By JAN McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
Two citizens asked Bowling Green City Council Monday evening to plan now for climate emergencies in order to protect people, property and critical infrastructure in the future.
Jim Evans and Katelyn Elliott both stressed the need for the city to establish resiliency centers that can serve as cooling or warming facilities, evacuation centers, and distribution areas for emergency needs.
Since the city is in the midst of planning for two new fire stations and major renovations to the police station, now is the time to address possible resiliency center accommodations, Evans said.
“The use of public buildings as resiliency centers is a national trend in the face of the accelerating climate crisis,” he said. “This role needs to be addressed and acted upon during the design phase for these buildings.”
Evans, who helped author the “Bowling Green Climate Action & Resiliency Improvement Plan” for the city, noted the plan addressed the fire and police stations’ roles in hazard mitigation, such as:
- The buildings should have safe rooms that are structurally competent to act as tornado shelters, protecting critical first responder personnel.
- The buildings should be designed to assume future roles as resiliency centers. This means during a heat wave the buildings could serve as cooling centers, or during a winter storm the buildings could serve as warming centers, or in the aftermath of a flood or tornado the buildings could serve as evacuation centers.
- To fulfill these possible future roles, the buildings need to have backup power and water supplies; be capable of storing, preparing and distributing food and water; be capable of providing shelter and basic-level medical care to displaced residents; and have redundant methods of communication.
- To remain in operation, the buildings should be flood proofed. This means ensuring the structures and utility connections are above projected flood elevations, ensuring furnaces, hot water heaters, and other tanks are secured; installing flood shields (heavy screens) over windows and installing bulkhead doors to prevent flood debris from breaching the building structure; and installing sumps and sump pumps as needed.
Evans also noted that Bowling Green is particularly vulnerable to tornadoes.
“If a tornado proceeded west to east down Wooster Street, as one actually did on Easter morning of 1920, it could destroy the police station, both fire stations, the hospital, the city building, and county buildings,” he said. “At least one of the new fire stations should be located “off-axis” from this threat.”
That building should contain a specialized communication facility that could serve as an alternative command center for city operations, Evans added.
Evans also spoke of the education phase that needs to accompany mitigation strategies.
“The public needs to know, well in advance, which buildings serve as resiliency centers, and what to do and where to go in a crisis,” he said. In the case of a power failure during a heat wave, people could die within hours, he added.
“People don’t panic because they have too much information. They panic because they do not have enough information,” Evans said.
Elliott, a member of the BG Climate Action Network, echoed the need to plan ahead for resiliency centers, noting the more frequent occurrences of extreme heat and cold.
“We should be prepared to face those challenges here,” she said.
It is more cost effective to make plans as buildings are being designed, then to retrofit them later, Elliott said.
“The time for action is now,” she said. “Lives may depend on it.”
City Council member Jeff Dennis asked if resiliency centers are part of the discussion in the new fire station designs.
Mayor Mike Aspacher explained, “We are still in the early stages of designing.”
But as of now, the city is not planning either station to be an “official resiliency center,” he said.
“Those buildings aren’t big enough to accommodate large groups of people,” Aspacher said.
However, the city is looking at support services that could be planned for at the new stations, he added.
Aspacher also pointed out that the city has partnered with the Wood County Emergency Management Agency to use the city’s community center in response to disasters. The facility has been used after fires or during gas leak evacuations, he said.
