By John Howell
Panola County Emergency Management Agency (EMA) Director Daniel Cole and his staff wear six or seven different hats to get done the various tasks assigned to them. “We’ve got a plan for everything we want to accomplish for today,” he said last week at a meeting of the Batesville Exchange Club, “but I bet before 8:30 we’re going to get a call and it’s going to change everything we’d planned to do today.”

The call could come from another area of the state needing assistance, from a parent whose child has wandered away and is feared lost, from a child whose parent has wandered away and is feared lost, from a fire alarm anywhere in the county, or from the E-911 communications center at the David M. Bryan Justice Complex.

Such is the nature of an office tasked primarily with emergency management and homeland security but also responsible for coordinating the fire services of Panola County’s volunteer departments, coordinating with the Panola County Sheriff’s Department search and rescue team volunteers, supervising emergency communications through the E-911 system, providing GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping services and Operation Lifesaver. That’s six. The seventh comes with each decennial census and includes several years’ preparation for the national head counts, Cole said.

“We do a lot of preparedness and prevention before storms happen to make sure we’re ready to respond to those emergencies,” Cole said. Funding from grants through Homeland Security during the last three years, “has dried up as they will continue to dry up until we’re attacked on American soil again, which I hope it goes away completely, I’d love to see it not be a need for that,” Cole said.

The work of volunteer fire departments in Panola County and across Mississippi is expected to soon bring lower fire insurance premiums for homeowners in rural areas, Cole said. (See “Improved fire rating means reduced premiums,” Jan. 30, page 3A)

The volunteer search and rescue team has been trained both for searching for lost and missing people and also evidence collection. “When you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, they typically call us because we can put the bodies out there and find what they’re looking for,” he said. The county EMA office has two “children friendly” search dogs, he said.

Assignment of 911 addresses has been moved to the Panola County Land Development office to reduce the number of steps involved in getting an address, he said. The EMA office has made emergency communications less vulnerable to weather, coordinating with the effort by the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) that began, following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, to promote a statewide system of emergency communications, Cole said.

All emergency calls in the county, with the exception of those to the Batesville’s police fire departments, are routed through the E-911 Center, Cole said. For emergency communications not on the Mississippi Integrated Wireless Network (MSWIN) “we are able to patch the two talk groups together; we can do a patch in about three seconds,” Cole said.

“Some that has been added this year … is GIS mapping,” the EMA director said. “We have used that to build a mapping database for the county,” he said. The mapping can pinpoint the location of people using telephones to request emergency services.

Combining the GIS mapping with tax parcel information will allow, “people in the community to go to the web site and be able to look it up from their office without having to come to the courthouse,” Cole said. The EMA office plans to have tax parcel, fire district and other information available online by October, he said.

Project Lifesaver has been funded by a $10,000 grant that pays for a wristwatch-like transmitter that can be worn by someone suffering from Alzheimer’s or dementia who might wander away from home.

“Should one of your loved ones become missing, that transmitter puts out a signal and we can track that,” Cole said.

“Several years ago we had a four-and-a-half-day search for a missing Alzheimer’s patient,” he said. “After that, we got real serious about trying to find something we could use to possibly prevent that from happening again.”

“It’s a service that we’re offering free; we have the ability to provide that free-of-charge to citizens of Panola County,” he said.

Cole, responding to a question, said that Operation Lifesaver has been used twice in the county to locate missing people.

“If y’all know anybody, please put them in contact with our office or the sheriff’s department,” Cole continued. “We would really like to get those bands out. The average search of eight or nine hours, you can cut down to under an hour; instead of 40 people, you can have two people looking for that person, so you can really conserve resources.”

Terry Bryant is deputy EMA director. Chris Downs handles GIS mapping and operations. The 911 communications center is staffed by 16 dispatchers, Cole said.