WORTHINGTON -- The role of an emergency management director often centers on the response to weather-related events -- from tornadoes to flooding to winter storms -- but the response needed depends on who or what is affected.
For instance, weather-related destruction to a farm site requires different response tactics be activated than damage to a home in town.
Following the floods in southeast Minnesota in August 2007, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture realized response plans really hadn't addressed the agricultural sector. Since then, meetings have been organized around the state to bring emergency management personnel and farm leaders to the table for discussion.
Nobles County Emergency Management director Dan Anderson, along with county environmental specialist Alan Langseth and Farm Service Agency director Ron McCarvel, were part of a regional group that met in Marshall in late March to begin developing response plans.
The goal now is to bring more people into the mix within Nobles County to develop a response plan for rural areas.
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Anderson said a disaster that would impact the agricultural sector would "impact us significantly on the economic side."
"One of the big things would be just housing," Langseth said. "Where do you go with animals if their barn is flooded and the pastures are gone? Does the county have a site -- someplace allocated like a sale barn?"
In Nobles County, Anderson said flooding isn't as much of a threat. Langseth also said new feedlots are not allowed to be constructed in a floodplain, thereby lessening the potential impact to livestock.
It isn't just livestock that is impacted in a flooding situation. Anderson said speakers at the workshop talked at length about the southeast Minnesota flood's impact on a fertilizer plant.
"The week before, the (plant) received two semis of pesticide that was sitting there in the store room and was totally gone," Langseth said.
In addition, soluble packets and insecticides at the facility were washed away, and bulk bins of fertilizers were tipped over.
"There's all sorts of possibilities when you get into chemicals and powdered pesticides," Langseth said of the things that need to be considered in developing a response plan. He even spoke of developing a response for a potential derailment of cars filled with ethanol.
Carcass disposal and response to a bird flu situation were also discussed. Among the questions to be answered, Anderson said, are how to dispose of carcasses, and in the event of a disease outbreak, how it could be contained.
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"I don't know if we have an answer to (all of the questions raised)," Langseth said. "There's so many situations they brought up that you just hadn't thought of before. If you wanted to go out and look for disasters, I suppose they could be any place."
Anderson said he hopes to get a group together within the next couple of months to begin work on the county's disaster response plan for the agricultural sector. One of the first steps will be to acquire a list of contacts in the farming community for equipment such as scrapers and payloaders, as well as farmers who would have corn stalk bales in the event a dike would need to be built.
"We hope to find out what our threats are ... and what the appropriate course of action will be," Anderson said.
Once the response plan is in place, the next step would be to conduct a drill or exercise to practice carrying out a response.
"You need to build relationships," Anderson said. "That's where the strength of our plan is going to lie."
