July 6, 2024

Weathering the Storm

via Zoom

Tuesday, July 16

7:30pm

Neighbors:

Are you prepared; not just in the Boy Scout sense, but in the event of extreme weather, fire, accident(s), health, and other emergencies that can happen at any time? To help cope, we have an offer of education and preparedness strategies directly provided to us from the Anne Arundel County Office of Emergency Management (OEM).

Background

A few years ago, your POA officers, board members, and concerned community members assembled a core Emergency Planning Committee to discuss and organize a response strategy to emergency situations. Given our changing weather patterns and to address non-weather-related emergency situations any one of us could experience, we’ve engaged the county’s help in providing training for all of us to most effectively respond as individuals and as a community to situations we never fully expect, but must always prepare for, aka, emergencies.

Present time

Through our continued contact with county coordinator Jim Kremple and now, former EMT Jorge Paucar OEM’s community outreach team — we have asked for some course offerings that could benefit all of us to help ensure the best outcome for our families and ourselves when unexpected events occur, whether it be accidental or environmental.

Please join us for our first session Weathering the Storm, via Zoom, on Tuesday evening, July 16, from 7:30pm ‘till we wear out Jim and Jorge with our questions.

They have agreed to make their Summer Storm presentation and then give us an overview of other, in-person OEM course offerings, which can conveniently be held evenings or weekends at the expanded meeting facilities of our new Busch Library, 1410 West Street. Some presentations are also available via Zoom for some prevention sessions.

OEM offers residents aged 14 and older emergency skills training in:

• Summer Storm/Tornado/Hurricane Preparedness Discussion: 1 hour, Zoom or in-person.
• Civilian Response to Active Shooter Events (CRASE) Training: 1.5 hours in-person only, no size limit
• Hands-only CPR/AED Training: 1.5 hours in person only, up to 10 people per instructor
• Stop the Bleed Training: 1.5 hours in-person only, up to 10 people per instructor

We can probably also arrange a Narcan (Nalaxone) opioid overdose reversal drug administration class as well.

Down the road, should any neighbors wish to learn advanced preparedness skills, OEM can also get our community slots for September's Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) Basic. This a FEMA-developed two-weekend course in hands-on personal emergency preparedness. It is taught by the Anne Arundel/Annapolis CERT at the County Fire Training Academy. For more information, please visit this link.

But we need to start small and there is probably no more pressing need than to prepare now for what we all know is coming, and that’s a frighteningly unprecedented hurricane season that OEM briefed some of us about last month. Learn more here.

So please let us know how many of you would be interested in OEM’s Storm zoom on July 16 so Jim can send out invitations.

Then we’d like to gauge interest in any of the other course offerings listed above. You can reply directly to me or, maybe more efficiently, you could just answer directly to Jim so he can decide if AOTB’s interest warrants special course offerings for us or whether smaller numbers of our neighbors could be folded into existing county-wide courses.

Finally, we’re all busy with something — work, family, home, whatever — but when disaster strikes, as it surely does, shoulda-woulda-coulda just won’t substitute for, planning, training, and a solid knowledge base.

Just to remind you that disaster can happen here, below are some photos of the damage Tropical Storm Isabel did to our community in 2003. Remember too, that within the past few years AOTB has been subject to severe storm flooding as well as at least three major fires resulting in personal injury and total property losses, proving that anything can happen anytime and that it just makes sense to be ready.

-- David Delia