Grafton Has Annual Emergency Management Meeting, A High Priority For Mayor Morrow

GRAFTON - Emergency preparedness is high on the list of priorities for Grafton Mayor Mike Morrow because of his long-time Corps of Engineers career.

Morrow has a broad understanding of river flooding and proper preparedness because of his previous service as a Corps of Engineers supervisor that spanned several decades.

Each year, Grafton has an Emergency Management Committee Meeting and one was held last week at Grafton City Hall.

In attendance was Doug Downey, IEMA Operations, Keith Norman, Jersey County EMA, Hal Graef PM and Jennifer Moehlmann from the Corps of Engineers, St. Louis District, Cindy Cregmiles, CFM and Derek Russell from the Jersey County Code Administrators office along with the Grafton Committee members. The group reviewed and discussed the newly updated Grafton Emergency Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) manual.

“The time to prepare for an emergency is when there is no emergency,” said Mayor Morrow as he welcomed the group.

The mayor explained that the Emergency Committee met last spring for the first time and worked on creating a standing SOP for the city to cover floods and natural disasters. Each agency representative commented on the plan and provided feedback for further improvements.

The mayor thanked everyone for their support and said the committee will continue to work adding the comments from today to the plan. The Corps offered to help set up a tabletop exercise for Grafton and Doug Downey from IEMA offered to design a live, multi-agency tabletop exercise for Grafton and the group. The mayor agreed that this would be an excellent opportunity to test the updated SOP and a tentative date was scheduled for this November.

The entire meeting was broadcast live and can be viewed on the Grafton YouTube channel.

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