4 - e-archives Home

Homeland Security | Major Webb-Edgington
>>
as they are responding to the scene, we’ll be able
to brief those folks on things such as the number
of entrances and exits, the type of HVaC that they
have, the number of folks that are inside a facility at
one time, the type of security that they have and the
utility companies that service that particular area. If
we had an event at a school, we’ve already got all the
critical information that we would need to brief the
officers going to that particular scene.
Our national strategic plan is focused on national
infrastructure protection programs, which involves
government building, water, sewer systems, modes
of transportation and all infrastructures. that’s
critical to what’s been done by the KCPP. Kentucky
“We are not a responding
entity, we are an administrative
function that
”
funds sources for
response.
was out in front on that. Vulnerability assessments
have been done in large urban areas, but for us to
be looking at all of our cities across the Commonwealth,
that’s huge.
3 KENTUCKY LAW ENFORCEMENT| Winter 2005
the teams that are going out are vanilla, if you
will, in that they’re going into these communities
and assessing because they don’t live there. they are
identifying things that if we lived there we would
pass every day and think, “Well, that’s not that big
of a deal.” those are things that I think make that
program unique.
in the past there has been a lot of emphasis on
responding to attacks. What can Kentucky do to
work on prevention?
I go back to what I said before about citizens being
vigilant. We are getting ready to kick off our
Citizen’s awareness Campaign. that will be a partnership
across Kentucky with the area development
districts. We will go into communities and explain
exactly what everybody needs to do in the event of
a natural or man-made disaster. We have pamphlets
that we’re distributing; we’re going to have some
public service announcements and videos that tell
folks what they need to do if there were an event.
While we’re out discussing those kinds of things, we
want to stress to people to call if they see something
strange and out of the ordinary. Our best information
is from folks who are living in a community
who are seeing things that are strange or out of the
ordinary. there’s no call that is too small. I think that
everybody needs to understand that. even if we get
the call and we look into it and it’s nothing, that’s
OK. I don’t want us to miss a component because
someone thought it was not that big of a deal.
We are looking at creating a Web service in 2006
for citizens to send information to us. Currently
folks send information to us over our Web site, but
we want to make the Web service so that we can
have more of a citizen’s intelligence report. that
will be one of our things to look for in 2006.
right now we want to get law enforcement
thinking totally in that mode, and then we’ll take
our next step. Once we get the law enforcement officers
up and running with mobile-data computers,
we also want to outfit the firefighters and the ambulance
personnel because oftentimes they get a call
that police officers are never at, and in doing so they
see things that are strange or out of the ordinary. We
need those folks to give us that information also. It’s
multiple components; it’s communities working together,
families working together and first responders
working together.
are there any other issues you would like to address
in your new position?
there is one thing that is critical that folks understand
about the Kentucky Office of Homeland security:
We are not a responding entity. We are an
administrative function that funds sources for response.
If you think about the Office of Homeland
security, you need to think about us, emergency
Management and the National Guard as a somewhat
three-legged stool. If there is an event, natural
rather than man-made, emergency Management
and the National Guard are the responding components.
the emergency Management group has 14
regional emergency managers that go out and assess
and then they report back to the emergency Operations
Center, and they advise General storm, and
then General storm makes the decision as to the
level of disaster. What we here at KOHs do is make
certain that they exercise and train and if they have
an event that they are equipped to handle everything
that they need. We want to prevent any kind
of issue. as I said earlier we can’t prevent a natural
disaster, but we have to be able to handle it if comes.
so our folks need to practice what they preach, they
need to have their equipment and they need to be
able to hit the ground running. J