Neighborhood leaders reboot citywide preparedness committee

Presenter: Would you like to learn more about preparedness? Your neighborhood association can help, with backup from the citywide Neighborhood Leaders Council. At the NLC’s meeting Nov. 25, Sandra Bishop: 

Sandra Bishop: I’m Sandra Bishop. I’m the vice chair of Jefferson Westside Neighbors. And I’ve been trying to get the NLC preparedness committee kind of reactivated for almost a year now.

[00:00:26] The history of it is that this NLC prep committee started in 2019. It was very active and at least a dozen or more people. And then it went into COVID, and then to make it overly simplistic, it kind of turned into an information channel where it would sometimes have monthly meetings, but it would be more pushing out information. So now we’d like to kind of reactivate it.

[00:00:54] The idea is that there are a lot of neighborhoods already doing something related to emergency prep or disaster preparedness. This committee can be like a clearinghouse or an educational spot for all of the neighborhood associations, and also for residents.

[00:01:15] ‘Cause I’m hearing out in the community, there are people in different neighborhoods that are organizing their neighbors. They don’t even know they are in a neighborhood group.

[00:01:25] So I think it will work both ways. We’ll get people who are in neighborhood groups already who want to work with this committee. And we’ll also be driving or getting people who are not involved or don’t know about the neighborhood groups and funneling them into their neighborhood groups. So I think it’ll work best that way.

[00:01:46] It’s a perfect time for NLC to take a leadership role in preparedness because the city has just moved (Althea Sullivan) in from the Fire Department into Emergency Management. And then Tiffany Brown has been hired as the county emergency manager. So it’s a perfect time for us to take a leadership role.

[00:02:10] If you look at the past and look at the trend, we’re getting less and less money from the city. And so some of this is trying to be a little more self-sufficient…

[00:02:19] And what this committee will offer is coordination because a lot of neighborhoods don’t know what resources are available. And if you really start looking at what resources are available, it’s like a fire hose. There’s so much, that nobody knows how to access things or what to access. So it’ll help the neighborhoods.

[00:02:42] You know, for a real example here: JWN is talking about, ‘Well, wait a minute, we’re getting our radio network put together, but we don’t want to do it just within our boundaries.’ Our boundaries of the neighborhood are a little bit arbitrary. So we’re looking at, ‘Well, what are the neighborhoods beside us doing?’

[00:03:02] It would be really handy to have the NLC committee as a kind of a touchpoint to say, ‘Oh, yeah, you know, Fairmount’s doing this, Friendly’s doing this, yeah, you’re adjacent to Friendly, let’s do this.’ So it’s that kind of coordination.

[00:03:18] One of the main things we would want to do is, well, of course, we want to interest more residents getting involved with their local neighborhoods and getting involved with preparedness.

[00:03:28] But we want to assess what the neighborhoods are doing now. And so that would be a big thing to start with. And are they doing anything? And then what do they want to be doing? What kind of resources, what kind of assistance or support do they need?

[00:03:43] And I also want to clarify, preparedness is about a very broad range of things. It’s about evacuation routes. It’s about fire. It’s about preparing financially. So it really covers a broad range. 

[00:04:02] Everyone in Eugene has a common interest in preparedness. They just may not know it yet. But I think because it’s so broad, we can see what people really want.

[00:04:13] Presenter: From Ready Northwest, Dawn Scott:

[00:04:16] Dawn Scott (Ready NW Eugene): We are with Ready NW (Eugene), a collaborative, as I call it, of three different neighborhood groups. That would be Active Bethel Community, Santa Clara, and River Road community organizations. It has been a successful collaborative. Some of you may be familiar with some of the Zoom sessions we did.

[00:04:36] But what happened with the history of the organization is two out of three of the people who started the organization actually left the state. And so they put out a plea to their distribution list. And Robert and I decided to step up and help them with that, because we had begun to work with emergency preparedness in our own 55 + community.

[00:04:58] We bought a house here in 2022 in a 113-household 55+ community. And we discovered at that time that there was no emergency radio plan for the entire of Northwest Eugene. And that didn’t work for us. We realized that something needed to happen.

[00:05:17] So we started working with Ready NW and eventually stepped up and said that we were going to be doing Be 2 Weeks Ready and radio work for the next year. And we have done that. We’ve done some Be 2 Weeks Ready training.

[00:05:33] In my association, I’ve been able to do some of that training and promoted it throughout the community to include a Zoom session that we did on Be 2 Weeks Ready where we brought in some person from Woodburn doing it and also the state coordinator.

[00:05:47] And Robert is now the Northwest Eugene EmComm radio coordinator or district lead for radios for Northwest Eugene and has gotten his ham license to accomplish that as a first step.

[00:06:01] Our third member of Ready NW is Ed Ferren, who is a CERT and was (until recently) the districtwide CERT director for Northwest.

[00:06:10] And also, I’ve been going to the COAD meetings, Community Organizations Active in Disaster. And the Lane County COAD is exactly that. It’s Lane County, it’s a whole bunch of rural communities being involved, as well as anybody who has a vested interest in preparedness. And I think the entire city of Eugene could be represented by the NLC committee on that COAD.

[00:06:37] We also work with the Rumblings film. It’s finally open for viewing now, and it is up on YouTube. It is really a wonderful film and a great springboard for becoming prepared. It covers both earthquakes and wildfires, interestingly, and then talks about preparedness and how the state has become prepared.

[00:06:59] So that’s the kind of thing: We work with the group that put that together, the state of Oregon and CRESCENT on campus, the Cascadia group on campus, and we were invited to table at that film debut, and I actually put stuff out about the neighborhood organizations and helped people find what neighborhood they lived in.

[00:07:20] So that’s kind of the idea was to get all of the neighborhoods working together. I think we could contribute a lot of that dialogue and getting the larger committee working in whatever manner they wish to.

[00:07:33] As Sandra said, having them doing a needs assessment, as I call it—what do you need, what do you want to know about, and what do you need help with in emergency preparedness—and collaborating together and combining our skills and maybe doing events around the city that people could come to and it would be something for the community to look forward to.

[00:07:56] A lot of the communities in Oregon are doing that. Corvallis does an annual event. Salem just did one. A lot of the coastal communities have annual events and I think Eugene could well manage to accomplish something like that. 

[00:08:11] Presenter: With winter storms on the way, check in with your neighborhood‘s preparedness committee. And if your neighborhood doesn’t have a preparedness committee, the Neighborhood Leaders Council is here to help.