Correspondent photo / Bob Jadloski Documentary filmmakers Alexander E. Tennent and Eric S. Vaughan, second and third from left, are shown with Warren native John Zabrucky, left, and Gerald V. Casale of Devo before an event May 4 at Medici Museum of Art in Howland. Tennent and Vaughan are working on a docuseries “The Heart of Rock ‘n’ Roll” chronicling Northeast Ohio’s important role in rock’s history and the next generation of acts continuing that legacy.

WARREN — The recently delivered Trumbull County Emergency Management Agency’s Emergency Command Vehicle cost $617,000, which sounds like a lot.

But when EMA Director John Hickey first started to evaluate what type of mobile command vehicle Trumbull County needed and what features it should have, his starting point was to get one costing approximately $1 million.

“We worked hard over about a year-and-a-half to find one that would not only meet our needs but also be fiscally responsible,” he said.

Trumbull County commissioners authorized using American Rescue Plan funds to pay for it.

Hickey said it was important to him that the vehicle not have forms of technology that would surpass the county’s ability to maintain it.

“With the amount of staff we have here to operate it, I am a one-man band. I have one part-time employee, but I don’t have a staff of five people so that I can have someone dedicated to the information technology part of it, that their only job is to run IT with it. I had to keep it simple.”

That is why when the agency ordered the vehicle, it chose not to equip it with a digital panel that would have run everything. Hickey chose controls for the vehicle that are more similar to the ones on fire trucks, using a bank of rocker switches.

“In my experience as a (former) fire chief, if something goes wrong with (the digital controls), you are done. You have to replace it. Whereas if one of those switches goes bad, you go to NAPA and get a new rocker switch,” Hickey, the former Champion fire chief, said.

The technology of using rocker switches is good, but the big benefit is in reducing maintenance costs. Instead of having a touch screen to turn on the vehicle’s lights and power outlets, that is done with rocker switches, he said.

“We put a lot of thought into it and took into consideration our experience with command situations. What did we like to see? What were we missing when we were on an incident like the Kinsman flood or the Rainn Peterson missing child incident?”

Residents of about 25 homes on the east side of Kinsman Lake in Kinsman had to be rescued from their homes July 20, 2019, when part of a road and earthen embankment were washed away in a major rain event.

Rainn Peterson is a 2-year-old girl who disappeared from her home in North Bloomfield in October of 2016, touching off a large search that lasted 48 hours before she was found uninjured in a field nearby. Authorities had just about given up hope of finding her alive when she was found.

DRONE CAPABILITY

Hickey said the emergency command vehicle enables those who will use the vehicle to launch and operate drones with it and feed the aerial footage to the vehicle.

“I can put a drone up in Newton Falls and have the command post back here at the office and see the footage right in the command post,” he said.

The vehicle can raise a camera 35 feet into the air to monitor activities. The camera and command vehicle were tested at the Trumbull County Fair earlier this month. It allowed officials to “keep an eye on the fair and everything going on,” Hickey said.

“They were able to move that camera 365 degrees. It has a joystick to operate the camera. The ability to have this positioned at Courthouse Square for the Italian Fest or whatever type of festival they have, is a game changer,” he said.

The vehicle provides many options to help law enforcement. For instance, it can be used in a hostage situation or a plane crash, “not to mention, God forbid, we have a train derailment like East Palestine,” he said. “This is invaluable. We have stuff like Ultium Cells and other places where we could have issues,” Hickey said of the Lordstown battery plant.

“This piece of equipment was a long time coming,” Hickey said.

PAST EFFORT

In 2021, during COVID-19, when the county had CARES Act funding, commissioners tried to obtain a mobile command post using that funding. Hickey was not EMA director at the time, but he was Champion’s fire chief and worked with the fire chiefs’ association to try to get a command vehicle then.

That effort did not succeed, but officials knew something needed to be done eventually because the county’s emergency command vehicle was a Federal Emergency Management Agency camper that was used by FEMA as part of the response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in August of 2005.

“It was surplus from Katrina,” Hickey said. “It had some value, but it was nowhere near what we needed here in the county.

“When I took over (as EMA director) in 2021, I asked my board if we could do a top-to-bottom study of EMA because one had not been done for quite a while, just to see what were some of the strengths and things we really needed to address.”

A consultant provided a report in the fall of 2022, and one of the high priorities of the study was to acquire a mobile command post.

“We now have checked that off,” Hickey said.

BEING PREPARED

Among the top reasons to have a mobile command post is to be prepared if there is ever another catastrophic failure of the county’s 911 system like what took place in July of 2003 when 4.65 inches of rain fell, the most rain in a 24-hour period since records started being kept in 1943, according to newspaper reporting at the time. The Trumbull County 911 center in Howland had to be evacuated.

“If it happens again, we can put all of the dispatchers in this unit and operate there. We could put up to seven dispatchers in there,” he said. “The command vehicle cannot replace the 911 center, but it could be a temporary home for it.”.

The command vehicle still needs to have communications equipment installed, such as radios and a satellite system.

“That way we will not only have communications, but redundancy,” Hickey said. “We will have Verizon, AT&T. So if one goes down, we will have a backup.”

He is hoping that it will be complete by the end of August so the unit is 100% functioning.

“If we have to go out right now, it can be used. We could work off of portables (radios), stuff like that,” he said.

The communications systems are being purchased locally to give the county EMA a “better hand in choosing how it is set up and programmed. It’s better to have someone locally than someone in Wisconsin,” Hickey said.

He said comparing the prices paid by other counties for their mobile command vehicle and the features they have is not relevant because “Everybody’s different. Everybody’s threats (to safety), everybody’s issues are different, what their hazards are, what they have to mitigate.”

He said with nothing more than the hand-me-down FEMA camper, Trumbull County was way behind.

The purchase of the new emergency command vehicle would not have been possible without the ARP money being available and without the commitment of the previous board of county commissioners to the project, including Niki Frenchko and Mauro Cantalamessa, and the present board of commissioners, Denny Malloy, Tony Bernard and Rick Hernandez.

“All have had a part in it, in addition to the Trumbull County Emergency Management Executive Board,” Hickey said.

WHAT IF?

“There are a great number of threats in Trumbull County the average person never thinks about, such as hazards associated with major highways,” Hickey said, adding, “This unit will get used.”

He has seen where some people have questioned the purchase of the command vehicle on social media “because it was purchased for the ‘what if.’ Well, the ‘what if’ is going to come. It’s not ‘if,’ it’s ‘when.’ I guarantee you this unit will get used by law enforcement, by fire departments, and the health department.”

He said in the early stages of COVID-19 around March 2020, the vehicle may have been useful to the county health department to run some of its operations. And the county 911 center could have moved some of its dispatchers to the command vehicle to spread them out more for social distancing than was possible in the county 911 center.

Hickey noted that years ago, St. Joseph Warren Hospital lost power because of a flood. The hospital had an emergency operations center, as hospitals generally do. If something like that happens today, Trumbull County EMA would be able to bring in its mobile command vehicle.

“The hospital could put its top command staff in there, and they could run their command center right out of there,” he said.

He noted that Trumbull County EMA did training recently at a bulk-fueling operation, Buckeye Terminals, on U.S. Route 422 near the AAA office in Niles.

“This will be a part of their plan moving forward,” Hickey said of the emergency command vehicle.

Hickey said he will start working this fall on the Trumbull County Hazard Mitigation Plan, in which the hazards in the county will be identified and rated.

“That serves a couple of purposes. It identifies what the (hazard) is and how we would attack it if it did happen,” Hickey said.

He said it is also important because if a specific hazard is not identified in the county plan, FEMA funding may be denied to help repair the damage the incident caused.

“If you have a dam that is in bad shape, if it is not in the plan, you are probably not going to get any funding for it,” he said.

Trumbull County’s plan has been updated about every five years, but the next plan will be a “complete rewrite because it’s been about 20 years since it’s been completely rewritten,” Hickey said.