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Communities in Union County early this year executed a finely tuned plan following a surprise tornado's devastation.
By Dacus Thompson, League staff
The residents of a smattering of small communities along a northeasterly line in Union County-from the town of Junction City south of El Dorado to the Lawson community east of El Dorado-were stirred from sleep just before midnight Jan. 12 by a tornado that ripped a 24-mile track of destruction. Despite modern technology such as Doppler radars and emergency alert systems, the residents were probably as startled as their technologically deprived ancestors would have been. "No one knew this tornado was coming until it was already on the ground," said Union County's emergency management coordinator, Jackie Wiley. Despite the lack of warning, the quick and thorough response through a well-choreographed emergency operations plan curbed losses and possibly saved lives. "All through the night they just worked clearing debris and getting the injured out and locating the dead," Wiley said of the emergency response workers. "Overall, I think the response was very professional and that we were pretty well prepared for everything." Every county in Arkansas has an emergency manager and an emergency operations plan-there are 77 emergency jurisdictions in Arkansas (75 counties and one in Little Rock and North Little Rock), and each municipality should have an emergency management coordinator, whether it is a fire chief or someone specifically assigned to the position. All municipalities should also have an emergency operations plan designed for all hazards. Emergency operations plans work as a sort of cooperative hierarchy, depending on the level of need. Municipalities, counties and the state each have a defined plan for human-caused and natural disasters specific to their areas, and the plans operate in conjunction: If the need is greater than a municipality's means, its county becomes involved; if it's beyond a county's means, then the state's resources become available; and in the worst cases, federal resources can be called upon. The plans also consist of defined actions to put in place during an emergency, and it usually consists of several personnel tiers, such as a first-responders team, a damage assessment coordinator and a recovery team, which includes those who provide debris cleanup/removal and housing and resources to those in need. The primary function of the first-responders team is to go into the affected area for preliminary assessments of damage to determine what resources will be needed and to contact or find residents of the damaged area. In the Union County tornado, the El Dorado Fire Department and the Union County Sheriff's Department were the first on the scene. "Our crews were out tracking the tornado immediately, making calls and evaluating the damage," Wiley said. "You would've had to have seen the debris to believe it. Roads were impassable. But we were getting information where people should be, and in some cases they were just crawling over debris to get to these houses and get to the injured." Thirteen persons with injuries serious enough to require hospitalization were pulled from the debris; two fatalities occurred. Most of these operations are orchestrated from a predetermined central location so all information can be collected without confusion and instructions disseminated to the proper personnel in an efficient manner. The night of the Jan. 12 tornado, the El Dorado Fire Department was transformed into an emergency operations center. Radios, communication equipment and telephones were set up to monitor the emergency responders and decide what resources were needed. The initial assessment concluded that the tornado, which reached an intensity of F3 on the Fujita Scale (winds from 158-206 miles per hour) and cut a path from 50 to 250 yards wide, was beyond El Dorado and Union County's means. The Arkansas Department of Emergency Management (ADEM) was called slightly after 1 a.m. after Union County Judge Bobby Edmonds declared the area to be in a state of emergency, a necessary step to receive state help. "ADEM is reactive to the county, which must declare a written or verbal state of emergency before we can get involved," said ADEM Public Education Coordinator Bill Muesham. "Once the county does that, we get out and find the resources they need from other state agencies and get those resources to them as quickly as possible." Although ADEM was contacted by Union County, the county did not require ADEM's help in the immediate response to the tornado. "We were pretty well self-sufficient on it," Wiley said. "We declared the emergency and I was in constant contact with ADEM, but we had the situation under control with people from El Dorado, volunteer firefighters from all over the county and road crews from neighboring counties." After the rescue and reconnaissance operations are complete, a damage assessment coordinator should survey the area to gauge how much relief is needed. There are five area coordinators at the state level and every county and municipality should have a coordinator. "The area coordinators will immediately do damage assessment," Muesham said. "They are the eyes on the ground and let us know what they're seeing in terms of damage to buildings, infrastructure, whatever the case may be. Then we react accordingly." This reaction helps determine the recovery process, which in Union County required extensive cleanup but little in the way of public assistance, because most of the affected areas were rural. As a part of the emergency operations plan established in Union County, the American Red Cross of El Dorado set up shelters, but most people affected by the storm went to relatives' or friends' houses. "The area that was hit was a close-knit neighborhood," Wiley said. "But it was nice that the shelter was available." ADEM has individual assistance programs for damaged public and privately owned buildings and a public assistance program that reimburses local governments with 35 percent of the cost of cleanup and repairs to their facilities. Muesham added, "ADEM does a lot of providing funds of individual assistance and public assistance, and if it's declared a federal disaster, then we work closely with FEMA to get people and materials and funding out to the field as quickly as possible." Depending on the county or municipality, local funding may also be available.
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