would have to rely on other agencies outside the township, and I can’t vouch for what to expect from them because I don’t deal with them on a consistent basis.”
“We now have added resources through the CERT team,” he adds, “ and the police department in particular has done a good job of engaging the community in a number of ways.”
Says Sheehan: “We have a lot of folks from this town, as do a lot of neighboring communities, who were at the site on September 11 and 12 trying to help. They saw first hand what can happen. It’s a sad lesson we learned. I think because of 9-11, we’re really tuned into these sorts of situations because we were so close to what happened.
“The 9-11 attack has forced elected officials to have a better understanding about and the need for emergency planning,” says Yates.
“It (the attack) was a real eye-opener that brought emergency planning to the forefront, especially in New Jersey,” Marion says.
