Reality and Shawna Legarza’s fictitious yarns are weaving together rather seamlessly this week.
A car colliding with a tour bus at the intersection of county roads 240 and 234? That one was fiction.
But a caller concerned about traffic jams created by construction and people practicing an evacuation from Edgemont Meadows? That one is real.
Legarza, director of emergency management for La Plata County, is conducting the fifth annual wildfire evacuation exercise. The simulation, in which area fire agencies and multiple county departments participate, runs through Saturday.
“Every year I’m learning more,” Legarza said.
The event is a constant exercise in asking and answering the question, “What do we do?”
The regimented affair always entails a certain level of chaos – some orchestrated and some real. It tends to grow in complexity each year as Legarza introduces new stumbling blocks for staff members and volunteers who respond to wildfires to navigate.
“We’re going to get tested on a little bit of communication today,” she told the assembled crowd at the Emergency Operations Center during the 10 a.m. briefing Tuesday.
This year’s drill involves simulated wildfires near Edgemont Meadows, Rockwood and Falls Creek. Every year, neighborhoods agree to participate in the drill and residents practice packing up their homes and evacuating to a specified location.
Internally at the EOC, Legarza is pushing staff members to respond to the unexpected by choreographing realistic inputs – calls or other information arriving at the EOC. She has given county administrative staff members scripts and a schedule and asked them to call in pretending to be residents with an array of concerns. The people answering the phones and the spokespeople communicating with the media have no idea what might play out that way.
“Every year I try to think, What should we do with our team? And not slam everything at once, but have them actually work through the processes,” Legarza said.
On Tuesday, emergency mangers were responding to a simulated fire east of Durango on County Road 234. Mock evacuation orders had gone out to over 700 people.
At 1:45 p.m., someone purporting to lead a group of young backpackers in the process of evacuating called in. A kid had been stung by a bee and they needed epinephrine.
Another scripted caller lost a cat during the evacuation process and wanted help.
Both of these situations were inspired by Legarza’s own experiences.
Once, while fighting fire in Alaska, she had to deliver epinephrine to a firefighter who was having an anaphylactic reaction to a bee sting – only the EpiPen, which had been tossed to her from the shore as she and the firefighter motored up river to an evacuation spot, was expired and didn’t work.
So where would emergency responders find an EpiPen in La Plata County during a wildfire? The drill was an opportunity to find out.
During the 2002 Missionary Ridge Fire, Legarza’s own house was placed under an evacuation order as she was working the fire nearby. Her neighbors rescued her dog and cats for her.
“That’s a real thing!” She said.
The scripted scenarios are a playful twist to the exercise. But real conundrums arise as well.
“Knock knock,” Eric Beyler said, interrupting an interview. “I can do a yellow form if you want, but I just got a call from one of the people who went to the Meadows location to get a rapid tag and her comment was – a lot of construction, vehicles on the road to and from and figures that there may be traffic jams.”
Legarza leaped into action, showing Beyler how that information should be disseminated.
“This could happen in real-world, right?” she said. “This is not one of my inputs.”
Once the traffic situation had been dispatched to the proper authorities, another situation arose. Volunteers with La Plata County Search and Rescue had flown a drone over the fire location to gauge its activity. But the team was running into problems getting that footage back to the EOC, where Legarza wanted it on a large smartboard.
She’s anxious to get that process working, noting that in the event of real fire, “We’re going to need that.”
The exercise is unique to La Plata County.
“A lot of places will build maps,” notes Durango Fire Protection District Wildfire Batallion Chief Scott Nielsen. “You can draw a circle on a map and then say ‘Evacuate.’ Well, if 3,000 people are going down a two-lane road, that doesn’t work.”
Within 20 years, Legarza wants a clear plan, practiced and in place for how the city of Durango would evacuate.
But, “We have to slowly chip away,” she said.
rschafir@durangherald.com
