Weathering Storms

Weathering storms…

Navigating inclement weather (winter storms and more) with preparation and communication.

Northern Colorado just experienced a large snow storm; a difficult to predict upslope that could’ve dumped a lot of snow in a short amount of time. We experienced three feet or so which gave us some difficulties, but thankfully not more.

(It may seem a little odd to write about preparations in the past, but it is hard to do such a thing while focusing on a storm, and maybe it’ll help other department’s evaluation of their tools and solutions for preparations; perhaps as a form of fire community AAR.)

We prepared:

• Overhead met with local EOCs (Boulder EOC, Gilpin EOC) for coordination/contingencies.
• Officers met (via Zoom) to plan local/station-level contingencies, including negotiated use of a snowcat and communicating with local community members who own snow mobiles.
• Stations held “chain up parties” (once snow levels were deep enough) to prepare the trucks.
• We performed an Everbridge poll to determine who was snowed in, and who was available.
• We used Group emails and Group messaging to communicate and coordinate with the department membership - before and during the storm.
• We made contingency plans for possible radio repeater/tower outages (preselecting line of sight radio channels, if needed, and to fall back to at least try WiFi/Internet and messaging)
• We communicated with the public sharing lessons learned from past storms.

We were lucky that this storm brought only two to three foot of snow, but we were ready for more, and as prepared as we could be.