By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Reno County is the third-largest county in Kansas with over 1200 square miles to cover. Watching severe weather across the county is a team effort.
"For our local spotters, we use all of our fire districts," said Reno County Emergency Management Director Adam Weishaar. "We have eight different rural fire districts in Reno County. Depending on where you're geographically located, you have anywhere between one and four fire stations in that district. Our firefighters are our spotters. They're trained spotters and any time there is severe weather, we'll activate our emergency operations center, our EOC here at the Law Enforcement Center. That's where we coordinate the spotters to go out. We page them out kind of like a fire, but it's for severe weather."
All the coordination is done through the Emergency Operations Center.
"Generally, for a severe weather event in our EOC, it will be us, it will be the Sheriff's Department, the police department and Hutchinson Fire Department. When we send out those spotters, they have the 800 megahertz radios that they report what they are seeing back to us. Then, either myself or our Emergency Management Coordinator, Todd Strain, will be entering that information into NWSChat."
That is a chatroom for emergency managers, National Weather Service meteorologists and media members where they can deploy information to them in real time.
"A lot of times they'll tell us, this is what we're seeing in this area, do you have any spotters there?", Weishaar said. "They are asking us questions. If we have a spotter in that area, we can give them some of the ground truth and say, this is exactly what the spotter is seeing, you're information is accurate, or this is what the people on the ground are seeing, what are you guys seeing on radar?"
There is a public event this month where everyone can learn more about storm structure.
"I always encourage people to go to our spotter training," Weishaar said. "We hold it once a year. This year it's directly after Severe Weather Awareness Week. We're having it on Monday, March 9th. It's about two hour training. It shows you not only what to look for on radar, but what to look for in the clouds and to me, it's a pretty good and valuable training that is free and the National Weather Service comes out and takes their time and puts it on for us. They obviously feel it's important."
The annual Storm Fury on the Plains 2020 Weather Identification and Safety Presentation has been scheduled for Monday March 9, 2020 at 6:30 p.m. at the Hutchinson Fire Training Center at 3201 East 4th.