Benefits of the APWA Accreditation process for an emergency management agency Byron Steward Homeland Security/Emergency Management Coordinator Mohave County, Arizona
n October 2003, I was hired as Mohave County Emergency Management Coordinator. This was, to put it lightly, a considerable change from my previous Emergency Manager position with a small rural county in Kansas. Mohave County is the fifth largest county (excluding Alaska boroughs) in the nation, covering 13,470 square miles with a 2000 census population of over 155,000, since grown to over 200,000 in the 2010 census. The natural and man-made hazards also turned out to be considerably different from my previous Kansas experiences with springtime prairie fires, winter ice storms, and tornados almost anytime. In Mohave County we have to plan for flash flooding, high country wildfires, extreme heat emergencies, and hazardous materials
and transportation incidents. (Two Interstate highways, the only direct highway between Las Vegas and Phoenix, and a main east-west rail line all transit the county.) The Colorado River cuts the county in two as it flows east to west, then bends south from Lake Mead to form the county’s borders with California and Nevada, so we also plan for the unlikely occurrence of unplanned releases from Hoover and Davis Dams. A more likely planning scenario is one involving an influx of evacuees from California earthquakes. About the time when I had almost absorbed the magnitude of this change and become inured to driving two or three hours to reach parts of the county, County Public Works Director Mike Hendrix (now Deputy County Manager) informed me of the ongoing effort to prepare all
COMMUNITIES
Public Works divisions for the APWA Accreditation process. Emergency Management at that time was a division of Public Works and has since been transferred to the County Development Services Department. Not being familiar with APWA and its Accreditation process, it didn’t take much studying of the process for me to find that I had much to learn. The first thing I learned was that the Emergency Management Practices under APWA were specifically directed at the Public Works Department’s policies and procedures for managing its response to emergency situations. My threeperson division, however, was the designated emergency management agency for Mohave County, so our responsibilities included but also extended far beyond the Public Works emergency role. This meant
Mohave County Emergency Management receives their Accreditation plaque with Public Works and Flood Control District at a County Board of Supervisors meeting. 14 APWA Reporter
November 2012
