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Safety from uncertainty Coordinator guides city in pandemic By Samuel Sutton Standard-Radio Post reporter
In these unprecedented times, one of the most important people in Fredericksburg is the emergency management coordinator. Dave Wisniewski, currently the person in this position, is working behind the scenes to keep Fredericksburg’s residents safe from COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus. In less hectic times, the job of an emergency management coordinator is to develop training courses and plans for emergencies such as tornadoes, excessive heat, tsunamis and pandemics so that city departments can be prepared. These plans also help the city receive grant funds if an emergency occurs. During this pandemic, Wisniewski is tasked with doing this, along with trying to distribute COVID-19 information to local businesses and city departments, collaborate with local, state and federal governments for emergency resources and advise people who do test positive to follow a physician’s guidelines. When Wisniewski applied for the assistant emergency management coordinator position in 2012, he was confident. He was familiar with the position’s functions, as he had used the same model while serving in the Navy. “The way the command system functions was actually based on a system that was put together by the Coast Guard, and the military had been using it essentially for years,” Wisniewski said. “It was nothing new to me at all.” He moved into the fire marshal position in 2016, and stayed there until his retirement in January. John Culpepper retired from the emergency management coordinator position
Emergency Management Coordinator David Wisniewski, left, helps firefighter Ryan McBee don Personal Protective Equipment. During this pandemic, Wisniewski has been collaborating with local, state and federal governments for emergency resources. — Standard-Radio Post/ Samuel Sutton
at the same time, but had stayed on part time until May, when family matters required him to leave. “I was asked to come back and hold it until the end of the year,” Wisniewski said. “You can’t not do something with all the craziness going on right now. You’d have to be a pretty hard-hearted individual to turn your back on the world right now.” Even though he may have been ready for the position then, he had no way of preparing for this kind of crisis. “Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined this,” Wisniewski said. “This is uncharted territory for all of us.”
The only comparable time to this, Wisniewski said, was the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic. “It was very similar with one exception. Lots and lots of people died with that,” he said. “If you caught that, you had a 50% chance of dying.” He added that while COVID-19 has a lower mortality rate, it shouldn’t be taken lightly. Looking purely at stats, Wisniewski said, is not the right approach. “It ain’t just a number,” he said. “It’s a human.” Every day, Wisniewski said he focuses less on stats and more on how many people are sick, where they are concentrated
and what tomorrow will look like. “We’ve been very fortunate here to this point with no fatalities, but no one should be under the impression that it’s not going to happen,” he said. Lastly, Wisniewski said that while his job is important, the real heroes are the first responders who have to go on emergency calls every day. “They have to wear Personal Protective Equipment on every one of those calls because they don’t know if someone is infected,” Wisniewski said. At the moment, Wisniewski’s plan is to stay until the end of the year. But, as previously mentioned, he won’t turn his back on a world in need.
