Cassandra
The Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience introduced a draft emergency response plan at a public forum at Montpelier High School on Oct. 11, and it needs public input.
Calling the plan “MAPLE” — the Montpelier Action Plan for Local Emergency —- the commission seeks to use it to better prepare the city for future disasters after the devastating July 2023 flood that submerged Montpelier’s downtown and left many homes severely damaged.
The MAPLE outlines measures to enhance the city’s preparedness and response capabilities in the face of extreme weather events, but, as several organizers hosting the forum noted, it has gaps and needs more public participation.
Commissioner Richarda Ericson, who led a team that created the plan, said the plan still needs more “clarity of roles and communication.”
“Clarity of roles and responsibilities is a key function of this plan so we can clearly understand where we as community members need to step up and where we rely on city officials,” Ericson said, addressing the crowd of about 50 at the forum.
The commission hired AC Disaster Consulting to help with the planning, and through that work, commissioner Marc Gwinn said, “we have begun to identify who the partners are, who the pieces are, who are the communities who have needs, who are the partnerships and relationships needed so we can pull this off successfully.”
The plan emphasizes a “whole community approach” and notes within the plan that “emergency preparedness is a shared responsibility and needs to involve everyone” including the city government, residents, businesses, faith-based and community organizations, and nonprofits.
Gwinn said eventually the plan will include written agreements between the city and other organizations to clarify who does what and when.
“City cannot do everything, and that’s where we come in,” Gwinn said as he led a breakout group discussion that focused on neighbor-to-neighbor communication.
Conversation in that group ranged from lamenting the now obsolete Capital Area Neighborhoods (CAN) program to observing a need for a revived version of CAN, focused on both social gatherings and emergency preparedness.
One participant pointed out that “not everyone is tech savvy” in reference to the many texts, emails, and social media alerts that went out before and during the flood last year.
“My next door neighbor has no connectivity to technology,” Gwinn said. “She has a phone and her nearest kids are in Williamstown. So when we have boil water notices, when we have power outages, we check in on her. I feel like that level of neighbor to neighbor is going to bridge that gap.”
Joan Javier-Duval, minister of the Unitarian Church of Montpelier, said she was encouraged to see local shelters mentioned in the MAPLE, including cooling and warming spaces. She also pointed to the plan’s reference to faith-based partners, such as her church. But, she said, after the flood in 2023, “many of our faith communities are right downtown, right by the river … in an immediate sense, we were in no condition to be a partner.”
Other people noted the need for training in how to properly fill and use sandbags, what to put in a “go bag” or checklist for how to handle an emergency, and a need to identify an overnight shelter within Montpelier, among other topics.
Gwinn said the commission plans to hold workshops on all of those topics, but ” … at the moment we don’t have those mechanisms to do that. … Those are the details we need to fill in.”
An overarching theme that came up throughout the forum was a need for people to participate in hammering out the details of the plan.
“Please sign up, spread the word outside of this room,” Gwinn said “We really need everybody’s voices … everybody’s legs to carry us up the hill.”
See the draft plan and sign up to participate at montpelierstrong.org/maple.
