Summertime is crunch time for county employees

Prince William County, Va.'s Splash Down waterpark is open and business is booming during some late-Spring temperature swells. Photo courtesy of Prince William County, Va. As the heat cranks up and the calen dar turns to June, packed up SUVs and spikes in sunscreen purchases foretell summer vacations, but for county government folk, summertime is crunch time.

Hurricane season started June 1, and that means the idea of vacation is tan tamount to obscenity for Bill Johnson.

The director of emergency manage ment for Palm Beach County, Fla. is settling in for six months of vigilance that, with any luck, will seem like overkill in retrospect.

The county hasn't seen landfall from a hurricane in 10 years and fingers crossed, that will continue. But in that time, an estimated 160,000 new residents have moved the county.

"Chances are they don't have any experience in a hurricane," Johnson said. "We'll be doing a lot of training and educating. This is a very busy time to reach out to the community."

Johnson and his staff participated in a recent statewide hurricane exercise in which they invited major stakeholders in for a multi-agency dress rehearsal.

This year brought the introduction of the Sea, Lake and Overland Surges from Hurricanes computer model that predicts how ocean water would come onto land, which will influence how evacuation orders are decided.

"Palm Beach is one of the largest counties east of the Mis sissippi, so we're dealing with a lot of coastline," Johnson said. "We might be in a position where we only have to evacuate our southernmost zone, for instance."

Other counties will swell with visitors, like Dare County, N.C. on the Outer Banks. The 35,000 permanent residents will be dwarfed by the esti mated 300,000 visitors over the summer months, and that means all hands on deck for county employees.

"Public works guys who were paint ing over the winter, they're going to be doing garbage pickup," said County Manager Bob Outten. "All depart ments are staffing up as much as we can EMS, sheriff. We have our work schedules finalized and we're ready for it. We're pretty much used to it, but every year is different."

Like Palm Beach County, Dare County has its disaster preparations complete.

The county also prepares public service messages on social media and public access television to reach out to visitors who are new to the area.

"We let them know that this will be a different experience than Myrtle Beach or Virginia Beach, it's a lot less urban," Outten said. "We try to keep people informed, but that will often fall to property management companies."

Outt

en said using the manage ment companies as liaisons to visitors has been successful and allows county employees to focus on doing their jobs and handling the swell of visitors.

St. Tammany Parish, La. has been getting ready for a horde of new residents since January.

Seven or eight part-time employees of the parish's mosquito abatement dis trict have cruised around in jeeps doing larva sighting and treating potential nests with oil and biological control agents to try to control the populations, but it's a big county, and control agents can't be everywhere.

"People always ask us what species is going to be bad, but we honestly don't know until they're already out in full force," said Viki Taylor, supervising entomologist. "We're dealing with 38 to 40 different species, and one always manages to break through and have a 'good' year."

She said 2012 was probably the parish's worst year in recent memory and since then, the abatement district has done more work in the woodland areas, which has reaped benefits in the last two years.

"There's no way to predict what's going to be bad, but if we do enough work in the months leading up to when the rains really start, we at least we have a foundation in place," she said.

West Nile Virus season is already in progress, but Taylor said numbers have been down this year and she is encouraged they'll stay that way.

In Prince William County, Va., two county-run waterparks opened over Memorial Day weekend and will be open seven days a week once the school year ends.

"It was a smashing weekend, fantastic weather," said Dianne Wahl, spokeswoman for the parks and recre ation department.

The weather is looking hot and dry in Washington state, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration briefing Okanogan County received in late May.

Maurice Goodall is in his second month as the county's emergency manager and he is looking ahead at forest fire season, following the larg est wildfire in the state's history last July following a lightning strike. The fire consumed more than 300 homes and one death, and one of Goodall's priorities is improved communication.

"We're coordinating closely with tribes in the area that have different guidelines for selling fireworks and they're open to working with us," he said. "The major issue we need to address is that society wants information now, and that often leads to incorrect information getting out and circulating. We want accuracy, because panic and misinformation doesn't help anyone."

The county is encouraging resi dents to register their cell phone numbers with a notification system, and working to program notifica tions through cell phone towers, so visitors can also receive emergency communications.

The county's conservation district has been doing home inspections to help homeowners understand how they can better protect their houses from forest fires.

For Goodall, keeping people vigi lant will help prevent unnecessary loss.

"People forget pretty quickly when they see green trees that we had such a problem last year," he said.

Meanwhile, rain is getting in the way in Woodward County, Okla., usually known for its hot and dry weather. Summer is typically the time for the county to do a lot of chip sealing on its roads, but recent heavy rains have delayed the work Commissioner Tommy Roedell hoped would be done by now.

"We've had much heavier rains in the last few years, so we're behind schedule," he said.

After working short-staffed, the roads department has hired two new employees, and Roedell hopes they can take care of more than 450 miles of county roads, though recent state transportation funding cuts have made that harder.

"We've been more fortunate than south central Oklahoma with the rains, but we're still seeing bridges washed out and eventually the legisla tors are going to realize that they can't keep cutting when the budget barely covers when things go well," he said. "We've built for a hot and dry climate."

The rain has delayed the comple tion of the parking lot at the Wood ward County Fairgrounds, which will debut its new 60,000-square-foot facility this summer, along with refur bished existing buildings.

Roe

dell hopes the new facility will allow the already-large stock, and oil and gas shows to grow and make Woodward County an agritourism destination in Northwest Oklahoma.

"The new space is going to give us a lot more capacity to hold more people, be able to do more with animals," he said. "I think we can become one of the largest oil and gas shows in the state."

Appropriately enough, one of the remaining steps to completing the fairgrounds work is installation of a new statue that will greet visitors.

"It's a man standing with a child on his shoulders," Roedell said. "It's called 'looking towards the future.'"