New storage garage, road renaming among improvements
KINGWOOD — The Preston County Office of Emergency Management gave an update to commission members Tuesday.
Preston Emergency Management/911 Assistant Director Justin Wolfe told commissioners a 40-foot-by-60-foot garage was built beside the 911 center to store mobile equipment and disaster supplies as needed.
He said the OEM also assisted with the Rowlesburg Address Project by coordinating with the town of Rowlesburg and WVU GIS Tech Center.
The GIS center hired a vendor with money from a FEMA mitigation grant to readdress the entire town.
This resulted in readdressing 304 structures inside the city limits and deleting approximately 50 addresses issued to structures that were no longer in existence.
OEM also assisted the town in renaming 47 road segments in the Master Street Address Guide and provided the town with five sign posts and hardware to assist with the installation of road signs.
When completed, OEM submitted all of the data for Rowlesburg to Frontier and the U.S. Postal Service for final approval, and assisted the town with suggestions on how to notify all the residents of their new E-911 physical addresses.
The OEM also:
- maintained COVID-19 supplies from local and state inventory for local responder agencies and health care facilities throughout the county.
- completed a 2 million FEMA Assistance to Firefighters Grant (AFG) for the volunteer Fire Departments to replace 12-year-old radios. The new radios, if the grant is successful, will be capable of communication with surrounding states as well as counties within the state that currently do not have the capability of such communications.
- helped set up communications for Southern ambulance service.
- maintains radio and pager programming for all fire, EMS and law enforcement.
- trained squads on the use of Controlled Air Purifying Respirator (CAPR) systems and put four in service.
- added Recommended Units and Response Plan to the CADSystem to assist dispatchers in knowing which units to send in different areas.
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