City of Des Plaines的动态

Transcript

Hello Des Plaines and welcome back to The Hot Seat. We're here again today for the ultimate Des Plaines Spicy Food challenge, where we ask burning questions about City operations. Let's see who we have in the hot seat. Today we have Patrick Tennant of our Fire and Emergency Services Department. Hi. Hello. How are you? I'm doing great. Are you excited? So excited. Be honest. How do you feel? I'm a little anxious about this sauce. Well, I just want the sauce. It'll be great. I'm right here with you, man. You got. This. The burning questions will be all right, its the burning sauce burning sauce I mean, is it worse than firefighting? We'll find out. We're learning the hard way today. We have water somewhere. And we have milk. And are you ready? Let's do us. What is all of it? All right. Cheers. Cheers. I sort of surprise time. Every time it surprises you? Yeah. It's not so bad. It tastes really good. That burning sauce will pair well with this burning question. One can hope. Yep. What is emergency management. Oh. Oh I'm glad you asked. So the textbook answer. Emergency management protects the city by coordinating and, integrating all the various, City departments into, like, one entity. And, from there, that entity would mitigate against, prepare for, respond to, and help recover from threats of actual or natural disasters or manmade stuff like that. So an analogy would be think of it as emergency management helps keep a wall together. So every department in the city is like a brick in a wall. And behind that wall is the City of Des Plaines. So trying to get through that wall would be an emergency, like, severe weather. And if those bricks were just stacked, that wall could just topple over. I had a big enough emergency. Well, we like to do is where the mortar. We hold all those bricks together and make that wall stronger. So we help, bring all those departments together and keep, keep, keep them together. Awesome. I like that analogy. It makes it make sense for visual learners like me. How do you feel? Let's go on to the next one. All right. You. Cheers Yeah. It's like it has more flavor. What? I have never. I don't know what this one tastes like. No, just. It's hot. Yeah. It's hot. It's coming up. Okay. Who handles the emergency management activities for the City of Des Plaines? You're right. It's lingering. Well, emergency management falls under the umbrella of the fire department. So it's just a division under the fire department. We have a small team. We all work in the emergency management division. Kind of part time. So our first member is Beverly Carroll. She's been around for a while working for the city. She handles all of our volunteer, program. The second person would be Katie Kozlowski. She works in, for her full time jobs and police department. She's more of our liaison. She does a really good job of, kind of filling us in on, police processes, which is a huge part of our job. And then there's myself. I work in full time in the fire department, and then we have Deputy Chief Sam Foster from the fire department overseeing all of us. And then the last group we have is our volunteers. We have about 20 of them. They're citizens of the Des Plaines as a group. All of us. We work with various agencies throughout the state. So we also work with Cook County, Homeland Security to work with, Illinois Emergency Management Agency and FEMA as well. And on top of all that, then we also work with our, private entities and throughout the city, like the Red Cross or private businesses. What is it? No, because, well, until I'm. You mentioned, volunteers. How can someone get involved in the volunteers? So, we have, four main requirements to be a volunteer. First being, you have to be a U.S. citizen. You need a driver's license. You have to be over the age of 18. And then you need to pass a background screening. Other than that, then the other requirements would just be, you know, able to, accept the time constraints. So a lot of our call outs don't really happen between normal business times. So when we ask people to volunteer their time and be called to an emergency scene, sometimes I could be in the middle of the night. Sometimes it's, in the early evening, normal times. So we just ask that, when you are considering becoming an EMA volunteer, you kind of put that in perspective and make sure that you're able to make those time constraints. I'm a suffering. No. Are you impressing yourself? I'm. Maybe I didn't load mine up because it wasn't. It's not so bad so far, but this last one I'm. I'm not looking forward to. It'll be good. Okay. Cheers. I just want. To. Why? I don't know. How are they going to do that? Why do people want. Someone's going to ask. Was a while. All right. What are ways we can see EMA in action or behind the scenes? So, EMA is really a behind the scenes, division. We aren't really out in the forefront. We do a lot of behind the scenes stuff. But that's not to say that a lot of what we do isn't, supporting the people who are out in the front lines. Another program we just, finished up was changing over the, warning sirens throughout the city. So the deputy chief, Sam Foster, was a big part of that program. We've completely automated those processes. It used to be someone had to call somebody to turn them on. And now it's. There's certain thresholds that if, the weather is, meeting those, that siren goes off automatically. So you might be hearing a little bit more throughout the, the year instead of just the first Tuesday of the month. Lastly, we have a hazard mitigation projects going up all all throughout the city. There's currently one going on in on Maple Street. Public works is out there digging up the road. So, citizen might go out there and go, oh, they're trying to fix the road. Really? We're updating the sewer system. So the storm sewers and by the city taking care of that, we help the engineering department get funding. So we register that program through Cook County. They register it through the state, and then you'll see, funding for that individual project. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. How do you feel? No tears? No. No tears. No tears. I feel relieved. To be honest. That's it for this episode of The Hot Seat. Thank you to Patrick for participating. Learn more about all things Des Plaines by following our social media, subscribing to our e-news, or visiting us at desplainesil.gov. Thank you for watching. Stay spicy, Des Plaines!