Demolition of Cessna Stadium begins at Wichita State University
8 June 2023
WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) — Sedgwick County leaders took a step to build an Emergency Preparedness Center. Now, they can begin searching for land to build on. On June 21, commissioners must approve the grant application.
“Emergency Management has not had adequate space to maintain supplies for disaster preparedness and response,” Assistant County Manager Rusty Leeds said.
The need for an Emergency Preparedness Center was exemplified after the pandemic and natural disasters.
“Public health and emergency management can be co-located. They can have the materials they need for initial response,” Leeds said.
It was also prompted after the 911 expansion because 911 employees were expanding into emergency management offices.
“We’re landlocked right there,” Sedgwick County Commissioner Jim Howell said. “911 uses the same building, and our 911 operation needs the space.”
The center would combine an emergency management warehouse, emergency operations center/emergency management facility and public health.
“This gives a facility where they can maintain equipment, trailers, medical supplies, all of those types of things that might be needed, whether it’s a natural disaster, a man-made incident, or a public health, viral, biological issue,” Leeds said.
It will have vehicle storage and access with five bays, warehouse storage for CERT, disaster response equipment, PPE, PHEP, Medicine, receiving and distribution and training space.
Right now, supplies are spread across the county.
“Through the pandemic, as we started trying to gather those, we found it difficult to locate them because of poor record keeping,” Leeds said. “Materials had not been maintained and switched out, so they were basically trash. So ultimately, it brought us to this point where because of space needs at the Public Safety building, and in order to be better prepared to serve.”
A new facility would increase efficiency.
“We knew that we needed to make some changes, to pull all our resources in one place to maintain a productive inventory,” Leeds said. “So that whenever something happens, the materials we have there are viable and useful and not expired and not trash. And it also gives us the opportunity to be responsive immediately.”
During the pandemic, they had to take time and use money and people to set up vaccination sites and testing sites.
“Rather than spending the first several weeks just trying to ramp up and pull resources together and find things that we need,” Leeds said. “It’s all right there in that one facility. We can be responsive immediately.”