Daviess County Emergency Management Director David Roll was one of the presenters at the first ever Midwest Rural Emergency Management Summit held March 22 at the University of Central Missouri campus in Warrensburg.
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Topics presented at the all-day meeting were Pipeline Accident in Canton, IL; Introduction to the “NEW” National Weather Service; Daviess County Water Outage of 2018; and the Rural Region A Emergency Management.
Mr. Roll’s topic was on the water outage of Public Water Supply District #1 of Daviess County Water in 2018. Customers of the water district were out of water for six days last year, starting on Aug. 2. Those customers lived south of the Grand River, and south of the old town of Pattonsburg, including Altamont, Weatherby and Winston. Large calcium and mineral deposits evidently clogged water lines, disrupting service to 717 water customers.
“I presented the topic as a case study on whether or not emergency management has a role in business continuity failures,” he says. “Part of my presentation included a background of the events, video clips from area news reports, the search for and discovery of the source of the problem, and how and what ways Daviess County EMA supported the community in obtaining and dispersing drinking water.”
Some of the audience at the summit included people from other emergency management agencies from around the State of Missouri, Transportation Security Administration, National Weather Service, students of the University of Central Missouri Emergency Management Program, and Team Rubicon. Team Rubicon utilizes the skills and experiences of military veterans with first responders to rapidly deploy emergency response teams.
Mr. Roll is a 2015 graduate of UCM’s Emergency Management degree program with a BS degree in crisis and disaster management.
The Institute for Rural Emergency Management (IREM) at the University of Central Missouri was established in June 2005 to meet a demonstrated need for technical assistance in rural communities. UCM is the only university in the U.S. to create a community outreach center focused on the emergency management needs of rural America, which are distinct from the needs of urban and suburban communities.
IREM gathers best practices from successful rural projects and develops guidelines and targeted information to distribute to elected officials and community leaders. In rural areas human resources are often limited, so IREM provides supervised student interns and researchers to complete vital projects, implement new programs, and deliver training workshops and exercises.
The Institute for Rural Emergency Management, staffed by a full-time director and graduate assistants, works in these key project areas: