Tag: Douglas and Coos Counties

When “The Big One” Strikes, Will They Be Prepared? by Hagen Hammons

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When “The Big One” Strikes, Will They Be Prepared? by Hagen Hammons

As my Community Planning Workshop’s team project, Emergency Management (EM) Strategic Planning for Douglas and Coos Counties, draws closer to completion, the second of three stakeholder meetings took place earlier this month to hash out and get feedback on key elements for our completion of the plan. For the past month before this meeting, our team interviewed appointed stakeholders from each county to get their knowledge on EM understanding, EM communication, public outreach, and funding/resources. Combining the feedback from the interviews and the meetings have helped us to start developing overarching mission “goals” to achieve each counties mission for EM and the core focus for each county’s strategic plan.

A unique aspect of our project is that we are working with two distinctive counties and the experiential learning outcomes we will eventually deal with is to collaborate each counties goals into one strategic plan for emergency management to be used 5 and 10 years into the future.  Given the decreases in funding available for EM at the federal and state levels, identifying stable and other opportunities for funding is, of course, a main goal for each county. Some other goals we are identifying include:

  • Collaboration with School Districts- Embracing a culture of planning into the school system and engaging children early on to realize the importance of EM.
  • Improving Communication with the Public- Better public service announcements, adding interpretive signage about disaster preparedness in public areas and events; and improving social media, aka a current Facebook page, which continues to be the go to and reliable media during disasters.
  • Political Engagement- Better community support and political pressure to develop someone willing to lobby for EM.

Douglas and Coos Counties have been fortunate to not have major disasters in recent memory, and currently does not have a strategic plan. This is the main reason EM preparedness has been put on the back burner in in the political realm, and in the public’s eyes. When “the big one” does strike, a thorough strategic plan will most definitely ease the pain and guide each county to a better recovery.

More about the Community Planning Workshop(CPW)

More about Hagen Hammons.