Cities push to map storm shelters

Searcy officials want to keep residents who seek safety in storm shelters even safer.

Last week, city officials released a statement asking people to let them know if and where they have shelters or basements used for refuge when tornadoes threaten the central Arkansas town.

Emergency workers hope to use that information to prevent a problem that occurred when a deadly tornado hit Moore, Okla., on May 20, killing 24 people.

After that storm, about 100 residents reported missing were trapped inside storm shelters, Searcy officials noted. The problem is that emergency workers can’t be expected to know who has shelters and where they are.

Fort Smith also has asked residents to register their tornado shelters and safe rooms with the city’s Police Department. In the event of severe weather, the department will provide a list of registered shelters and safe rooms to emergency responders to aid search-andrescue efforts.

“Debris, fallen trees and structural damage can easily block a storm shelter exit,”said Doug Baker, Searcy’s emergency management coordinator.

Baker said Searcy officials decided to act after hearing about the shelter problems in Moore.

“Some were in there over a day,” he said. “We would like to be able to make a faster recovery. … But if we don’t know they’re there, we don’t know to search for them.”

He said he knows of one Searcy resident who has a concrete bunker beneath his home.

He said he has no idea how many shelters are in the White County town of about 22,800.

The statement asks people with shelters, safe rooms, basements or other kinds of shelters on residential or commercial property to call the Searcy Fire Department at (501) 207-5789 . The request had been out only for a short time, and fewer than 10 residents had contacted the city as of late last week.

In Fort Smith, the city asks residents to register their safe rooms and shelters by going to fortsmithpd.org and selecting “Shelter/Safe Room Registration.”

Searcy officials said the information they gather will be kept private and used onlyby emergency responders. Fort Smith, however, cautioned residents that the voluntary information was subject to release under the Freedom of Information Act.

In Little Rock, Arkansas Department of Emergency Management spokesman Brandon Morris said this was the first time he had heard of a city in the state starting such a list. He said the agency has no policy recommendation on the matter.

“We sort of let the locals do their own thing because all disasters are local,” Morris said. If a city wants to make such a list, then the state agency supports the idea, he said.

One Arkansas city that already has such a list is Conway. The Faulkner County Fire Department compiled that list in 1999, Fire Chief Bart Castleberry said. He indicated that the city probably knew of more than 100 storm shelters in Conway.

Now, Castleberry wants to update Conway’s list, which has a population of about 60,470.

“We have just recently asked people to” provide such information again, Castleberry said. “Conway has grown so much [that] we felt it was time to … updateeverything.”

The chief said the Fire Department is logging the information and also sharing it with the city’s Planning Department, which can put it on a GPS program.

Shelia McGhee, director of the Faulkner County Office of Emergency Management, said that her office has never compiled such a list but added, “That is something that I’m looking at and would like to gather this information.”

McGhee already has been looking at computer software that would help with this process, but said she doesn’t know when the county can buy it.

In the meantime, Mc-Ghee said, she encourages residents to call her office, which will make a note of shelter locations in its database. Only a handful of residents have contacted the office with such information, though, in the past five years, she said.

“Our emergency responders are trained to look for tornado shelters,” she said, but it’s good to have such information beforehand.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 15 on 06/23/2013

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