By Katy Decker
- Early warning notification of fire, and other important alerts – sign up with readygila.com. Phone/email/text.
- Contact the City to establish a Property Maintenance Ordinance fine against neglectful owners.
Dear Residents of Payson…A question for all of you who are looking at the myriad of issues which face this town. All of you should know the most important issue of all that we face. If your answer is a catastrophic fire, then you got it right.
If this occurs, our differences of opinion in the political arena, taxes, electrical costs, water costs—none of these will make one bit of difference, without a standing town. Since the danger of fire has increased exponentially in the last 20 years, it seems like the doomsday clock is hovering at one minute to midnight, with no chance of going back.
Does Payson have a plan in place for successful evacuation? No. Does Payson have an early warning system that will alert all residents, and direct them out of the area? That answer is a little more complicated. Rumor has it, that the Police Department and the Gila County Sheriff’s Department do have a documented procedure to notify us when and where to go, and has an ability to track those leaving.
What is true is that Gila County has an Emergency Alert Program (EAP) that anyone can sign up for. It is called Everbridge, and this system will email/text/phone you if something is happening in our area. Gila county’s website is www.readygila.com [5], with the signup for Everbridge, right on the page. This program provides alerts about emergencies that occur in Gila County. By signing up for the EAP, the system provides you with critical information quickly in a variety of situations, such as severe weather, unexpected road closures, missing persons, and evacuations of buildings, schools or neighborhoods.
You will receive time-sensitive messages wherever you specify, such as your home, mobile or business phones, email address, text messages and more. You pick where, you pick how. This system can be set up using a cell phone, as long as you have GPS enabled on your phone. But what if the cell phone towers are down? How about those without a cell phone? No joke.. many here still do not have or use a cell phone, or a computer.
Now, rumor also has it that the old fashioned landline phone in your home can be used in this type of emergency notification as well. As long as the phone is using copper lines in the house not VOIP, which is through a computer system.
Since copper lines are self-powered, in rural communities or areas prone to storms, it makes sense to have a land line. In case of bad-weather conditions, landline phones are much more likely to be available. For example, satellite-based internet services in rural areas can have outages during storms. And cellular towers can be vulnerable to losing power in natural disasters, as occurred during Hurricane Sandy.
“If they don’t have enough backup battery power for these towers, your cell services will disappear,” says Barbara Cherry, a professor in the telecommunications department at Indiana University and a former senior counsel at the Federal Communications Commission’s Office of Strategic Planning & Policy Analysis.
In our area, there is also a group called R.A.C.E.S (Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service) which consist of those amateur radio operators [6] who have previously registered with state and local governments to provide emergency radio communications in times of emergency.
The local HAM radio club, TARA, teaches the licensing skills needed to register with the State and Local government.
Hand-in-hand with this information, is the first line of defense… clean up your property! Firewise!
Many will agree, our problem is those properties that are not maintained, due to absentee owners, homeowners without means, the elderly, or maybe Town-owned land perhaps? I mention this, as I have for the last 6 years, paid to have the Town land which borders our property to be cleaned and maintained. It is not cheap. Scrub, manzanita, pine needles, trash, pinecones, dead trees, you name it. But guess what? The vacant home with absentee ownership next to me is the bigger problem.
Am I singing your song here? Personally, I would like to see the town levy fines against homeowners that have decided to ignore this responsibility. Can our Town create and impose a Property Maintenance Ordinance fine system? If that can be done, it should have happened yesterday. We need to clean up these properties and our town. There has been no accountability for property owners to do anything, so an Ordinance would address this. After all, how far can a burning ember be carried on the wind? Over a mile.
I end my writing here with a sobering thought. Is it too late for our town? Is it just a matter of when, and not if we have a fire? I think the time to act is TODAY, not tomorrow. Firewise Graphic HERE [7] , Firewise Flyer HERE. [8] Firewise Home HERE [9] Firewise for Horses HERE [10]
