She is the acting director for emergency management for Racine County.
She's part of our staying safe program from the Racine County Traffic Safety Commission.
Today, we're going to talk about emergency, emergency.
Everybody run from street.
You know, you're too young to remember the movie.
The Russians are coming.
The Russians are coming.
Anyway, so good morning, Liz.
How
are you?
Good morning.
I'm good.
How are
it's great.
I got to see the sunrise and all that
Well for acting director I just got it because our previous director left the position and so for the meantime I've been filling in this as acting because there there needs to be someone
Manning manning the ship
Permanent probably not.
No, I really yeah, I like to be a little bit more behind the scenes and when you're the director you tend to have more people Who focus on you and
Yes?
don't mind talking to people but most of the time when you know when people need something I'm like, I'll be one one step behind
in emergency management.
Sure.
Real brief background, I guess.
I studied political science in school, and then I decided to do a graduate program that did Homeland Security and emergency management.
And I decided I really liked it and went into it after school.
I started over in Virginia.
I worked there for a while, I worked in Nevada for a bit, and now I'm here.
That's right.
Prepared for pretty much anything.
One of the key tenants of emergency management is that all emergencies start and end locally.
And so for the individual, that means that all emergencies will start and end with you yourself.
So although there will always be people long to help you, first responders, community organizations, that kind of thing, the beginning and end will always be with you, your household, your family.
So if you can prepare those things by having an emergency kit, making a plan, you'll be much better, well, prepared for whatever comes your way.
We have smoke detectors everywhere and the smoke detector we have, it's very sensitive.
So when you're cooking in the kitchen, it goes off and it doesn't just make a sound.
There's a voice, you know, I run for your lives.
The house is on fire.
Run now, everybody.
And you try to fan it with the towel and shut it off because, you know, it's just smoke from the kitchen, but it's very sensitive, which is good.
And you can hear it everywhere in the house.
I mean, it's very loud.
But we've got them everywhere.
But that's the only one that seems to go off at the slightest bit of little cooking smoke.
You're cooking some bacon or something.
Run for your lives, everybody.
Run now.
So everybody should have a smoke detector.
Yes, absolutely.
And September is a great time to test them, make sure they're working, their batteries are up to date.
Smoke detectors also can expire.
A lot of people may not know that.
So check the expiration date on your smoke detector and if it's out or if the batteries are out, your local fire department is always happy to help you troubleshoot whatever problems you might have with your detector.
There's no good place to live in this country where it's emergency free.
If you live on the West Coast, you got fires all the time.
The whole state of California is always on fire.
If you live in Arizona in the Southwest,
You've got droughts.
It's always dry out there.
If you live in the upper part of the country, like you got tornadoes, it's always tornadoes and severe storms.
If you live down south in the southeast, then you've got tornadoes and hurricanes.
You got those.
If you live out in Hawaii, you got molten lava flows coming after you.
And I was talking to somebody, which is the worst to have?
I think it's Hawaii because when you get liquid rock chasing you through the streets,
There's no way to get out.
You have touches you, you're all done.
I mean, it's that bad.
I don't know how they prepare for volcanoes out there.
I mean, just volcanoes go off liquid rock coming after you.
There's nothing you can do except run for your life at that point.
You can't prepare your house or it just eats everything.
But there's nowhere in America to go to get away from some kind of tragedy.
Yeah, that's pretty accurate.
Thankfully, no molten lava risk here in Wisconsin.
Yeah, at least two notes.
There could always be a new super volcano that opens up.
I'm not a geologist, so I don't have any expertise on that.
Wait a
Oh, goodness.
I don't know anything.
Like I said, I'm not a geologist.
But yes, thankfully, no molten lava risk here in Wisconsin.
But pretty much everywhere in the country, you have
your hazards, your risks, and it's really just a question of learning about what is dangerous where you live and then learning how to prepare for that.
So in Wisconsin, most of the time, we see a lot of flooding.
We see tornadoes, especially in recent years.
They've been increasing in number and severity.
And then winter weather is also a hazard as well.
There were some hurricanes, not super strong ones like you see in Florida most of the time.
By the time they come up the east coast of Virginia, they've weakened quite a bit, but we did have some hurricanes here and there.
She lives on the Gulf side.
And when we had a big snowstorm here, and it was like 80 degrees down in Florida, she calls me up on the phone and goes, ha, ha, you've got a big blizzard coming your way.
I said, you know what, we're going to dig out of that blizzard by the afternoon.
It will stop and the sun will come out and we'll dig out and it'll be done in a day when the hurricane comes through and blows the roof off your house.
you'll be set for months.
So there's always something.
There's always something.
That's a great question.
If you don't have a basement, the most inside part of your house where there's hopefully no windows, so a hallway, an interior bathroom, something like that, you could get inside the tub.
That will be the safest point for a tornado if you live somewhere that is maybe a little bit more Flexible like I'm thinking like a like a mobile home or something like that You probably will want to find an alternate Shelter because those are are not very safe in a tornado
It does seem that way,
Yeah, that one unfortunately did cause a lot of damage, and that absolutely could happen here in Racine as well.
I do not.
It's on
It wiped out everything in the town.
I remember the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather that night just showed.
And I don't know what Barnabeld was.
It was moved here.
They showed a water tower.
That's all that was left in Barnabeld, just the water tower and three homes.
So we went to Barnabeld years later and all the homes are brand new, except for three.
And you could see where the bank was cut in half because they just rebuilt half the bank.
They got a whole diorama in the middle of the town showing you everything.
They're kind of proud of it.
Went to the diner there and they got to say, oh, yeah, it was a fireman that night.
It was great.
The whole town wiped out.
And I don't think I don't think anybody lost their lives, but nothing was left.
Just the water tower and those three homes and half a bank.
I mean, it's devastating.
And it was in the middle of the night where everybody was
sleeping.
Now here, every the first Saturday of every month, we have that four o'clock tornado sound that comes off the test and get used to it because if it's not a Saturday and it's not four o'clock in the afternoon, pay attention to it and have a plan because you never know.
And you can't look outside and say, oh, look at the pretty funnel coming this way.
It's getting closer.
Hey, wait a second.
One house away.
It's too late to do that.
We're chatting with Liz Adams.
Liz is acting director for emergency management for Racine County.
It's part of our staying safe program with the Racine County Traffic Safety Commission.
We're talking about all types of emergencies.
And we were talking a moment ago about the sirens that go off the first Saturday as a test at four o'clock in the afternoon.
But if you hear the sirens go off and it's not Saturday and the skies are looking kind of darkish, we have a problem here.
But you said a lot of people can't hear the sirens they say, right?
That's right.
A lot of people think that the sirens are sort of the first defense when it comes to tornado.
They're sleeping, but then they don't get woken up, and then they're like, well, what happened?
I didn't hear the siren go off.
And a fun fact about the sirens is they're not meant to be heard in your home.
They're meant to be heard outside.
So if you want something that's more reliable, make sure you have a weather radio or you have your weather alerts turned on on your
know, you think the world's ending
It just keeps going, which is good.
That's what it's supposed to do.
It's supposed to keep going and bring you an alert.
Emergency management is not just for weather, because I remember there was a spill once on a farm not far from here.
And the guys had this big tankard of chemicals and all spilled out and emergency management was brought in.
So it's not just.
not just for weather.
No, a lot of it is weather, but we also are involved with hazardous materials releases.
We can be involved with planning for large events, for instance.
Back when I lived in Virginia and worked there, that was a lot of what we did was large events.
Since this was the DC area, there's always something big happening.
It can also be things such as food scarcity,
illnesses, diseases, COVID, we were heavily involved with COVID.
Remember that?
That was, I think it's so nostalgic.
Oh, remember those days when we had to stay in, we couldn't travel, everybody was talking on Zoom.
Remember those good old days?
They weren't good old days.
People were dying and getting sick.
They weren't good old days.
But I think back now, because it's all gone.
And now COVID is just like getting a cold.
But they're talking nostalgic about it.
Oh, yeah, those were fun times.
No, they weren't fun times.
Not at all.
And you were probably busy because...
Oh, yes.
Very busy.
We were trying to help people not die.
So when it comes to weather, we interact a lot very closely with our National Weather Service partners.
They are tremendous professionals.
They send us...
updates and forecasts daily and multiple times a day if there's something nasty expected.
As it gets closer and closer, for me at least, I will be actively monitoring the weather.
We have a group chat basically with various other EMs across the region, our weather service people, and they'll be giving us updates and posting pictures from the radar so we can kind of see what's happening as we speak.
I can see stuff right now.
Oh, yeah, there it is right there.
I'm taking a look at it.
Yeah, I went to the casino the other day.
We did it real well.
We played poker.
Yeah, I came back with a lot of money.
Oh, you did well at the casino.
We saw a band play the other night.
Is that what's going on
in these
Maybe when there's not a tornado warning, but if there's a tornado expected, we're pretty focused.
That is this year's theme for National Preparedness Month, set by FEMA.
They come up with a theme every year.
They put out press releases and social media things, other materials to publish for the theme.
So that's this year's.
This year, it really has a few key focus areas along with that theme.
It helps to highlight self-reliance, personal responsibility.
Being a resourceful individual, this will help support first responders during critical situations so that they're less overwhelmed by what's happening if people are a little bit more prepared and they can kind of thin for themselves for a little bit.
It also helps to protect your family and your friends if you can take proactive actions to keep your loved ones safe.
And then finally, it will just help your community.
It will foster local resilience and mutual aid, which basically just means people helping each other.
A couple of years ago, he got us this backpack with all this freeze-dried food.
I mean, bars of freeze-dried food in containers to keep it good.
It's been years now, I don't know, but it's supposed to stay for years.
And he said, now we're ready.
I said, ready for what?
What are we ready for?
The zombies coming to eat our flesh?
By the way, you guys were in charge of that, too,
of
Well, there is actually just a fun fact.
You can Google the CDC several years back as a sort of training exercise.
They developed a zombie apocalypse plan.
And you can find it.
Yeah, you can find it on the internet and read it.
It's pretty interesting.
I mean, it's not.
Wait a second, wait
I think we have breaking news.
We're ready for the zombie.
I also heard in a nuclear disaster.
And this, you gotta remember when I grew up, the Russians were threatening to blow up America, all these things.
And they said, you don't have to worry in a nuclear disaster, the mail will still get through.
Well, that's good.
It's good to know I have to pay my water bill when the landscape is radioactive.
Do you have do you have something in case there's something like that goes off?
I mean, it's got to be there's got to be something in this country.
Sure.
Yeah civil defense nuclear attack preparedness that actually used to be one of the primary jobs of emergency management For most disasters most emergencies you have what's called an incident commander, and they're the ones who is more or less ultimately in charge
And another fun fact for you, a nuclear attack was pretty much the only disaster that emergency management would be the incident commander for everything else that's usually fire or police.
Something like
We have a very old plan.
Yeah, this is it.
Let
up.
Yeah.
There's one in my office that's from the 80s.
Really?
Yeah, it's not something that we typically will
update all of the time since the chances of it are pretty low, hopefully.
But one of the other tenants of emergency management is that you plan for all hazards.
So you try to not have too specific of plans.
You try to make things much more broad.
So no matter what happens, you can still have a structure and outline for what to do.
Because I remember growing up, I hate to keep sounding like I'm 300 years old.
My dad's AM radio in his car had the civil defense triangle there.
And when there was, you had dial to that frequency right there on the radio.
It's not digital, but you know, there's the little thing going, you put it on the civil defense channel there in case there was a problem.
We never had to do it.
We had the duck and cover drills in school where they hit the siren.
You had a duck, you look up and there's a giant block glass window right above you.
That was good.
goes right down on your head when there's a, I don't know what ducking in the hallway, putting your hand above your head would do in a nuclear attack.
I have no idea what that purpose, but that, they said, if the Russians ever drop a bomb, we're safe with ducking and cover in the hallway.
As a kid, you don't think about it as an adult.
What were they talking about?
That's not going to solve anything.
Okay.
Just quickly here, it's national prepared month a month.
What should we do?
as people live in Racine County.
I don't care about Kenosha.
No, I
do
Great, great question.
So the top things I would suggest for this month, make a plan.
It can be fairly simple.
You don't have to do anything super complicated.
I would suggest start with a fire.
That's probably the most
likely emergency that you would face.
So with your family, figure out how you would exit your house in an emergency, have a meeting place set up, have some sort of communication plan, so that if you don't have your cell phones, you still know how to get in touch with one another, and then have an emergency kit.
Like Don was saying, you have your three days supply per person of food and water.
You want to start with a gallon per person per day for three days Have copies of important documents extra phone chargers flashlights batteries Things like that.
Don't forget about your pets as well.
Make sure you have supplies for them and keep it somewhere safe somewhere where everyone in your household knows where it is so that if you're stuck in a tornado or You just need to grab and go you can quickly do that
We do.
Yes.
We have a page on the county website, so you can head to RacineCounty.gov.
And then under departments, there's an emergency management page.
The website isn't updated super often, but you can also check out our Facebook page, which is Ready Racine County.
We post updates on there much more often.
I don't think so.
But if you really want to take a look at it, you can come to the office.
I'll dig it out of the closet for you.
Hopefully not.
But maybe just have some extra food for them just in case.
We had a house on fire with us yesterday, but was on the next block.
It fire ends and everything wasn't that bad, but still there was a fire in the house.
And for on Main Street, all the blow, the electricity went out for several hours because there was a fire.
So you never know.
These things are
Absolutely.
Thank you for having me.
Liz.
Thank you.