‘I’m not going to be letting my guard down at all’

Once each month, the Jefferson County Local Emergency Planning Committee comes together, rotating between locations in Whitehall, Boulder, and Montana City. The agenda is nearly the same at every meeting – parsing the details of one section or another of the county’s Emergency Operations Plan.

That document, required by law, is comprised of over 400 pages. It lays out four phases of activity – mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery – and lays out a framework for each phase. It provides an organizational structure and describes roles and responsibilities for incident command. And it articulates the core priorities in any response: people’s health and safety; protection of critical civic facilities like fire stations and radio towers; and preservation of infrastructure such as roads and utility equipment.

And that’s before you get to the annexes prescribing activities for more specific challenges such as evacuation, damage assessment, and animal care.