Good morning, good morning, good morning, and welcome, welcome, welcome. It is time now for our community connection right here on K one built one you trust. Commissioner Mitch antel in with is today from Washington County and good morning here kind certain happy new year do you.
Good morning, mister Davis, Happy new year to you as well.
Well. We had the swearing in ceremony yesterday, correct though.
That went well.
Judge Thomas were in our four electeds yesterday morning at about eight thirty on the third.
Floor of the courthouse just right his rain. Huh, yes, sir, we'll speaking of rain.
I understand we could get some weather that could be coming down in the form of freezing rain. And as a commissioner, you got a lot of things on your hands. One is infrastructure and two is roads and a lot of other things that they go into the mix. But freezing rain is just a crazy thing to try to combat. How do you get your roague crews ready for that?
Well, you do a lot of prep work on vehicles and equipment, make sure everything's ready to go just in case. So you're kind of loaded down, ready to put down in the ice situation. Salt sand mix of course, there's sometimes where there's not a whole lot we are going to be able to do.
That's some mails. It'll be freeze yet.
Right, So we just continue to work through those things as often as we can and hopefully we're as prepared as we can be.
Well, that's about all you can do. The other infrastructure would be like if the electricity goes out. Something you guys did and I thought was great was redundancies, investing in at least you voted to invest in redundancies as far as computer and things like that.
As far as yes, as far as our operations are considered in continuity of operations. But additionally, what we do is we partner with one of our local electrical providers in as much as provides staging area for them. In the event of a major storm or major event, we stage electric providers contractors that may be used by multiple electric providers are staged up at our fairgrounds and ready to deploy. Now, normally, if they're staged here, we're not going to get the event they're staged.
Here for that reason.
Yeah, but there's other communities within the northeastern corner of the state that allow those same things, so that coupled with some aggressive what I will call aggressive by way of our electrical providers here in the community is their right of way clearance, their maintenance of their facilities. So when you see those guys out there working hard and clearing those lines off, just know that that means it lessens the likelihood of you suffering an outage during these events.
And we're very grateful as a community for these entities that come out and maintain their infrastructure the way that our electric providers do.
Now we're talking with Commitcher, Mitch Antele and Mitch. One thing that some folks might be new to the area, freezing rain is not something that affects every part of the And as a person who came from the Great Lakes area, yeah, we get it every once in a while, like once every four or five years. But down here we're kind of in that hit and miss region where it's either going to be snow or freezing rain, and
it's really a different animal. And even though you don't have a foot of snow out there, you still have branches that could break and fall on power line down them and it could be a mess.
Quarter of an inch ie.
That's all it takes if we look at quarter of an inch of ice, If we've got a storm of that magnitude that's coming in and we're going to get a quarter of an inch of ice, you're going to have some implication of infrastructure failure, if you will.
At that point. It doesn't take a whole lot.
Now, when we're talking about driving, any amount of moisture on a road that freezes is insufferable. I mean, it's just not something that gives a whole lot of grace to the traveler. We see it most pointedly on bridges, so elevated surfaces that don't have the protection of a roadbed underneath of them. You're just looking at a freeze ban structure gonna it's gonna freeze. It's getting cold from the top end of the bottom, and it's gonna freeze
before anything else. There's protections in place, but you don't want to take your vehicle and ping pong across a bridge structure simply because.
Of you know, a tenth of an inch of ice or less.
Even Oh wow, Mike, recently we had a small breach of security with the computers. I guess it was kind of explained. It's a little complicated for the average person when you hear a breach, you go, oh.
My gosh, exactly.
It's it's one of those frustrating and infuriating things, and it's not unexpected or atypical, especially around the holiday seasons. To see government government type facilities, to see our systems tested, our networks tested, our computers tested. And what I mean by test it is it's a great time for infiltrators or bad actors to play with your system and try and figure out what's going on. We're managed, and I say managed, we're tested literally tested on multiple levels, just
kind of routinely. Oklahoma Department of Homeland Security, which is under Department of Public Safety, will periodically look at our systems and our infrastructure make sure everything's everything's well protected.
In this particular instance, it was a Homeland security office out of California, Federal Homeland Security that had tested our systems and found what they believed to be a breach, and that just immediately set our plan of action in place as to, Okay, what's our response mechanism look like.
The deficiency that we noted the board of kind of commissioners noted as a result of that was we didn't have a critical or an incident response plan in place with our firewall services, so we will migrate to that. But what we did was engage those services through a third party contractor with our firewall provider.
Over the weekend.
We conveyed that authority or I conveyed that authority to our ORIT director, mister Naherd. She handled that on our behalf and did a wonderful job with it, working with the Sheriff's office. That's how our initial conversation began. It's difficult sometimes to vet where these things are coming from and to understand that.
So it takes relationships.
So a phone call from California telling you your systems being compromised, that's I don't know this person, right, I've not dealt with them before. So these things come to pass, and it came to pass that it went through a Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs agent known to this San Francisco DHS agent, known to DHS agent in Tulsa, and.
To our undershare who knew these people.
So it's those relationships that that vet what you have coming in, make sure it is what's what it is, at least gives it some credibility initially, then your IT department begins there their.
Query into your system to see what's going.
On, and again very low level couple of probing type attacks where they basically want to enumerate your system number it give you a numbered list of here's here's how many users, here's how many pieces of equipment, here's the topology within that network, so they can begin to know reconnaissance mission, if you.
Will, case in the joint.
Case in the joint, there you go, I like it.
My Chicago came up, and then they move on from there if undetected. So in this case, they weren't undetected, and we've isolated and quarantined the area of compromise, and we'll move through the corrective actions necessary to make sure that doesn't happen again.
Do we know who this was or what this was?
No, we don't know who or what.
I haven't received the final report yet from well for a while.
Normally it doesn't take him very long. You'd be amazed.
Really, Yes, that's become much more efficient than it used to be. I expect we'll have a final final report sometime next week.
Nice, very good. We're speaking with Mitch Channel he's one of our commissioners here in Washington County. We've been talking about a great deal of things. One of the things that comes up out of the meetings, it seems like there's always something to be acknowledged or voted on with the new Washington County Emergency Management Center, and that's going to be a fine little addition to our county.
It's a phenomenal addition to our county. I know that there are some concerns that it's too large of a facility. That's that's kind of where I fall out is. It's it's not too large of a facility. It's what we need within the community. We've got a unique arrangement here, and we have got a very aggressive emergency management director who operates well within the state of Oklahoma with all the other entities that are associated with emergency management and
those type of emergency responses. That facility will allow us a level of posturing and preparedness that we've not had previously, and it will last long into the future. I call that one of the tree projects. I'm planting a tree so that the next iteration of me can operate more effectively.
Does that makes sense? And looking ahead, we as a community.
Planted that tree, and that's the beauty of those kind of projects.
I've spent a lot of time in emergency management complexes in Florida during hurricanes and covering hurricanes. I mean not saying that we're going to get to anything that's going to last days in the way of a tornado or a heavy storm, but it's nice to know that when everybody has to be in there, you can fit everybody who's supposed to be in there in there correct. They can be responsible for getting communications out to where they need to go.
Yes, so that size is important. It is.
And part of that facility is a hardened infrastructure type that is design if you will, it should withstand an e F for tornado.
So that's really and it allows.
Us an opportunity. You know, our state Auditor inspector has been routinely I don't want to say pinging, but but letting us know that we could do better with regard to continuity planning as a county government. And their position now is what happens if a storm comes through and wipes out your administration building.
What are you going to do? How are you going to continue your operations?
This facility offers us the ability to basically just flip a switch. We have equipment at the ready, so any office currently housed administratively, so our treasurer, our assessor, our clerk, our board, border county commissioners could immediately go over there, flip switch, and we're back up and running exactly.
That's where the size comes in, correct. You may never need it. If you ever do, you're not going to be caught with your shorts down.
Well, and it's not always just about that one time, big incident. We have a multitude of small incidents throughout the year. Yes, And for ease of operations and the ability for a community this size to have let's just say, distribution points of whether it's food, water, prophyle axis, whatever.
It may be.
You know, we've got some sort of illness that's running and we want to run a vaccine clinic or something along those lines.
That's available.
Not to say that it would ever be used, but it's designed and how so that you can move vehicles in and out quickly.
We could probably rotate a large portion of.
The community through that facility in a very short period of time. With the warehouse facility toward the back of it.
I keep thinking fires because by Olly, when those things go up, he's got a lot of land, you know, and Lord knows how many resources you might need. It runs out of the emergency center.
We have a unique system out there with regard to our fire protection services at the county level.
They're not.
They don't have a specific response area. They're a secondary response to everybody that responds.
So if we have a.
Small rural fire department, volunteer fire department that's responding to something, they can go respond to back them up and that bolsters our ISO rating as well as provides for a service within the community. And quite honestly, the county doesn't put a whole lot of money into that. We give him some basic operations money just for that endeavor, but they operate grant heavy off of that and community participation
off of that. We've got several community entities that provide for those services regularly.
And chandled is our guest here and commissioner. Anything you'd just like to say.
To encourage everybody to remain safe, especially with this weather coming in. Check on your neighbors, make sure your pets are cared for, drive safely and if you don't need to be out, and we do have some ice or snow on
The ground, then don't get out.