By: Lydia Crawley
The Parsons Advocate
It’s been a busy few weeks for Tucker County Emergency Management. Tucker County Emergency Management Director Kevin White updated the Tucker County Commission on a variety of projects and assistance efforts the department has been involved in including the new canopy for equipment trailers, utility outages in the area and other weather related emergencies and the status of the electronic signs. The updates came as part of the meeting of the County Commission.“It’s kind of been the busy time of our year because of the weather creates a lot of events for us in Tucker County,” White said.
Weather has created several events for his department, White said. The County has seen broken water lines to the High School that lasted four to five days, according to White. Other weather related issues, White said, were the phone outages due to broken power lines and poles. “We spent a lot of time as liaison with all those companies trying to get services reinstalled for people as quickly as possible,” White said. “I know you all spent a lot of time over the last weeks doing the exact same thing.”
Tucker County Commission President Mike Rosenau credited the combined efforts of the County with resolving the issues. White concurred. “The County is fortunate to have that team behind them they have,” White said.
White said his department was still waiting on the funds for the electronic signs. According to White, his department had qualified for the grant funding, but the funds are held up at the State level at the Treasurer’s Office. “We qualify, we received our letter, you signed documents, we sent them back in, everything’s a go. It’s just the red tape of getting it through the Treasurer’s Office and the check in our hand.”
White said that getting funds for his department through the State Treasurer’s Office has only been in place since 2020. Prior, funding for his department did not have to go through the Treasurer, but came straight from the Department of Homeland Security who obtained it from the Treasurer’s Office. “Homeland Security is waiting on the funds to be dropped from the Treasurer’s Office is my understanding. We’ve did our part.”
Rosenau said he would call the Treasurer’s Office in Charleston and see what he could find out about the funds. “Treasurer Riley Moore was just in the County the other day,” Rosenau said. “I wish I would have known or realized. I knew you hadn’t got the funds, but I didn’t realize exactly where it came from. So, I’ll give him a call this week and see what the status of that is.”
According to White, the signs are ready and sitting in a lot in Dunbar. White said he wrote the grant for the signs due to the need to inform the public of urgent and emergency matters such as spills and other emergency road closures. White said that if Tucker County had the signs in house, they could be erected in hours instead of days. “The pretenses that I wrote the grant on was the fact that just out here and year and a half ago we had a diesel spill,” White said. “And no offense to anybody. I don’t throw stones at glass houses, but we waited three days for signs to be erected telling people that there were going to be delays, there were detours, different things like that. Where if we would have had these signs sitting in our County ready to go, we could have put the signs up within hours.”
Rosenau said he had received positive feedback on the Active Shooter Training that White and his department has assisted with at all three of the schools. “I heard some good feedback on the Active Shooter Training,” Rosenau said. “I heard a lot of good feedback from the personnel at the schools.”
White said his department had worked with the Tucker County Sheriff’s Office, the School Resource Officers and trained personnel from Randolph County. According to White, Randolph County has the program and can be instructors. White said the training was offered to Bus Operators last year and this year to all three Tucker County Schools. According to White, he had been working on bringing the training to Tucker County for several years. “No one wants to use the word Active Shooter,” White said. “No one wants the think that its a possibility, but the world we live in today, it can happen anywhere at anytime.”
White thanked Joe Long for his crew’s assistance in erecting the new canopy to house vital equipment trailers. “I want to thank Joe, him and Bennie,” White said. “They oversaw the erection of the canopy at the city garage.”
According to White construction has been completed on the canopy. White said that trailers have already been placed underneath, but he is working on the final layout in order to have the trailers in the most efficient position in case of emergency need. “We need to get a little more creative on how I’m going to put them because I don’t know exactly which one I’m going to need first. Trying to make it as easy to get them in and out as possible.”
White said he anticipates the canopy will save the County money on maintenance due to reduced exposure to the sun and weather. “It will save the County a lot of money in the future with maintenance and repairs to those trailers because they won’t be exposed to UV rays and they will no longer have snow load on them,” White said.
The next meeting of the Tucker County Commission will be held Wednesday, February 28th at 4 p.m. at the Tucker County Courthouse Old Courtroom in Parsons.