MOUNT VERNON — The reunification plan for Knox County is fluid. It’s also urgent due to unpredictability of an emergency’s timeframe.
A reunification plan is a coordinated effort for an institution if an emergency were to occur. The one Knox County Emergency Management Director J.T. DeChant is focused on is for Knox County’s local schools.
Several prominent community leaders are involved in the reunification plan process. The list includes county and city-wide law enforcement agencies, school superintendents, parents, teachers and government officials. Everyone needs to be on the same page, which requires coordination, determination and countless hours of training, DeChant said.
“Everybody’s gotta buy in and say, ‘Yes, we, we will,’ or ‘We can do that,’ ” DeChant said. “You may task somebody with something that they physically can’t do. You put somebody in charge of traffic control, say it’s in a village and you say your department’s gonna be in charge of the traffic control. Well, we only have three officers and there are 18 roadways around that reunification site. We can’t do that. So you gotta go back to the drawing board and figure that out.”
The goal of reunification is to have all survivors get back to one central location and reunite with their families. It’s getting everyone back to a sense of normalcy, DeChant said.
It doesn’t end once everyone is reconnected, either, DeChant said. It’s the steps afterward such as checking in on everyone’s mental-health status, and counseling after a horrific event like a mass shooting or bleachers collapsing at a county fair injuring several fairgoers. It’s having a crisis management team alerted and on standby.
“You have to have input from everybody,” DeChant said. “It depends on where the situation happens. American Red Cross, the community emergency response team, everybody’s a major player at that table.”
Reunification plans for county school districts may take six to eight months to complete, DeChant said, due to making sure everyone is on the same page.
“Maybe have a drill or exercise and talk those things through and see what worked, what didn’t work, what we need to change, what we need to update,” he said.
It’s also reaching out to locations asking an owner if the school district could use the property if an emergency were to occur.
If the reunification plan is fluid in nature, there are annual to bi-annual reviews to see if anything needs to be changed.
“Do they have the ability to have an extra laptop computer that has all the names of their students and participants in an event so they can check that off and make sure everybody’s present?” DeChant asked. “Do they have the ability to pay for signage? Because obviously, you have to direct folks in what way to go where you can’t just–here’s a room. Go get your child or whatever and leave.
“No. They have to get through the process or you have to have people, you have to have resources.”
A wide array of communication devices would be used for reunification such as radios, cellphones and emails. One reason behind the intense care put toward communication is patient tracking.
If local EMS and the area hospital already have patient tracking software that they use, if somebody’s transported from where the emergency or incident took place and they’re not at the reunification point, the tracking software would be able to locate a person.
“How many times have we heard, ‘They were transferred to this hospital’ and then you call that hospital and find out no, they went somewhere else? So, you have to have the ability to have real-time communication at all levels,” DeChant said.
Each school has its own emergency operations plan, DeChant said, and reunification is a small part of that.
DeChant said Knox County will review this aspect, especially after the SWAT incident in Licking Valley.
