Yavapai County Emergency Management

General information

When asked, most do not know, or cannot explain what emergency management is. The following is a description of the Yavapai County of Emergency Management: Yavapai County Office of Emergency Management principle responsibility is the safety of our citizens and visitors, protection of our infrastructure, as well as the environment. This is accomplished through a proactive, comprehensive, and integrated planning and coordination process to enhance response to an incident. Furthermore, focus is given to mitigation of hazards, response to incidents, recovery from incidents, and preparedness through planning, training, and exercise development. The goal is to build a disaster resilient community, capable of responding to and recovering from any incident.

Much of our work is in the area of mitigation (lessening the effect) of hazards. Yavapai County Office of Emergency Management sponsors and supports grant funded projects for the development of defensible space through wildland fire hazardous fuel mitigation. For more information on this topic see http://www.pawuic.org/ .

Several projects are underway to provide public information for our communities, as well as other projects on our agenda. Here is a list of this year’s projects thus far:

•Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) hazardous fuel mitigation.
•Hazardous tree assessment and removal
•County Continuity of Operations Planning (building resiliency in our county operations, thus enhancing service to our citizens)
•Continuity of Government Planning
•Emergency Operations Planning
•Camp Evacuation Planning
•Development of a Special Needs database
•Multi-Year Training and Exercise Planning
•Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC) Hazardous materials coordination and planning
•New website integrating warning systems, mapping, and evacuation areas
•Upgrading Emergency Operations Center information systems
•Planning, applying for, managing, and administering various grants for the county