By: Nick Buglione
The county has opened its new Emergency Operations Center in a lower level of the Nassau County jail, which will coordinate future responses to severe weather threats, natural disasters, power outages or terrorist attacks.
Run by the county s new Office of Emergency Management, the center was unveiled at a press conference last Thursday but has been open for the past two months. It has already tackled its first two emergencies: Hurricane Isabel and the Dec. 5-6 snowstorms.
Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi said that creating an agency to coordinate emergency responses, a responsibility that previously fell on the Nassau County Police Department, has been one of his top priorities since he took office in January 2002. When I first came into office two years ago, emergency management was of course a very big topic on everybody s mind, said Suozzi, who became county executive just months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
While police are a central, key component in emergency management operations, they re only one piece," Suozzi said. "We wanted to make sure that all the different parties that are in emergency management operations would be involved in the process at all times.
Armed with a $100,000 grant from state Sen. Michael Balboni (R-New Hyde Park), the county transformed what had been a jail storage room into an 8,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art emergency command center, equipped with the latest technology.
The county chose to build the Emergency Operations Center in the East Meadow jail because it s a secure, centrally located facility open 24 hours a day, Suozzi said.
What s so key, and I can t stress this enough, is that Washington and Albany are looking for the local commitment toward emergency management in order to direct funds and services, said Balboni, who is chairman of the state Senate Committee on Veterans, Homeland Security and Military Affairs. So when you demonstrate the local commitment in the form of this emergency management center, it is going to bode very well for you receiving funds.
In the event of a future emergency, representatives from more than 50 county agencies and local municipalities -- including the police, fire marshal, department of transportation and department of health -- will converge at the center to coordinate response and relief efforts.
The center comprises 45 to 50 computers, 14 televisions, 200 phone lines, weather radar, military satellite and shortwave radio, through which leaders could potentially communicate with people all over the world.
Its primary feature, however, is a $400,000 cutting-edge software program that will coordinate resource databases, assist in incident action planning and allow electronic messaging with other emergency-management agencies.
Though Hurricane Isabel and the early-December snowstorms marked the first two challenges the center faced, it has held mock-emergency drills for more serious situations. There was a chemical spill exercise at SUNY Farmingdale last May 20 and a Long Island Rail Road dirty bomb drill on Oct. 7.
You re supposed to have an entity in any type of government, whether it s the city, county or state, that does preparation for any major event or disaster, said Richard Rotanz, who s the new commissioner of the county s Office of Emergency Management and heads the center.
Rotanz is the former deputy director of New York City s Office of Emergency Management, and has a resume boasting extensive work during and after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The Emergency Operations Center will be manned by a staff of 10 to 15 people at all times and cost approximately $1 million a year to run, Rotanz said.
The Office of Emergency Management will also actively seek grants to fund operations and recover money that is spent in federally declared disasters. The team has already collected $875,000 in funds, which includes an extra $75,000 grant Balboni kicked in, and has retrieved $4.5 million of county money spent during the February 2003 blizzard and $1.5 million for the August blackout.
We ve always had great assets here in Nassau County, as far as emergency management goes, Suozzi said. We just want to make sure we do the best job we possibly can in coordinating those resources together.
