This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

Volunteer Disaster Assistance Teams Respond to Northern Illinois

The Emergency Management Assistant Team of the Illinois Emergency Services Management Association has been deployed to McHenry Co. to assist with response/recovery efforts from the recent flooding.

The Emergency Management Assistant Team (EMAT) of the Illinois Emergency Services Management Association (IESMA) has been deployed to McHenry County to assist with response/recovery efforts from the recent storms and subsequent flooding.

The deployed EMAT members are assisting the McHenry County Emergency Management Agency and local authorities in damage assessment which includes assessing individual residences and businesses and determining the level of flooding damage to those buildings, including structural damage. Once the assessments have been completed, all of the data is compiled and then forwarded to the Illinois Emergency Management Agency.

“IESMA and its members are here to help provide emergency management assistance to any jurisdiction when a disaster strikes. This includes responding to incidents such as the flooding here in the northern part of Illinois,” stated IESMA Past President and Palatine EMA Coordinator Tom Smith. Smith, the current IESMA Region 4 Vice President and a member of the EMAT. He further added that the EMAT has recently responded to the Harrisburg Tornado in 2012 and the Southern Illinois Flooding in 2011.

Find out what's happening in Palatinewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Instituted in 2003, the EMAT is equipped with the necessary interoperable communications, information technology equipment and Mobile Emergency Operations Centers that can augment or stand as a temporary Emergency Operations Center if necessary. All IESMA assets, including the EMAT are dispatched and tracked from the association’s 24-hour dispatch center EM-COM, which is located in Logan County, Illinois.

IESMA membership is comprised of professional emergency managers, emergency management staff and private sector partners from throughout the State of Illinois. As the voice of local emergency management, IESMA serves as the conduit from local to state and federal agencies. IESMA utilizes a collaborative platform to enhance the emergency management profession through mutual aid services, public relations and professional standards.

Find out what's happening in Palatinewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

"Our goal is to lessen the impact of managing a disaster that often falls to a part time emergency manager, Smith offered. "With personnel and resources becoming more difficult to obtain, our team of volunteer professional emergency managers become a force multiplier." 

IESMA has represented local emergency management in many areas, including through the Illinois Terrorism Task Force Emergency Management Committee that has procured over nine million dollars to enhance and support emergency management programs such as the Interoperable Tactical Emergency Communications Systems (ITECS), Emergency Operations Center Technology grants, weather radios and the purchase and deployment of emergency power generator caches located throughout the State of Illinois

For more information contact:David H. Searby, Jr., IPEM, CEM(618) 571-0020 or email iesmanews@gmail.com 

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?