Larimer County, Colo., Signs Updated Emergency Management Plan

(TNS) — The Larimer County Commissioners signed an updated Emergency Management Plan on Tuesday morning during their weekly administrative matters meeting, updating the county’s documented protocols to catch up to the way that county staff has responded to disasters since the COVID-19 pandemic.

The updated plan represents a change in approach, but one that Emergency Management Director Lori Hodges has been practicing for years, even though it was not necessarily reflected in the Emergency Management Plan until now.

“We’ve learned that the problems that we have to face right now are not the problems of the past,” Hodges said during a work session last month where the plan was discussed with commissioners in more detail. “They’re more complex, they’re wicked problems, and things that people haven’t really had to deal with. So we get the right people in the room, we give them that problem, they brainstorm it, they figure it out, it seems to work really well for us. Bringing our plans in alignment with a more flexible and fluid approach just makes sense.”

The previous approach, Hodges said, referred to as Emergency Support Functions, is a model used by states and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but the county’s approach for recent disasters such as COVID-19, the Cameron Peak Fire and the Alexander Mountain Fire is what she referred to as a “Lifelines” approach. She added that states and FEMA are also beginning to adopt more elements of the same Lifelines approach in recent years.

The difference, Hodges said, is that Emergency Support Functions are more linear, focusing on firefighters or law enforcement in a vacuum. A Lifelines approach is more all encompassing, she said, and includes questions of critical services that could worsen an already dire situation if not addressed quickly.

“Instead we’re looking at work groups of individuals who solve complex problems,” she said.

One example she offered related to utilities during the Alexander Mountain Fire. The fire was poised to impact utilities, threatening to cut off 9-1-1 services to the town of Estes Park.

“We got a group of people together to solve that problem,” Hodges said. “It’s really about how we build a system that can do more of that.”

Responding to COVID-19 was the first time that the new approach was used, and the Cameron Peak Fire that occurred in the midst of the pandemic provided another good use case.

“COVID was a disaster that nobody had really been through before, because it’d been 100 years since the last pandemic,” Hodges said. “We had really complex problems that we had to solve. Ultimately, you couldn’t just have public health solve the problem. We had to have law enforcement in the room, you had to have logistics to figure out how to get supplies everywhere. You have to have this multidisciplinary approach.”

The commissioners unanimously approved the updated plan Tuesday, and the updated plan will soon be available for the public to view on the Department of Emergency Management’s website.

“I appreciate that we are able to learn from previous lessons, and update things accordingly,” Commissioner Kefalas said.

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