Good morning, good morning, good morning, and welcome, welcome, welcome. It's time now for our community connection right here on K one, the one you trust. We have the Washington County Emergency Management in here today and we got you all.
I hope nothing happens.
Carrie Cox, the director of Melissa Mays. I talked to you on the phone quite a bit, John Mosley with the Floodplain in nine one one. Boy, if it's springtime in Oklahoma, there's a lot of things happening, and you were just telling me we've got the whole expanse, don't we. It's seventy two degrees here today.
Yeah, seventy two degrees here today. There the forecast is telling us in western Oklahoma they may have record snowfall this weekend.
I ought to be here.
Yeah, they can set us a postcard right Facebook.
But we've got fire possibilities today.
Yeah, we've got high fire danger today. It's that time of year, you know, springtime here in northeast Oklahoma. So with warmer temperatures, little lower humidities, a little bit of wind there, we're gonna see a wind shift today also, So that kind of complicates things when we start talking about wild land fires. So we're going to be on the watch for that today.
Well, Melissa, you got a good night's sleep, right, Yeah, well good.
Because you might be busy leader, you ready to go.
Also, it brings rain. We had two three inches of rain that really didn't do too much for our fire stuff.
No, and that's what you know. We've talked about this before. A lot of folks don't really understand that because I think, well, we got rain, or we had recent snowfall, so everything's moist and so the fire danger.
Is not that high. Well, there's a lot of dead stuff still there a lot of dead stuff there.
And so you get these these winds, these these breezes that we have in the springtime, it dries that dormant vegetation out on top.
It may be muddy underneath.
With that, that dry vegetation on top will readily burn. So it's it's good fuel for those wild land fires.
Little boyant, Well with the rain, sometimes we get floods, and I understand that. John, you know a little bit about floodplains.
Stuff like that. What you got going on here? Do you like to talk to us about it regards to that?
So we luckily we haven't had any floodings recently. But so I'm the floodplane manager for the county. Yeah, and so I just my main My main job in that is to watch and regulate what people build within the regulatory okay, mapped floodplains.
So you also take care of me nine to one one. That's out to be a little bit.
Of a trip. Yeah, it's what goes into that.
So I do all the nine one one addressing for unincorporated Washington County with the exclusive city of Bartsville. And but we're also working on a nine to one one grant in conjunction with the City of Bartlesville through the State of Oklahoma and to upgrade. Right now, we're in Enhance nine one one and we're going to upgrade into next generation nine one one, which has to do with call routing. If you call nine one one geolocating that phone and telling the dispatchers where exactly.
You are, well, that's going to help out a lot.
So we're in the process of getting all the MOUs and everything signed and submitted to the State of Oklahoma so we can move forward with this grant.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, trying to endure what to call a no compete clause. I wound up answering nine one one phones at a capcom at the county office in in Illinois, and by geo locating, you've taken five, ten, fifteen seconds away from the time of that call, and that could be critical. I'm getting a fire or a police or medical someplace.
I mean, I just right there. That's incredible.
Well, and this grant that John's been working on is really beneficial and critical for us because of the technology advances that we've seen in the fact that folks are using. We don't see very many landlines now.
No, and that's that's another problem is is back several years ago, everybody had a landline in their house. Yeah, and it ran through AT and T and had an address and location associated with that landline. Now everybody's going mobile. Nobody has landlines anymore unless you're a place of business for the most part. Yeah, And so with that, it'll help with your cellular phone calls and locating more precise location of where that cell phone is. Instead of well
they're in between this tower and this tower. Now it'll it'll it'll narrow that gap and actually locates you a little better, you know, because there's people that will call nine one one that maybe in respiratory to stress and might not be able to get everything out that they need to get out. So stuff like this will help locate these people a little bit faster.
Well, it's better than between this tower and that tower and look for the next thing smoking or somebody else. Good gravy. Uh, Melissa, I understand. You guys are getting some new digs.
Have you been in the we are?
We are? We were just out there yesterday. We're really excited about that. This has been a project years in the making, at least four years in the making of actual work on this project of our new facility out on Bison Road. A little bit more room, a lot more room, a lot more room, a lot more room. We have been really fortunate with the facility that we have currently originally being donated by Walmart and now DSR,
but we've outgrown that a long time ago. So this is this is a really good thing for the community as a whole to have this facility.
I began work here about six years ago and that was my first venture over there with Garrett Giles, and we walked in, I'm like, oh, my gosh, Carrie's looking at us, and we fit one more extra person in here, We're going to be in trouble.
I was.
I was really quite surprised in that big building. Just a slipper, I mean, generously given to you to use, but still, wow, I don't know how you guys functioned in there for so long and girls, Yeah.
Well, and it's been a good home for us. It provided us with what we needed, huh. But as Melissa said, we've we've definitely outgrown that. And and again, you know, same way with the technology on the on the next gen nine or one, the technologies that we use or communications for severe weather operations, any other type of emergency or disaster has also expanded increased and we're struggling to
keep up with that in our current facility. So this new facility will give us the abilities, the capabilities that we need with that newer technology to continue to provide for the citizens.
Of Washington County.
I wanted to get back to mister Mosley John, what are folks going to notice? Are you going to be contacting people when we go through this, you know, upgrade people with with phones residents? What can we expect as Joe and Jane average.
There room won't be anything that you'll necessarily notice in the end. Oh good, it's all said and done, there will be You won't have to do nothing. It'll all take care of itself, all right. So it'll all be done within the dispatch center here in Martinsville. Oh so, all that i S data, we're getting it all remediated and fixed and making sure everything's right and there's address points are on the right houses associated with the right address.
And then all that data will be submitted to the state nine one one to a repository, and then our nine one one center will be able to pull all that data into their system from the state repository.
And that was a great deal about this grant And the reason that we wanted to take advantage is because it'll be seamless for the general public.
Wow.
And the people that will really notice the difference will be the dispatchers down at the nine one one center and the responders because they'll be able to get access to that information to find those those victims, those patients whatever easier and more readily. But the general public themselves, it'll be seamless to them.
Wow, I got like that here I'm thinking, you know, we're going to get a knock from somebody, plumber brush man. No, it's not only kidding, only kidding and kidding anyway, you do a great job here in our community, and we really thank you. A lot of folks wonder, well, what constitutes an emergency? And I'm going to go to Melissa on this because it seems like I always get a hold of you and bad thing going on because he's out there, you know, running into places on fire.
Yes he is. So what constitutes an emergency? I mean that's different for everybody.
What's an emergency to me may not be an emergency to you, and vice versa. So, but as far as in our line of work, it's everything from lost people to weather, to fires, to car accidents, gas leaks.
What else have we done?
Tornadoes, earthquakes, I don't. I mean just the list keeps growing every year of the kinds of things that that we were spawn too.
Well, it's just like a few years ago we added the pandemic. That was something we hadn't really had on our list previously.
So nobody wants to say that.
That list seems to grow, But anything that has a significant impact to the community. Okay, then that's that's what we're.
Focused on, because you know, Carrie, I run into you in different things, whether it's directing traffic for an accident or if there's a wildfire, and a variety of other things. It just seems like it's kind of an omnibus thing. It's one big umbrella. You know, if it's going wrong, chances are you're gonna see white cars out there.
If we can help support it in any way and coordinate resources will be there.
Oh wow, great, Now with the new building, is that going to help you with your coordination?
Oh? Absolutely, I just saw that.
Yeah, so many different ways, not just our our daily operations or or even our responses for severe weather or flooding or whatever that might be, but even in the preparation for that training of area responders.
Oh.
That's always something we've kind of struggled with, is finding facilities that could hold a certain number of people to do different types of training. Well, we'll have our own training room out there in the facility now where we can seat up to eighty people at a time to do training. So essentially it'll be a regional training center, if you will. Also and having some of the planning meetings that we have. You've been to our LPC meetings
and some of those. It gives us a lot more space, better facilities to do those types of things, which is how we develop our plans to respond to these disasters. So yeah, the new facility is going to help in so many different ways. The equipment stuff that we have currently, we have three different buildings or facilities around the community where our equipment is stored. This will put all of that equipment under one roof in one location.
And it was designed with the community in mind for sure, because we can use this facility to distribute good goods or supplies and things like that. We learned during the pandemic when we needed to do test pods and vaccination pods and things like that, there wasn't really good facilities around here to get lots of people through. We'll be able to do that at our facility.
Great.
Great, Now this is built kind of large because I think we all know Martinville is about to grow and Washington County is about to grow, So this gave you some wiggle room to grow.
Correct.
Yes, absolutely, and when we designed this facility we tried to keep that in mind and look towards the future, so it is designed for the future as well.
Is there anything I missed?
The reason why it is because I could talk to you guys, I really could, because I've got like a million questions. But we'll get to them when we get to them. Well, thank you all for coming in. Thanks for taking a good chunk out of your morning to be with us here on the radio and TV.
We appreciate it.
Take care now, folks.