Monterey County Office of Emergency Services opens up biweekly Q&A hour for public to learn more about disasters
MONTEREY COUNTY, Calif. (KION-TV) Fires, severe drought, damaging storms, earthquakes, and even a pandemic like COVID-19, impact those in their path. Now, the Monterey County Office of Emergency Services is inviting the public to their new "office hours” to give people the chance to have a one on one conversation about disasters and how to be better prepared.
You might not be able to prevent a disaster, but the Monterey County Office of Emergency Services is now giving you the power to be better prepared, before, during, and after an event.
"We can do things that will keep us and our family and our property safe. And so there's always something we can do, and it's important to do what you can," said Lubna Mohammad, Community Resilience Coordinator Monterey County Office of Emergency Services.
Monterey County of Emergency Serves or OES, has set aside office hours every other Tuesday for the community to ask any type of questions about emergency management and learn what to do in the event of a disaster.
"It’s open to residents, it's open to businesses or community-based organizations, nonprofits. If your organization is interested or schools are interested in becoming more disaster resilient and better prepared, it's a great place to have that initial conversation. The point of this is to be helpful to the public and provide that discussion that we don't usually get to have with them unless something's happening,” added Mohammad.
The virtual meetings give people a chance to have one-on-one conversations with OES to learn more about certain disasters and preparedness, but to also better understand what emergency management is and does. Though there haven't been many participants, yet, the primary topic people have been asking about is COVID.
"The best way we prevent the impact and negative impacts we have faced and experienced over the past few years is through preparation. It's through saying I have the power to do something and starting those discussions and starting those actions that can keep you safe,” Mohammad.
OES reminds people even with time or money constraints there are simple preparations you can do to be ready. One of them is signing up for evacuation alerts.
"Signing up for Monterey County, that's how we push out all of our evacuation information that will take you two minutes. You can even send a text with your zip code. Or you can go online and you can put multiple locations,” Mohammad.
These meetings aren’t replacing OES' regular business hours, they’re an added bonus.
"We're still there and we're open to answering questions and just talking to the public and learning from them and teaching them at the same time, because there's a lot that the public can inform us about too,” concluded Mohammad.
The meetings started on February first, and right now they're only virtual---but OES hopes to have more face to face opportunities across Monterey County in the future. The next virtual meeting is Tuesday, March 15th from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. and is open to both English and Spanish speakers.
