ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third story recapping the debriefing of the recent fires in the area Monday afternoon with the Seward County Commission. This story discusses how Southwest Medical Center and the county administrator’s office helped out with the response, as well as questions from Commissioner Jairo Vazquez. A final story will discuss the recent controversy concerning Commission Chairman Steve Helm asking former Fire Chief Andrew Barkley to give Administrator April Warden a radio as well as drills the county does to help prepare for emergencies.
Following reports from county first responder department heads, Southwest Medical Center Director of Plant Operations Gregg Freelove gave a short recap of the hospital’s involvement in helping with the fires that hit the area in mid-February at the March 2 debriefing.
Freelove said the hospital was taking care of some facility issues as part of its direct involvement.
“We ended up cancelling or postponing a couple of surgeries due to the amount of smoke our building was receiving and having to shut the air down, and we can’t perform safe surgeries at that point,” he said. “Overall at our facility, it went well.”
Freelove said he had received a few phone calls stating Liberal was being evacuated during the fires, but after some research, he discovered this was false information.
“If you’ve got 18,000 to 20,000 people who are all worried, getting the information out to them to either alleviate that worry or get them where they need to be in a good fashion, it is a good thing,” he said.
Seward County Administrator April Warden said many people reached out to her department, including those providing mutual aid and tankers and farmers, ranchers, businesses and departments who got involved with the emergency efforts.
Warden said she had composed a list of those partners she had shared with former Emergency Management Coordinator Rosa Conley, former Fire Chief Andrew Barkley and Interim Fire Chief Braden Steckel.
Warden said her first phone call when the fires started was to Conley, who had only been on the job for a short period of time and not prepared for what Warden called “the perfect storm,” and it was soon after that when phone calls started pouring in to her office.
“Unfortunately, we had some storm watchers who were saying Liberal was being evacuated, and then, the college started reaching out,” Warden said. “The City of Liberal started reaching out about evacuation. I believe if we would’ve had the Emergency Operations Center up and running, we would’ve had our public information officer. We would’ve had the people who were helping outline where the mutual aid needed to go, and most certainly, we needed somebody who was in command at the river fire.”
Assistant Administrator Brock Theiner was on both sides of the Feb. 17 fires coordinating supplies and equipment, and he praised the work of those who helped out.
“We had a great group of guys show up on the equipment,” he said. “We were tasked with doing some sketchy stuff. What safety stuff we have implemented in Seward County paid off that day. Everybody arrived home safely. Equipment was safe. We did our diligence down there. I commend everybody with their attitude. There was no bickering, and there were no bad attitudes. We all had a job to do, and everybody jumped in, and we did it.”
Like others, though, Theiner too said a chain of command needs to be in place when firefighters cannot make it to a scene.
“We need somebody in command here, and we need somebody in command there on the ground to deal with the resources,” he said. “We need muster points. We have a trailer. We need that loaded with supplies, and with the other supplies that are coming in, centralize and locate that stuff strategically, along with the tankers, and other equipment.”
In addition, Theiner said the person in command at the scene of the fire needs to have a plan in place.
“Communication was a big thing,” he said. “How are we going to execute the plan and see that plan through? We made it through. We had several people who stepped up into that role. We ended up executing what we had to do. In the future, once we put all this stuff in place, we can train with that, and everybody will know their part. It will go a lot smoother, and it’ll just flow like it’s supposed to.”
Diesel was also a heavy need at the fire scenes, and Theiner said future plans need to have a plan for getting this to mutual aid trucks on the scene.
“The tanker situation, once we got where they were going, was handled very well,” he said. “We’re rotating the people out and left our tanker there, and those tankers filled our tanker and ran the water to us. We also have the farmers with the tractors and the disks. Communication would’ve been really helpful.”
Theiner said while services such as the Kansas National Guard and the Kansas Forestry Service were on hand, communication was still needed to put all the pieces in the right place.
“I feel we needed somebody in a definitive on-the-ground operations role to carry everything out as far as what mutual aid needed,” he said. “Not all that meshed at every chance down there at the river fire.”
Theiner said a big outpouring of support supplies, but communication needs to be better about where those supplies need to go.
“In the midst of that, there were a lot of people helping, but nothing had any rhyme or reason to how it was going down and how the supplies were getting out to the people down in the river who a lot of times we didn’t know,” she said.
The debriefing was then opened to commissioners for questions and comments. Commissioner Jairo Vazquez reminded everyone of the purpose of the debriefing.
“The reason we’re here is to better ourselves and to better respond next time,” he said.
Vazquez asked how county officials can help with communication, particularly when dealing with mutual aid sources. Steckel said plans are in place for additional training with other counties.
“A big problem we ran into that day was everyone was dealing with their own fires, and unfortunately, if can’t handle some of those situations in house, we might not get any help,” Steckel said. “We’ve got to be prepared for that day we make the call for help and no one’s coming. I would like to just be better organized with whether it’s Road and Bridge, landfill, whoever’s’ going to be out at these fires, some of these are moving parts already.”
As emergencies are commonplace for first responders, Steckel said it sometimes is forgotten they are not normal for those who are not first responders.
“It’s a way for us to control the chaos a little easier,” he said. “Some of that needs to be in place. If it is Road and Bridge or whoever’s running graders, there’s a person in command of graders, and they run that branch. There’s a person who’s handling water supply. We don’t have to have one person making 30 phone calls. It’s a little easier span of control for everyone. It spreads out that workload.”
While Seward County currently does not have an emergency manager in place, Steckel said this is not the answer to the problem either.
“He can help facilitate this, but we can’t base a system off of one person,” he said. “When that person’s not here, our system’s going to fail. It takes a working effort from everyone to get all these things place that it just automatically flows that we’re bridging those gaps, and this doesn’t have to be a fire event.”
Steckel said plans likewise need to be in place during other emergencies such as tornadoes happen.
“We’re already prepared and people are ready to setup and know how things work,” he said. “We need to form a committee and start hashing out these ideas and get all this feedback from all the departments and bridge those gaps, especially the communication issue. Maybe we can help solve some of those issues.”
Vazquez likewise asked about how the fire department’s recruitment stands at this time.
“How can we better that, and how can we help you in that?” he said.
With the recent resignation of Barkley as fire chief, the Seward County Fire Department is down a position, but he emphasized the department did have four full-time firefighters in place throughout the days of the February fires.
Steckel added volunteers can only get three to four hours of training a year, whereas SCFD’s full-time firefighters get up to 200 hours a year, and volunteers are used in a specific way.
“We train them to do everything,” he said. “They run water supply very well for us, and they work out to be perfect partner for us. The long standing issue with volunteers has been I cannot force a volunteer to come to a call at 2:30 in the morning. I can force a full-time guy to do that. We’ve had 30 volunteers before, and that doesn’t mean we had 30 people come to the fire. I have a couple volunteers right now who will drop everything.”
While volunteer work is typically thought of as free, Steckel said volunteer firefighters do cost money.
“It’s just not a free issue. It’s a complex thing we need to solve,” he said. “It’s a complex situation asking someone to put their life on the line for hardly any pay. It’s not for everybody.”
Steckel, however, did praise the work of the volunteers who did help out with the recent fires.
“They saved Liberal, and I’m super proud of them,” he said.
Steckel added even if with a good supply of volunteers, the county is still limited on how many trucks they have to fight fires.
“It’s not like we can have trucks in every single spot,” he said. “It is a complex issue. Over the years that’s been brought up. What if you have more volunteers? It goes deeper than that.”
Vazquez then asked how a command center is created.
“Is there any way we can improve that process?” he said. “What does that look like?”
Sheriff Gene Ward said any officials with the Local Emergency Planning Committee, an emergency manager, emergency preparedness officials or emergency services department heads can call for a command center.
“Many times, whenever we get on scene, we just announce on the radio we’re setting up river bottom command, or the fire department would say that,” he said. “Then we’d say a location and everybody who was in charge at that time. It doesn’t even have to be me at the sheriff’s office. It could be any of my deputies who show up to that command center until we get there.”
As emergency officials became heavily involved in helping with the fires, Ward said this did not allow for time for a command center to be set up.
“I didn’t even think about it truly, and I don’t think anybody else did,” he said. “We do train many hours on setting up a command center, and we were just so busy of thinking Liberal’s going to burn and we need to get people out of the way from the fire.”
