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Thursday, 08 January 2009 |
By KAREN CAMPBELL
Assistant Managing Editor
Concerns that townships are not notifying emergency responders or school districts of road closures prompted members of a county-wide committee to remind them of the obligation.
During 2009’s first meeting of the Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC), members decided to include a letter about the problem in a mailing to all township and village clerks this week. LEPC is comprised of representatives of emergency responders, schools, businesses and other agencies.
“We need to figure out where the problem is and get it fixed,” LEPC Chair Ken Cline said. “We’ve come upon this problem several times when we’ve been responding to calls.
“I don’t know where the liability lies if we can’t get to a residence to save someone’s life because a road is closed and we have to make a detour that we didn’t know about,” Cline, who serves as the St. Marys Fire Chief, said.
The Auglaize County Engineer’s Office has pro
cedures in place for notifying of road closures within its system. While those are working without problems, Cline said something needed to be done to alleviate concerns elsewhere.
Sheriff Al Solomon said his dispatchers could try to handle the responsibility of serving as a central place that townships and villages could notify and then they would pass that information on to the affected emergency responders or school districts, but he preferred they not be required to do that in the midst of the important task with which they face on the job.
He said this could cause a problem if roads are being closed due to inclement weather and dispatchers are answering a heavy volumes of potentially life-threatening calls.
“Whether there are one or two dispatchers on duty, when an emergency situation like that happens or inclement weather strikes, they have got their hands full,” Solomon said. “They wouldn’t be able to sit there and figure out which school districts are impacted by what road closures.
“There’s room for error,” he said. “My opinion is whoever is closing the road, should make those calls to us, to other emergency responders, and to the school districts, direct.”
Auglaize County Administrator Joe Lenhart suggested the information could be placed on the county Web site, but Commissioner Don Regula raised concerns that it wouldn’t be updated soon enough or that electrical outages during inclement weather would make the updates moot.
Another suggestion was made to handle road closures like other weather notifications in the county, but problems were expressed about that idea, too.
Board members decided to write the letter asking trustees and clerks to notify emergency responders, including the Sheriff’s Office, and school districts any time a road is going to be closed, when it will close, for how long it is expected to be closed for and to call back when the road opens again.
“Whether they do it or not, we can’t control,” Cline said. “This is a place to start. Hopefully, it will improve things, and if not, it may be something we need to remind them annually.”
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Last Updated ( Friday, 09 January 2009 )
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