Who remembers the Blizzard of 1978? Or the 24 inches of snow Granby received in early 2011? Or the 2011 October snowstorm when we lost power for over a week? How about Superstorm Sandy in 2012? Or if you are old enough, the hurricanes of 1938 and 1955 with torrential rain that caused widespread flooding. While Hurricane Katrina didn’t impact this area much, that storm was the impetus for the creation and use of NIMS (the National Incident Management System), at the heart of Emergency Preparedness Planning.
While we hope weather events like those listed above don’t ever happen here, hope isn’t a plan. We also wouldn’t be doing our jobs if we didn’t practice how to respond to unusual, mostly weather, emergency events. The end product of practice is preparedness.
Why do we practice preparedness? Because when you practice, you get to see what works and what doesn’t work in a controlled environment. Essentially, you get to fail safely, not when lives may be on the line. You also get to assess the quality of the response using the employees who would respond in an actual emergency.
And because every emergency is different, you add “injects” into every practice session. What is an “inject” you ask? It’s an unforeseen problem that alters your emergency response. An example of an inject is when the town prepares for a 24-inch blizzard but then finds out the weather pattern behind it will deliver two inches of accumulating ice causing the power to be lost completely for 14 days. If that was the inject, we’d have to draw up a plan to keep this community safe, warm and fed for two weeks.
After reading to this point, I hope you concur that emergency planning is a good thing to do. To that end, the Town of Granby and key decision makers and employees will participate in a remote, mock emergency planning exercise being held by the State of Connecticut on Sept. 9.
The state will choose the emergency that will impact Granby, and our staff and elected officials will make decisions to keep this community safe. And along the way we’ll get injects that will cause us to stop and rethink our emergency response as the situation changes in real time. This exercise is where we practice preparedness.
While the beginning and end times of the state’s mock emergency event have not been shared with us, I have invited members of the board of selectmen, and observers from the Drummer and Granby Community TV, to join us on that day as we work on this mock exercise for the future benefit of the community. We’ll even try to update social media in real time.
I hope to never have to employ what we will learn from this practice preparedness exercise, but I will certainly sleep better knowing that in the event of an actual emergency, the town’s investment in preparedness was time well spent.