By CARL E. FEATHER - Staff Writer - cfeather@starbeacon.com
JEFFERSON — George Sabo likes to see the snow melt slowly.
Last week, Sabo, director of the county’s Emergency Management Agency (EMA), was concerned that the warm weather and drizzle would result in flooding that would require evacuation of residents in low-lying areas. That didn’t happen; however, but if it had, Sabo has a plan to deal with it.
Indeed, Sabo has more than a dozen plans that address scenarios ranging from a nuclear disaster at the Perry nuclear power plant to a terrorist planting an improvised explosive device in a public building; from a tornado tearing apart a business district to a pandemic shutting down schools and public services.
Overarching these plans is the county’s Emergency Operations Plan, which is updated annually with input from the sheriff and all police and fire departments. The plan is placed in the hands of more than 90 responders and political subdivisions.
“This way, everybody is working off the same game plan, the same structure,” Sabo says.
EMA is a resource to the county’s first-responders, whether that be the volunteer fire department in a rural township or professional municipal departments. Sabo says it’s the local department that first deals with virtually any disaster that befalls the county. When the disaster exceeds the resources of these local responders, they move up the ladder to EMA.
“Any township, any political subdivision, if they exhaust their resources, they will reach out to us,” Sabo says. “If they need us, we make ourselves available, and we’re on call 24/7.”
If the county can’t provide the resources, then the request moves to the state level, and from there to the federal. The focus is always to let the local responders deal with the situation first, calling in assistance as needed.
Sabo says while response plans have been developed for a number of scenarios, the County Emergency Operations Plan is broadly written and applicable. That’s an approach encouraged by the National Incident Management System (NIMS).
“They want you to have one plan that will work for all disasters,” he says.
That doesn’t mean his agency and the county’s fire and police departments don’t plan for and train to respond to specific disaster scenarios. Indeed, Sabo says training and continuing education are a way of life for these responders, and his office is always asking the question “What if?”
For example, what if there were a tornado or huge snowstorm that required residents to evacuate and leave their pets behind? One of the issues that came out of the Katrina disaster was that many residents either refused to evacuate in the face of the storm or returned to their homes to rescue their pets. In the wake of that, a local committee was formed to develop a plan for animals in disaster. The plan calls for a shelter to be established so pets could be taken in and cared for while their owners head for safety.
Another group is looking into how to address the special-needs population of the county in the event of a disaster. The approach taken by other counties has been to establish a registry of those persons and deal with them one on one. Sabo says the local committee has taken a different approach: Identify the stakeholders who work with these populations, and let them be the liaisons to the special-needs residents.
EMA also looks at specific disaster scenarios. One of the big ones, of course, is a release of radioactivity at the Perry nuclear plant. For residents who are within the alarm zone, this involves periodic alarm testing and, every two years, a full-scale drill that is observed and graded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). That drill will be in September and involve many responders and 60 volunteers from a range of county agencies.
“Because we are a nuclear county, we are far more ahead of most of the other counties in the state,” says Sabo. “We have to exercise every year and be evaluated by FEMA.”
Tabletop exercises also give the EMA and responders the opportunity to work through scenarios before they happen. Last year, an exercise involving an improvised explosive device was held at Kent State-Ashtabula. Ashtabula City Police and the Ashtabula County Sheriff’s Department were among those that worked through the scenario with a facilitator. A larger-scale version of the exercise will be held with Geauga and Lake counties this year.
Last year, a full-scale exercise was held in Geneva. The mock disaster involved an incident at the wastewater treatment plant, complete with injuries and chemical contamination. An evacuation area was created, and the Red Cross set up operations.
“We exercise a lot. We have a lot of different scenarios,” Sabo says.
Earthquakes are in the national news this year, and Sabo says the county recently increased its preparedness for dealing with a disaster of that nature. The county created an Automated Critical Asset Management System, basically a database of critical assets like power grids and infrastructure that would be subject to damage. Created by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the database gives responders access to critical information needed to assess damage and get help to residents.
Sabo points out that a seismograph is located underneath the emergency operations center in the Ashtabula County Courthouse Complex. Data from the seismograph is monitored from Columbus and used to pinpoint tremors in the region. The recent quake in Illinois was picked up by the instrument.
The emergency operations center can be staffed, either partially or fully, in the event of a large-scale disaster. The county commissioners would make the call and be part of the administrative team, which includes the sheriff and EMA director. There are more than a dozen stations in the room. From this center, radio contact can be established with emergency responders both in the county and beyond. In addition, EMA owns a communications trailer, which can be moved into the disaster field to maintain radio contact.
The center also has access to the Emergency Alert System, which allows Sabo to break into local radio broadcasts with emergency information. The Perry alarms can be activated, and a variety of messages transmitted, from the operations center.
In the two years Sabo has been director, the center has been activated only partially, during the ice and snow storm of 2008.
Some of the latest issues EMA and local responders are looking into, include developing plans for areas that experience large population influxes during the summer months.
For example, responders on both sides of Pymatuning Lake recently developed a joint plan that would address a disaster — like a Fourth of July tornado — when the transient population in the Andover area could be as high as 100,000. A Homeland Security grant provided the money to bring parties from both sides of the state line to the table to develop the plan.
“That’s the type of things we are looking at,” he says.
Sabo is available to speak to groups about disaster preparedness, and his office has free literature on various preparedness topics. The Ashtabula County EMA recently established a social networking presence on Facebook so it can disseminate disaster response information via the Internet. A link to EMA’s Web site, which offers preparedness tips, is at www.co.ashtabula.oh.us.
