Missoula Emergency Team Sent to Help with Hurricane Ian
Missoula, MT (KGVO - AM News) - We just got an exclusive interview with the Missoula County Emergency Team as they were headed out of Atlanta to Tallahassee to help with the response to Hurricane Ian as it slams into Florida.
Public Information Officer with the Missoula County All-Hazards Incident Management Team, Nick Holloway spoke to us as they were preparing to drive to Florida.
Florida Reaches out to Missoula for Help
“Florida put out a request for teams to come down and they requested our team to come down and help out with the hurricane,” began Holloway. “We had a Florida person up here during the Yellowstone floods and so we've been in contact with her. We've landed in Atlanta and we're about to jump in cars short and move towards Tallahassee.”
The Missoula team is no stranger to facing emergency situations. Holloway said they could be sent just about anywhere in Florida to help with hurricane response.
Missoula Team to Coordinate Recovery Activities
“We're going to start out in the Florida State Emergency Operations Center,” he said. “We don't know what our mission is going to be yet. But we very well could be positioned in a forward base so that we can operate out of there. We could be coordinating other teams, sending them to certain places. We really don't know what we're going to do. We could be working in an EOC, that’s an Emergency Operations Center in a county that has been impacted by the storm. That's what we did during Hurricane Michael. We could be doing just about anything, Peter, but in any case, it's going to be coordinating recovery activities.”
Holloway said the Missoula group is an ‘all-hazards’ team, meaning they could be sent anywhere in the affected areas in Florida.
“Well, we've done it before,” he said. “We're an all hazards team. So we do Incident Command training. And that's really a training that is applicable to any situation with the Incident Command System. One of the virtues is that it translates from wildfire to flooding to hurricanes, to even planned events like presidential inaugurations.”
Signing off, Holloway told KGVO that Hurricane Ian was scheduled to make landfall as we were speaking, and cut the call short.
Missoula Team Driving into the Storm
“I believe landfall is occurring right now down near Punta Gorda, at least that's what I saw in the news,” he said. “There's no telling, Peter what we're going to do, but we will go to that state emergency operations center and find out what our mission is and go from there.”
The Missoula County All-Hazards Incident Management Team also helped to coordinate rescue and recovery operations during the massive flooding that occurred in June at Yellowstone National Park.