Counties examine roles of shelters

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January 28, 2007

Anonymous The Joplin Globe Sun Jan 28, 2007, 11:22 PM CST

By Derek Spellman

dspellman@joplinglobe.com

Joplin officials are still assessing Memorial Hall’s role as an emergency shelter, while a Newton County official said the network of shelters there fared well during the ice storm this month.

The Red Cross is the primary agency for organizing shelters and has prearranged agreements with sites to serve as shelters, said Dan Pekarek, director of the Joplin Health Department.

Joplin offered Memorial Hall to the Red Cross on Jan. 14, Pekarek said, because of the scale of the storm and because none of the organization’s prearranged shelters had backup power generators.

“The disaster had the makings of being several days in duration,” Pekarek said.

A review of Memorial Hall’s capabilities as a shelter is not yet complete.

Gary Trulson, the Joplin fire chief and a member of the Joplin-Jasper County Emergency Management Committee, said Memorial Hall was a good shelter for a disaster on the scale of the recent ice storm, and lacked only a backup generator and showers.

“It has everything else,” Trulson said, citing its kitchen, restrooms and space as among its advantages.

The city originally housed the shelter in City Hall, Trulson said, because it has a generator that can feed power to about 70 percent of the building. The city shifted from City Hall to Memorial Hall once it was sure the latter had a reliable power supply.

The city is examining the cost of installing a generator in Memorial Hall, although it likely will have to seek grant money to finance that kind of addition, Trulson said.

Memorial Hall sheltered more than 60 people not long after it opened Jan. 15. That number had decreased to about 20 by Jan. 18.

In Newton County, which was particularly hard hit by the storm, county workers quickly had a network of shelters up and running, said Gary Roark, the county’s emergency management director.

“It worked out really well down here,” he said.

At the height of the power outages, Newton County had seven shelters available for residents: six churches and the Eastern Shawnee casino in the Seneca area.

Churches can double as good shelters, Roark said, because they often have large gymnasiums and multipurpose rooms that can be used to board large numbers of people. Some of the larger ones have their own generators. Many have kitchens in which to prepare food.

That food came from a number of sources, Roark said.

Newton County’s public school districts — Neosho, Diamond, Seneca and East Newton — donated food they had on hand. So did the Salvation Army. Money, food and supplies also were donated by Newton County churches and residents.

Some of the county’s disaster response was planned, Roark said. Some of it was spontaneous, with different segments of the population volunteering help.

Roark cautioned that every disaster requires a measure of flexibility on the part of emergency management.

Churches that had power to operate during the recent ice storm, for example, might not during the next disaster. Some buildings, such as the recreation center in Neosho and a number of smaller churches, had good accommodations but were located in places that were difficult to access via ice-coated roads.

“You never know which ones are going to work,” Roark said.

Memorial Hall capacity

Rick King, a Red Cross volunteer who worked at the Memorial Hall shelter, estimated that the building could accommodate up to 140 to 150 people.

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Counties examine roles of shelters

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