Portage County’s Emergency Management Agency opened a new Emergency Command Center attached to its administrative office in Ravenna township.
Formerly located on Infirmary Road at the Justice Center, the new location can be found at 2978 State Route 59.
Director Ryan Shackelford said the goal of the new center is to “bring everybody together and collectively and collaboratively respond to our worst day,” and the new building offers a “centerpiece in the community” for this to happen.
He said new ideas and technology came together to put the center together. It has what he calls emergency support functions, a room for their executive policy group, a main operations room and a joint information center.
The executive policy group sets overall policy objectives and funding to respond to incidents. They work with specific departments or agencies that represent a discipline and offer physical and financial support. The main operations room carries out the strategy the group develops.
“For example, if we have a large tornado and we got downed power lines, downed trees and we can’t even get ambulances and other first response equipment to homes because the roads are unnavigable, then we can work with public works, First Energy and other entities to open those roads up as soon as possible and get first responders downrange to the public, as well as restoration of roads and power lines and things of that nature,” Shackelford said.
The Joint Information Center (JIC) has positions for eight public information officers so they can do formal stand-up media briefings. In this space, they also put out public media releases and monitor local media outlets and social media.
“The new JIC is really going to fill any of the gaps that we had from a public information officer standpoint,” said McKenzie Villatoro, emergency management specialist. “It also gives us the ability to collaborate with more local media partners … Honestly, the opportunities are endless.”
Villatoro said the solar eclipse earlier this year was a great test of the JIC. She and another public information officer brainstormed ideas on how to share eclipse information.
“We deemed the necessity of opening up a public inquiry line,” she said. “And, believe it or not, we received a little over 100 phone calls but from people across seven different states … Because we found that we had the need, it was pretty obvious that other people throughout the country had that need, so the fact that Portage County was able to fulfill that was really cool to see.”
Shackelford said since the agency’s opening in 1989, with each incident that happens, it has slightly evolved and changed to better support the needs of the county.
With the natural disasters currently happening in places like North Carolina and Florida, the agency is now able to better accommodate what would be needed to respond to an emergency on a larger scale, and with so much planning that goes into each new strategy the agency puts into place, the new space will suit them well.
“When we start that planning process, we do an immense amount of research, we do an immense amount of collaboration, we bring in a whole slew of different stakeholders and then we facilitate a professional planning process so that our documents really reflect what we expect our partners to do and how we’re going to respond,” Shackelford said.
He said that the new location is central to most of the agency’s stakeholders and workers, and they have had an immense amount of engagement with other partners as well.
“There’s a lot of interest in using this facility,” he said. “We get emergency response assets and equipment out the door faster. We have the ability to do points of dispensing or issue water, food, vaccinations, whatever it is, right here, from this place. People can pull in, come through a center bay, we get them whatever essential need they need, and go right out the door back on the 59 and on their way.”
The new physical addition to the agency is adding onto equipment they have already acquired, some of which include their mobile command post, incident management team and hazmat team.
“Occasionally, we get complacent that big disasters can happen in Northeast Ohio, or can happen in Ohio, generally,” Shackelford said. “We want to make sure that we can bring the right people into this room to make the right decisions and get things going as soon as possible, as collaboratively as possible. The last thing the public wants to see is us not working together for their best interests, and that’s what this whole purpose of this room is: unity of effort.”
Lauren Cohen is a reporter. Contact her at [email protected]
