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Sleeping soundly
By Chris Kreft
Staff Writer
While it sometimes seems like the entire nation quivers in fear as it lies in bed each night, the threat of a terrorist attack seeming imminent, Grand Rapids residents can sleep more securely, knowing systems are in place to deter and deal with an attack.
Earlier this week, Joe Partridge of the Grand Rapids Fire Department said they have a set of instructions and guidelines held by the city on how to respond to and recover from a major disaster.
Partridge, the local “tornado man” according to a GRFD secretary, said the All Hazards Emergency Plan is very general in nature, covering everything from terrorist attacks to tornados, but also flooding, fire control and even snow removal.
Different city departments deal with specific problems, Partridge said, yet each is linked to a network so that the services of two or more could easily be applied to a situation that required it.
Partridge went on to speak of two response systems which collaborate to provide aid to Grand Rapids: the Metropolitan Medical Response System (MMRS) and Regional Response Team Network (RRTN).
The RTTN is a state-sponsored plan that involves specific training and equipping of police and Emergency Medical Services teams to deal with hazardous materials.
The MMRS is a federal program, approximately 18 months old, identifying resources different states would need to handle a weapons of mass destruction attack.
The two systems, RTTN and MMRS, besides dealing with events such as a weapons attack, also deal with events like a chemical spill.
Partridge’s county-level counterpart, Lieutenant Jim Van Bendegom, said MMRS would cover the availability of resources (medical and otherwise), in the event Grand Rapids ran short on anything during an emergency.
If overwhelmed, Van Bendegom said, the city would declare a “local state of emergency,” in which case the state of Michigan would try to pool resources from other cities.
“We believe in a regional response to an emergency,” Van Bendegom said.
If the emergency was on an even larger scale, then the governor could declare a “state of emergency” in Michigan and the assistance of other states and of the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) would be necessary.
None of this is new, though, something both Partridge and Van Bendegom made clear.
Both men said these precautions and systems were not merely a response to 9/11.
“We had some good things already in place,” Van Bendegom said. “It wasn’t ‘Oh my gosh, what are we going to do?’”
National emergency plans go as far back as the Cold War, where preparations were laid out for a nuclear strike against the United States.
FEMA was formed by President Jimmy Carter in 1978, the first time a part of the budget was allocated for emergencies rather than a specific emergency requiring a congressional vote on any particular issue, as was previously the case.
As time went on, more “emergencies” were added to FEMA’s response list. Terrorism was added after the first World Trade Center attack in 1992 and school violence was added after the Columbine, Colo., school shootings in 1999.
“The federal government has been pretty involved,” Partridge said.
Although a threat is always present, officials said there are plans and strategies in place to handle emergencies and disasters.
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