Crow Wing County & FEMA Hold Emergency Management Exercise

FEMA recently teamed up with Crow Wing County officials to put on a tabletop exercise, where they went over plans and procedures in case of a disaster.

Officials at the local, state, and federal levels met at the Crow Wing County Land Services building on Thursday morning to participate in the emergency management exercise.

“We’ve been working with the FEMA’s National Exercise Division, and we initially applied for a grant to get them to assist and exercise support,” explained Clayton Barg, Crow Wing County Emergency Management Director. “So we’re doing a tabletop exercise for a derecho, or severe wind storm event, that they’ve been helping us with over the course of the past 12 months.”

Participants shared how their own organizations prepare and react to emergencies.

“[We’re] looking at what resources are required to respond to an incident of this magnitude and trying to get all those stakeholders and all those players kind of sit around the table ahead of time before the actual incident occurs to allow us to kind of walk through some of the challenges that might occur,” said Barg.

Bemidji Fire Chief Justin Sherwood joined in on the conversation to share how his team reacted to the derecho wind storm that happened in the Bemidji area just a few months ago.

“We all think, ‘Oh, that’s not going to happen to me,’ or, ‘I’ll get to that tomorrow,'” said Sherwood. “That’s what we call in the fire service ‘normalizing deviance,’ meaning, ‘I got away with it today. I’ll get away with it tomorrow.’ But like Bemidji encountered, it catches you. [We’re working on] preparation, [building] meaningful relationships. But then identifying long-term effects like, well, again, like what Bemidji is going through now. We’re three months into this thing. And while the emergency has gone, there are other people in a different type of emergency, so we have to think about the long-term recovery effort.”

Officials want to express to members of the community that it is not if, but when another disaster will affect the area, and that full cooperation at exercises like these will help the community be prepared for whatever lies ahead.

“Have peace of mind knowing that city officials, elected officials—but not just at the local level, we’re at the national level here today—are working on an event specifically to the Brainerd area, or Breezy Point, or Pequot [Lakes], or Bemidji,” Sherwood emphasized.

Thursday’s meeting was the first tabletop exercise that Crow Wing County officials have held with FEMA to prepare for major disasters.