Luzerne County Elected Officials Receive Emergency Management Training

On March 1st local elected officials attended free Emergency Management Training at the Luzerne County Emergency Management Agency in Wilkes-Barre.
We had a chance to speak with the Director of LCEMA and the Deputy Coordinator of LCEMA about the training.

Q: What's going on here today?​

David Elmore, Deputy Coordinator of LCEMA:
Basically what we're doing is we're bringing the elected officials into our area here and giving them the training they need to get on the same page with their emergency management coordinator and incident command. It explains the whole ICS process incident command system and lets them know just exactly how they're gonna work together and teach them to work together.

Q: What is the goal of providing this training?

Lucille Morgan, Firector of LCEMA:
we really would just like to give a little bit more education to the local elected officials so that they don't have so many questions. That they could kind of I mean every disaster is different but for them to just expect what may occur me what might not occur what they should expect from their EMA coordinator their local fire company to share some terminology with them to let them know how we work here we would assist if municipality gets overwhelmed so this will go over a little bit of our role and what we could provide to them as far as service and support.

What has EMA recently helped lower Luzerne County with recently?

Elmore:
we helped all municipalities during the Stella snowstorm and we got to be on first-name basis with a lot of municipalities during that time.

Morgan:
Freeland, their municipal water all the pipes had frozen so ice along with the Pennsylvania Emergency Management went up and had meetings with them to try to assist them try to get some resources in for them to mitigate the issue.

Q: Anything else you'd like to add about the training?

Elmore:
I'm looking forward to the training here it looks like we're good we have a good turnout here hopefully the weather will hold back a little bit tomorrow for our better turnout but if not we are offering these training again to the rest of the municipalities that aren't here in the future, in the near future.