Marshall County Emergency Management Agency Director Clyde Avery told the county commissioners this week that he was successful in obtaining two grants.
“We did receive the grant agreement that has been signed and returned to the state so we’re waiting for their signatures and then we’ll have fully executed agreements for both the EMPG competitive grant, which is a $5,000 grant we’re going to use to conduct the table top exercise next year,” said Avery. “We also received the $3,000 grant that we will be using to provide ICS 300 and ICS 400 classes for the county.”
The ICS 300 course provides training for personnel to gain knowledge on how to implement the incident management process on a simulated incident and develop an incident action plan for a simulated incident. The ICS 400 course helps personnel understand how major incidents cause special management challenges and why Area Command and Multi-Agency Coordination Systems are established.
Avery also that due to this year’s assessment, the county comprehensive strategic plan needs to be updated. It will include a response phase of emergency management as agreed upon last year.
“We’ll be looking at trying to develop a volunteer reception area in the event that we have something happen up here and we have a lot of volunteers that come in to provide assistance. We’ll be able to track those folks so that we can use those people in the best way possible and be able to obtain credit for their work hours to put toward what we need to have as part of the FEMA requirement. The other piece of that would be to develop a donations management plan as well.”
Avery added that he will continue with the development of a 501(C)(3) organization. He thinks that it would be a great asset for the county. The organization would raise funds to help those people in need of disaster assistance who were not otherwise properly covered under insurance and who do not fall under government assistance.
