Mesa County Safety Fair Educates Students
by Rita-Lyn Sanders, Director of Marketing and Communication
GRAND JUNCTION, COLO. - (Feb. 16, 2024) Mesa County is doing it right. Like something out of a Tom Clancy novel, at any given moment a sleeper cell of trained specialists is prepared to respond in force to any emergency. Be it a natural disaster or manmade, Mesa County’s agents of care are ready to swoop in, bringing aid to the injured, supplies to the impacted, and information to everyone.
In addition to first responders, this group represents humanitarian entities, municipalities, schools, transportation, and utilities. I am proud to say that Grand Valley Power is among them. We work together to build meaningful relationships and coordinate our efforts long before a crisis taps on the door. What does this mean to you? The biggest benefit is knowing that if our region is struck by disaster, we will be prepared.
Relationships are key to this success. Through discussions and practice exercises, we’ve learned how each agency works and handles different situations. This knowledge makes for a more efficient response. Knowing who to contact when you need support or information is critical. In my first few months as a school communicator, a small tornado touched down in our town, damaging houses and fences and coming near enough to a few of our schools that we sent students and staff to shelter in place. Tornadoes are not typically a thing in Washington state, so my school district pulled a rabbit out of our hat that day. A tornado doesn’t tell you where it’s going. We had eight schools sheltering and no idea what to expect. It’s like we were managing the emergency blindfolded.
Even so, we were able to apply our emergency procedures, training, and the relationships we had built with regional emergency management folks to get the information we needed to keep kids safe. It was a crazy day, to say the least. To make it worse, phone lines were tied up. At the school district, we called the personal cell number of a colleague in the regional emergency management center. When we told him what we needed most — information about where the tornado was headed and if we should expect more weather events — he got us the information from the National Weather Service and shared it across emergency frequencies so we could coordinate an appropriate response.
If we hadn’t developed that relationship, I don’t know that we would have been able to remove our blindfolds that day. Instead, we kept our kids safe with informed decisions.
That is the very reason why I so appreciate the collaborative culture of my Mesa County colleagues. We are proactive about emergency preparedness.
We encourage members and the public to do the same. Safety is one of our values, and Concern for Community is a cooperative principle. Later this month, Grand Valley Power will be at the Mesa Mall with trained professionals in emergency management to bring our safety messages to 1,500 elementary students from the Grand Valley. Our lineworkers will be at the two-day event, educating students on how to stay safe should they encounter downed power lines. They’ll join trained professionals from across the county. It’s an innovative event that has been happening for over four decades and is just one example of how Mesa County does it right.