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Ask Weld County Office of Emergency Management (OEM) Director Roy Rudisill what past emergency events stand out in his mind, and it won’t take him long to give an answer, even if he can’t settle on just one.
“I’d have to say the Weld County Tornado in 2008,” he said, before adding to his answer later in the conversation. “You could also point to the floods in 2013, the blizzards in 2006, even our pandemic response.”
As he talks about these experiences, it becomes clear why they’ve taken center stage in his mind. Yes, they caused death, damage and disruption, but Rudisill also focuses on the positive in otherwise dark times: The people-helping-people approach of emergency response and recovery.
“All the communities get together and work together, especially during those times of major incidents,” Rudisill said, referring to the effort of volunteers, and municipal and county staff to help communities recover from past events. “It’s that whole concept of helping your neighbor that makes me feel good.”
It was a concept noticed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) following the Weld County Tornado when officials credited Weld County Government with its debris management. It was seen after the 2013 floods, when Weld County’s Department of Public Works worked to quickly clear debris, repair, and eventually reopen more than 100 county roads. And it was reflected during the COVID-19 pandemic when, for two and a half months, county staff worked around normal job duties in the county’s Emergency Operations Center to assist the Weld County Department of Public Health and Environment and Weld County municipalities with many different resource needs.
Such ability to effectively manage response efforts comes from continued preparation. Although the number can vary from year to year, OEM typically attends or administers 600 hours of trainings a year. These trainings, held internally with county staff as well as with 26 fire districts, 14 law enforcement agencies and municipal officials countywide, focus on improving incident support and emergency operation plans for the expected events — think tornadoes, blizzards and flooding — to rarer, but still possible, events like a hazardous material spill from one of the more than 5,000 facilities in Weld County that use hazardous chemicals in day-to-day operations.
Then there are those events that are completely unexpected, like the Avian Flu that occurred in Weld County this summer. Working alongside the Colorado Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Agriculture, OEM Coordinators Dave Burns and Denise Bradshaw helped manage the incident, which included ordering resources and developing plans to safely depopulate more than 3 million birds, while ensuring the virus didn’t spread. It was an admittedly new, if not unexpected, challenge for OEM, but thanks to continued preparation, the department could still be an asset.
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“We’ve done a lot of training with the Colorado Department of Agriculture over the years, but it’s usually been focused on cattle and large animals,” Rudisill said. “We hadn’t done anything with poultry. But because of the trainings and exercises we’d done over the years, a lot of our processes and the actions we took to manage the agriculture disease matched how we would handle a tornado, flood or any other incident.”
Still, with all the successes Rudisill can point to in emergency response, he’s quick to mention that efforts could always be improved upon to be more responsive and resilient. It’s in that never-ending desire to improve and be a greater resource to municipalities and residents that the true value of OEM comes through.
“It’s not lights and sirens,” Rudisill said, explaining the job of emergency management. “We are that local level of planning and coordination for disasters. We’re always preparing for the next big thing.”
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Impacting the local level
In an emergency, municipalities are responsible for responding to it and exhausting their resources to lessen the impact of an event before asking OEM for assistance. However, to communities varying in size, with different risk factors, priorities and overall goals, preparedness can seem like a difficult undertaking.
Last year, Bradshaw had an idea to make it a little easier.
“I’m working with so many different communities countywide each with a different capability in responding to emergencies. I needed a better way to identify where each community was in terms of preparedness and see if there weren’t some opportunities to improve,” Bradshaw said.
Working alongside hazard mitigation experts, access and functional needs experts from the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management and federal experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Bradshaw created the Community Resilience Baseline document (CRBD). Part evaluation, and part resource tool, the document allows municipalities to grade themselves in various categories, including overall response capability and hazard risk, while identifying what resources they have at their disposal to lessen the negative impact of an emergency to the community. If there are any weak spots in preparedness, the document is meant to identify those as well so they can be eliminated through more planning or future mitigation projects.
“It’s where I’ve gotten the information to guide my priorities moving forward,” Robert Ball said of the CRBD. Ball, who became the Town of Windsor’s Emergency Management Coordinator after a 31-year career with Windsor’s police department, said the document has helped him identify current goals and plan for future ones as well. “My goal is to take what needs to be done and get it started and formulated, so whoever takes over has a baseline to work with. I want to get this in place so the next person can move forward.”
Ball has taken an active and energized approach to his new role, and he credits Weld County’s OEM as well as Larimer County’s OEM — Windsor stretches into both counties — for helping him along the way.
“She’s been a big source of ideas and been extremely helpful (with providing) printed material I can hand out to folks,” Ball said of Bradshaw, before mentioning the quality of Weld County’s Emergency Preparedness Guide. “Next to FEMA, it’s one of the best I’ve seen.”
What he said next speaks to the excellence OEM hopes to achieve every day.
“That kind of professionalism certainly helps with outreach,” Ball said.
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By Baker Geist, Weld County Communications Specialist
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