October 10, 2024 • 16 mins
This Team Rubicon worker talks about where to start when it comes to providing relief after a hurricane.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Scott Vordies rescue workers who'd kind of set up a
home base at Tropicana Field Baseball Stadium in Saint Petersburg.
That's Tampa Bay Area, that's the home of the Tampa
Bay Rays Major League baseball team, because this weekend storm
still tore the roof off the SUCA, as a seventies
(00:21):
funk band might say, wins toppled a massive construction crane
in downtown Saint Petersburg that fell onto a building nearby
that houses the offices of the Tampa Bay Times newspaper.
And we're looking at some areas in the path of
Hurricane Milton getting up to eighteen inches of rain. It's
(00:43):
been raining for the last two weeks down there. I
mean it rains in Florida a lot, but the rains
from Hurricane Helene and now Hurricane Milton are such that
an already saturated areas, there's no place for this water
to go. And so people were told you need to leave,
a lot of people stayed, and we're still assessing what
(01:05):
all of that looks like here as the sun's been
up now for a couple of hours and no power
in Florida. Good morning, Scott, Vorhees here with you on
Nebraska's news, weather and traffic station. This is news Radio
eleven ten KFAB. I want to welcome on to the
program now someone who has worked in recovery efforts, relief
(01:26):
efforts when it comes to the wake of devastation like hurricanes.
She's now here in Omaha's the director of Emergency Management
for UNMC and UNO, Diane Mack. Welcome to eleven ten kfab.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Good morning, Thank you, Good morning.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
You've been on the scene where a hurricane has reaked
devastation across a huge swath of area. Now we know
here in Omaha a tornado comes through there and tears
up a neighborhood. It's horrible. There's so much to do
in terms of cleanup. But comparing that to the size
of a a wake of devastation after a hurricane, it's
(02:02):
not even close. Where do you even begin, you.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Know, it's it's the same old adage that they always
use of how do you eat an elephant? It's it's
one bite at a time. Focus on your priorities, you know,
firstus the people taking care of the people, making sure
that life safety is addressed, and that you're rescuing those
who need to be rescued, taking care of those who
are injured or otherwise, you know, we're unable to leave potentially,
(02:31):
So it's taking a look at, you know, what do
we need to do in terms of how do we
get to them, how do we take care of them,
and then how do we move on forward from there?
For any incident that we respond to, we have the
life safety. Uh well, I guess priorities overall for the response.
First of all, it's life safety, and then once that's
(02:52):
taken care of, then you get into incident stabilization, so
not letting it get worse, and then property preservation is
a kind of distant third, and that's when you start
getting into the recovery part. So right now they're they're
just starting on the life safety part. And you know,
even Helene, they're still in a lot of areas they're
(03:13):
still in that phase of the life safety and getting
folks in there so that they can you know, the
rescue teams they can get people out, those who are
trapped in their houses and sort of that sort of thing.
So it's you know, we've seen a lot of disasters
here in Omaha that are you know, when you add
them all together, they are on that par with a hurricane,
(03:36):
and for this area, so you know the floods at
twenty nineteen and then July thirty first, just of this year,
we had a lot of damage, especially in the Omaha
area for you know, wind damage. So you know, kind
of add all that together, and then you know, across
maybe even a larger space, you have a lot of
different teams that can address these different pieces and start
(03:58):
getting those operations back to normal. That's kind of the
goal is to get back to normal, but you know,
the landscape may be changed a little bit, but we'll
get there after some time.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Yeah. Well, the first part component of all of this,
especially for a hurricane, is the local whether it's law enforcement,
emergency management types, political figures telling people if you live
in this area, you need to evacuate, and a lot
of people don't evacuate. How frustrating is that for emergency
(04:29):
responders when they come in there and they find people
dead who should have left.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Yeah, you know, as much as we want folks to
trust that message, there are still some that are going
to say, hey, you know, I've been here for thirty years,
nothing's happened yet, so why would I need to leave now.
But you know, the government, the emergency managers, the people
who are making those calls are making those in your
(04:55):
best interest. And that's something that we want to make
sure that you know, if this were to ever happen
in the Omaha area, that you know, if we make
calls for someone to leave or to stay or whatever
the direction is, that is based on science. It's based
on what we know about the situation. Because we all
get together, we share that information so we have the
(05:16):
best information available and those are our pieces that you know.
We're doing that for folks, their safety, for their life, safety,
for even the future, because it may not be something
that folks can see immediately, and you know, it's something
if we a lot of folks won't believe it unless
(05:38):
they can see it, they can taste it, they can
feel it, touch it, that kind of thing. And that's
if something is coming down the road. There are folks
in emergency operations centers who will make that call and
we ask that that folks will believe that because that's
coming from a good place. It's coming from a place
of protection that we want to make sure that that
(05:58):
folks are taking care of.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Thank God that this category five hurricane as it was
bearing down on Florida, weakened to only a category three.
Now only a category three. Those are wins akin to
what we've seen here in the straight line win events,
microbursta ratio, call them what you will across Nebraska, and
we've seen the devastation that it can do. But the
(06:21):
bad side of that, if you can find one, and
I can always find a dark cloud in a sunny day, Diane,
But the dark side of that is that people were
told for several days, this is going to be an
historic storm and you won't survive it. Well, then it
weakened and so the people who stayed or like see
it wasn't as bad as they said. They don't know
what they're talking about, which means that somewhere down the
(06:43):
road there is going to be a major storm and
they're not going to heed the warning, right And.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
We just want to make sure that if it were
to ever happen here that you know, folks understand that
when we are making those calls, it's not lightly so
we're not just saying hey, leave because we just want
you out of your house to incurluding know that's that's
never going to be the place where that that direction
(07:12):
comes from. It's going to be we are concerned for you,
we want to take care of you. And so Florida,
the responders are going to go in, they know that
this is going to happen, are going to go respond anyway,
which you know, we want to make sure that we're
not putting them in danger anymore than we have to. Uh.
But you know, I think there's there's a lot of
(07:36):
distrust out there, and I want to make sure that
you know, first of all, the people don't believe everything
you see on the internet. You know, there's there's kind
of a halfway middle right there between you know, believing
things immediately and and and verifying trust but verifying. And
so we're already seeing some of the misinformation out there
from the general population on the internet about the storm
(07:58):
last night. Even so, so you know, make sure you're
verifying it, but then trust in that information from official sources.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Talking to here with Diane Mack, who is currently the
director of Emergency Management at UNO and un MC. But Diane,
when you've responded in the wake of for example, hurricanes,
in what capacity did you do that, who did you
work with and where were you on the scene for
some of these big storms we've talked about over the years. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Sure. So in addition to my day job with the
un MC and UNO, I'm also the incident commander of
a couple of different teams. One is through Team Rubicon,
where we go in and respond after big disasters such
as these. But then in my past have also been
the incident commander of the State of Indiana. I just
(08:47):
moved here a few years ago, State of Indiana's Incident
Management Team, and so through that, I was the incident
commander of a team that went out to Hurricane Sandy,
which actually wasn't even a hurricane, and it caused that
much devastation and Irma and Florida. You know, there have
been a number of them, some in southern Louisiana. So
you know, I've led teams out there and and we
(09:10):
there are some really good hearts out there, some folks that, uh,
you know, are just impacted by the storms. And you
never know these storms whether they're going to meet more wind,
more rain, more surge. The tornadoes uh that that are
that accompany hurricanes. You know, there's all kinds of damage
(09:31):
all over the place, and different storms carry different hazards,
but we're all hazards teams. We go into to address
the situation and try to bring that framework to put
around the chaos and make it a little better for
the folks who have been impacted at the end of
the day.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
I you know, you see some of these TV shows
where you've got all these young, attractive, strong people that
go out there and they're fighting in the wake of
emergencies or wildfires or whatever. It's my understanding that you
guys with Team Rubicon make those guys look like the
rock Cats. Team Rubicon is just an awesome organization of
(10:10):
people just taking it upon themselves to see what they
can do to help. How do you end up being
a part of Team Rubicon? Do you have to go
out in the woods for three months and like become
one with the wolves? How does that work?
Speaker 2 (10:24):
I love that that's the perception. So we are a
team of seventy five percent veterans. So the purpose behind
Team Rubicon is a veteran led disaster response organization is
to you know, the original purpose of to provide a mission,
a purpose for veterans who have you know, done their time,
done their service and still want to contribute. But Now
(10:47):
we have civilians as well in this team. I'm one
of those civilians, and we we partner up and we
go and we provide that that framework that team, and
you know, everybody's trained the same way in the military, right,
so it's it's easy to kind of put that in
the incident command structure that is used for disaster response
and to to move forward as a team since everybody's
(11:09):
familiar with that framework, and we welcome anybody in there. Uh,
Team RUBICONUSA dot org always welcoming anybody who wants to
come and join us. Go and get dirty, you know,
we go and tarp roofs, will knuck out houses that
have been flooded. Uh. We have sawyer teams that go
out and take care of trees that are across roads
(11:30):
or on houses. We have a lot of folks who
just like to pitch in and help out. Even if
mobility is somewhat of a challenge. We will will take
a lot of folks. We need, you know, some of
the command staff back in the Emergency Operations Center to
help guide everybody that's that's out on the ground. We
have a lot of teams in North Carolina and and Georgia,
(11:53):
right now and we're expanding into Florida. So we're, you know, unfortunate.
We're always looking for disasters. We don't like how it
affects other people, and we would rather be part of
that solution to go and help address it.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
So having having been a part of the relief efforts
in situations like this and working with an organization like
Team Rubikan, how much do you work in partnership with
the Federal Emergency Management Agency FEMA or in some cases
a National Guard and some of these other organizations that
are obviously getting some attention both good and bad in
(12:31):
the wake of disaster. Some people are saying they didn't
do enough. Some people are saying they're doing a great job.
Some people are saying we haven't heard from them and
we wish we could get more communication. What is that
level of communication like between your organization and what you've
seen in the wake of some of these storms.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Yeah, we work very closely with local, state and federal government.
Tim Urbakan has a seat in the National in the
FEMA's operations center. In each state we try we will
work with each of the state governments and their operations centers,
and then even on the county level, getting that that
(13:11):
really key information of where to go, what areas are
worst hit, and making sure that we're getting that information
from them, but them, we're also feeding that information back
to them so that they know which areas have been addressed.
And so we we have those close partners. There are
a lot of rumors of folks that haven't been you
(13:33):
know that I've heard this square's FEMA. How do we
get help? And quite frankly, some of these areas are
just almost impossible to get to, and so they've been
very creative, especially in the North Carolina area, with how
to get to folks using mule teams, using helicopters, civilian helicopters,
and it's a lot to manage, and they're doing the
(13:54):
best that they can.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Last question here for you, Diane, how do you and
your fellow your fellow responders keep safe in this situation,
because in order to be there moments after the storm hits,
you've got to be there when the storm hits, or
at least so close that you're in danger. I mentioned
earlier the roof ripped off of Tropicana Baseball Stadium in
(14:19):
Saint Petersburg. That's where a lot of first responders a
kind of set up as a safe home base and
they look up and they're like, hey, there's the sky
that wasn't there a minute ago, So how do you
guys stay safe?
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Safety is absolutely number one issue for first responders, just
very much like airlines. If you're not if you don't
take care of yourself first, you won't be able to
take care of anybody else. So we want to make
sure that we are our responders are safe, regardless of
whether they're federal, state, local, civilian volunteer teams, whatever it is.
(14:53):
Safety is absolutely the number one issue, and so we
try and mitigate those safety issues as much as we can.
We will make calls sometimes to not go into certain
areas until it is safe enough for the responders to
go in there. In terms of the sheltering, taking the
best shelter you can, they tried, they did. They tried
(15:14):
to get set a shelter up in advance because they
knew the thousands and thousands of lignemen that would be
coming in and it was a great idea. And you
just you know, as we saw, sometimes you run into
hiccups with the execution, but you know they'll they'll adapt
and move on, they'll find another facility or several of them.
(15:35):
We at UNO, we were able to provide a base
camp during the July thirty first storm response. We provided
a base camp for all of the linemen coming in
for I mean, I think there were several hundred of
them that came in to help restore the power in
the home Omaha area. And so it's sometimes you get creative,
(15:56):
sometimes you just have to roll with the punches. But
certainly safe, he's always the number one issue.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Diane Mac, director of Emergency Management at UNO and un
MC and part of Team Rubicon as well that have
been out in the wake of these disasters like what
we've seen here in Florida in North Carolina these past
couple weeks. Diane, very interesting conversation. Thank you so much
for everything you've done, and thank you very much for
sharing that with us this morning.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
I can only imagine how much your mom is worried
about you over the years.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
That she has well, especially when I'm the one who
said you really need to get out of Florida. She's
in the Cocoa area. So this one's going to be
a monster, and I'm glad she did, because the power's
out there, all right.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
It's a heck of a mess, Diane, thank you very
much for the time. Thank you. Scott Boy Mornings nine
to eleven, Our News Radio eleven ten KFAB
Scott Vordies rescue workers who'd kind of set up a
home base at Tropicana Field Baseball Stadium in Saint Petersburg.
That's Tampa Bay Area, that's the home of the Tampa
Bay Rays Major League baseball team, because this weekend storm
still tore the roof off the SUCA, as a seventies
(00:21):
funk band might say, wins toppled a massive construction crane
in downtown Saint Petersburg that fell onto a building nearby
that houses the offices of the Tampa Bay Times newspaper.
And we're looking at some areas in the path of
Hurricane Milton getting up to eighteen inches of rain. It's
(00:43):
been raining for the last two weeks down there. I
mean it rains in Florida a lot, but the rains
from Hurricane Helene and now Hurricane Milton are such that
an already saturated areas, there's no place for this water
to go. And so people were told you need to leave,
a lot of people stayed, and we're still assessing what
(01:05):
all of that looks like here as the sun's been
up now for a couple of hours and no power
in Florida. Good morning, Scott, Vorhees here with you on
Nebraska's news, weather and traffic station. This is news Radio
eleven ten KFAB. I want to welcome on to the
program now someone who has worked in recovery efforts, relief
(01:26):
efforts when it comes to the wake of devastation like hurricanes.
She's now here in Omaha's the director of Emergency Management
for UNMC and UNO, Diane Mack. Welcome to eleven ten kfab.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Good morning, Thank you, Good morning.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
You've been on the scene where a hurricane has reaked
devastation across a huge swath of area. Now we know
here in Omaha a tornado comes through there and tears
up a neighborhood. It's horrible. There's so much to do
in terms of cleanup. But comparing that to the size
of a a wake of devastation after a hurricane, it's
(02:02):
not even close. Where do you even begin, you.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Know, it's it's the same old adage that they always
use of how do you eat an elephant? It's it's
one bite at a time. Focus on your priorities, you know,
firstus the people taking care of the people, making sure
that life safety is addressed, and that you're rescuing those
who need to be rescued, taking care of those who
are injured or otherwise, you know, we're unable to leave potentially,
(02:31):
So it's taking a look at, you know, what do
we need to do in terms of how do we
get to them, how do we take care of them,
and then how do we move on forward from there?
For any incident that we respond to, we have the
life safety. Uh well, I guess priorities overall for the response.
First of all, it's life safety, and then once that's
(02:52):
taken care of, then you get into incident stabilization, so
not letting it get worse, and then property preservation is
a kind of distant third, and that's when you start
getting into the recovery part. So right now they're they're
just starting on the life safety part. And you know,
even Helene, they're still in a lot of areas they're
(03:13):
still in that phase of the life safety and getting
folks in there so that they can you know, the
rescue teams they can get people out, those who are
trapped in their houses and sort of that sort of thing.
So it's you know, we've seen a lot of disasters
here in Omaha that are you know, when you add
them all together, they are on that par with a hurricane,
(03:36):
and for this area, so you know the floods at
twenty nineteen and then July thirty first, just of this year,
we had a lot of damage, especially in the Omaha
area for you know, wind damage. So you know, kind
of add all that together, and then you know, across
maybe even a larger space, you have a lot of
different teams that can address these different pieces and start
(03:58):
getting those operations back to normal. That's kind of the
goal is to get back to normal, but you know,
the landscape may be changed a little bit, but we'll
get there after some time.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Yeah. Well, the first part component of all of this,
especially for a hurricane, is the local whether it's law enforcement,
emergency management types, political figures telling people if you live
in this area, you need to evacuate, and a lot
of people don't evacuate. How frustrating is that for emergency
(04:29):
responders when they come in there and they find people
dead who should have left.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Yeah, you know, as much as we want folks to
trust that message, there are still some that are going
to say, hey, you know, I've been here for thirty years,
nothing's happened yet, so why would I need to leave now.
But you know, the government, the emergency managers, the people
who are making those calls are making those in your
(04:55):
best interest. And that's something that we want to make
sure that you know, if this were to ever happen
in the Omaha area, that you know, if we make
calls for someone to leave or to stay or whatever
the direction is, that is based on science. It's based
on what we know about the situation. Because we all
get together, we share that information so we have the
(05:16):
best information available and those are our pieces that you know.
We're doing that for folks, their safety, for their life, safety,
for even the future, because it may not be something
that folks can see immediately, and you know, it's something
if we a lot of folks won't believe it unless
(05:38):
they can see it, they can taste it, they can
feel it, touch it, that kind of thing. And that's
if something is coming down the road. There are folks
in emergency operations centers who will make that call and
we ask that that folks will believe that because that's
coming from a good place. It's coming from a place
of protection that we want to make sure that that
(05:58):
folks are taking care of.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Thank God that this category five hurricane as it was
bearing down on Florida, weakened to only a category three.
Now only a category three. Those are wins akin to
what we've seen here in the straight line win events,
microbursta ratio, call them what you will across Nebraska, and
we've seen the devastation that it can do. But the
(06:21):
bad side of that, if you can find one, and
I can always find a dark cloud in a sunny day, Diane,
But the dark side of that is that people were
told for several days, this is going to be an
historic storm and you won't survive it. Well, then it
weakened and so the people who stayed or like see
it wasn't as bad as they said. They don't know
what they're talking about, which means that somewhere down the
(06:43):
road there is going to be a major storm and
they're not going to heed the warning, right And.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
We just want to make sure that if it were
to ever happen here that you know, folks understand that
when we are making those calls, it's not lightly so
we're not just saying hey, leave because we just want
you out of your house to incurluding know that's that's
never going to be the place where that that direction
(07:12):
comes from. It's going to be we are concerned for you,
we want to take care of you. And so Florida,
the responders are going to go in, they know that
this is going to happen, are going to go respond anyway,
which you know, we want to make sure that we're
not putting them in danger anymore than we have to. Uh.
But you know, I think there's there's a lot of
(07:36):
distrust out there, and I want to make sure that
you know, first of all, the people don't believe everything
you see on the internet. You know, there's there's kind
of a halfway middle right there between you know, believing
things immediately and and and verifying trust but verifying. And
so we're already seeing some of the misinformation out there
from the general population on the internet about the storm
(07:58):
last night. Even so, so you know, make sure you're
verifying it, but then trust in that information from official sources.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Talking to here with Diane Mack, who is currently the
director of Emergency Management at UNO and un MC. But Diane,
when you've responded in the wake of for example, hurricanes,
in what capacity did you do that, who did you
work with and where were you on the scene for
some of these big storms we've talked about over the years. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Sure. So in addition to my day job with the
un MC and UNO, I'm also the incident commander of
a couple of different teams. One is through Team Rubicon,
where we go in and respond after big disasters such
as these. But then in my past have also been
the incident commander of the State of Indiana. I just
(08:47):
moved here a few years ago, State of Indiana's Incident
Management Team, and so through that, I was the incident
commander of a team that went out to Hurricane Sandy,
which actually wasn't even a hurricane, and it caused that
much devastation and Irma and Florida. You know, there have
been a number of them, some in southern Louisiana. So
you know, I've led teams out there and and we
(09:10):
there are some really good hearts out there, some folks that, uh,
you know, are just impacted by the storms. And you
never know these storms whether they're going to meet more wind,
more rain, more surge. The tornadoes uh that that are
that accompany hurricanes. You know, there's all kinds of damage
(09:31):
all over the place, and different storms carry different hazards,
but we're all hazards teams. We go into to address
the situation and try to bring that framework to put
around the chaos and make it a little better for
the folks who have been impacted at the end of
the day.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
I you know, you see some of these TV shows
where you've got all these young, attractive, strong people that
go out there and they're fighting in the wake of
emergencies or wildfires or whatever. It's my understanding that you
guys with Team Rubicon make those guys look like the
rock Cats. Team Rubicon is just an awesome organization of
(10:10):
people just taking it upon themselves to see what they
can do to help. How do you end up being
a part of Team Rubicon? Do you have to go
out in the woods for three months and like become
one with the wolves? How does that work?
Speaker 2 (10:24):
I love that that's the perception. So we are a
team of seventy five percent veterans. So the purpose behind
Team Rubicon is a veteran led disaster response organization is
to you know, the original purpose of to provide a mission,
a purpose for veterans who have you know, done their time,
done their service and still want to contribute. But Now
(10:47):
we have civilians as well in this team. I'm one
of those civilians, and we we partner up and we
go and we provide that that framework that team, and
you know, everybody's trained the same way in the military, right,
so it's it's easy to kind of put that in
the incident command structure that is used for disaster response
and to to move forward as a team since everybody's
(11:09):
familiar with that framework, and we welcome anybody in there. Uh,
Team RUBICONUSA dot org always welcoming anybody who wants to
come and join us. Go and get dirty, you know,
we go and tarp roofs, will knuck out houses that
have been flooded. Uh. We have sawyer teams that go
out and take care of trees that are across roads
(11:30):
or on houses. We have a lot of folks who
just like to pitch in and help out. Even if
mobility is somewhat of a challenge. We will will take
a lot of folks. We need, you know, some of
the command staff back in the Emergency Operations Center to
help guide everybody that's that's out on the ground. We
have a lot of teams in North Carolina and and Georgia,
(11:53):
right now and we're expanding into Florida. So we're, you know, unfortunate.
We're always looking for disasters. We don't like how it
affects other people, and we would rather be part of
that solution to go and help address it.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
So having having been a part of the relief efforts
in situations like this and working with an organization like
Team Rubikan, how much do you work in partnership with
the Federal Emergency Management Agency FEMA or in some cases
a National Guard and some of these other organizations that
are obviously getting some attention both good and bad in
(12:31):
the wake of disaster. Some people are saying they didn't
do enough. Some people are saying they're doing a great job.
Some people are saying we haven't heard from them and
we wish we could get more communication. What is that
level of communication like between your organization and what you've
seen in the wake of some of these storms.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Yeah, we work very closely with local, state and federal government.
Tim Urbakan has a seat in the National in the
FEMA's operations center. In each state we try we will
work with each of the state governments and their operations centers,
and then even on the county level, getting that that
(13:11):
really key information of where to go, what areas are
worst hit, and making sure that we're getting that information
from them, but them, we're also feeding that information back
to them so that they know which areas have been addressed.
And so we we have those close partners. There are
a lot of rumors of folks that haven't been you
(13:33):
know that I've heard this square's FEMA. How do we
get help? And quite frankly, some of these areas are
just almost impossible to get to, and so they've been
very creative, especially in the North Carolina area, with how
to get to folks using mule teams, using helicopters, civilian helicopters,
and it's a lot to manage, and they're doing the
(13:54):
best that they can.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Last question here for you, Diane, how do you and
your fellow your fellow responders keep safe in this situation,
because in order to be there moments after the storm hits,
you've got to be there when the storm hits, or
at least so close that you're in danger. I mentioned
earlier the roof ripped off of Tropicana Baseball Stadium in
(14:19):
Saint Petersburg. That's where a lot of first responders a
kind of set up as a safe home base and
they look up and they're like, hey, there's the sky
that wasn't there a minute ago, So how do you
guys stay safe?
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Safety is absolutely number one issue for first responders, just
very much like airlines. If you're not if you don't
take care of yourself first, you won't be able to
take care of anybody else. So we want to make
sure that we are our responders are safe, regardless of
whether they're federal, state, local, civilian volunteer teams, whatever it is.
(14:53):
Safety is absolutely the number one issue, and so we
try and mitigate those safety issues as much as we can.
We will make calls sometimes to not go into certain
areas until it is safe enough for the responders to
go in there. In terms of the sheltering, taking the
best shelter you can, they tried, they did. They tried
(15:14):
to get set a shelter up in advance because they
knew the thousands and thousands of lignemen that would be
coming in and it was a great idea. And you
just you know, as we saw, sometimes you run into
hiccups with the execution, but you know they'll they'll adapt
and move on, they'll find another facility or several of them.
(15:35):
We at UNO, we were able to provide a base
camp during the July thirty first storm response. We provided
a base camp for all of the linemen coming in
for I mean, I think there were several hundred of
them that came in to help restore the power in
the home Omaha area. And so it's sometimes you get creative,
(15:56):
sometimes you just have to roll with the punches. But
certainly safe, he's always the number one issue.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Diane Mac, director of Emergency Management at UNO and un
MC and part of Team Rubicon as well that have
been out in the wake of these disasters like what
we've seen here in Florida in North Carolina these past
couple weeks. Diane, very interesting conversation. Thank you so much
for everything you've done, and thank you very much for
sharing that with us this morning.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
I can only imagine how much your mom is worried
about you over the years.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
That she has well, especially when I'm the one who
said you really need to get out of Florida. She's
in the Cocoa area. So this one's going to be
a monster, and I'm glad she did, because the power's
out there, all right.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
It's a heck of a mess, Diane, thank you very
much for the time. Thank you. Scott Boy Mornings nine
to eleven, Our News Radio eleven ten KFAB
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