Southlake's Emergency Manager Amanda Meneses poses for a photo in front of the DPS building. As an emergency manager, Meneses makes sure the city is as prepared as it can be for any disaster that may come its way.
Normally around this time of year, Southlake’s Emergency Manager Amanda Meneses is preparing for what disasters, big or small, the fall and winter might bring. This year is no different — except with the added complication of a global pandemic. Since COVID-19 hit, Amanda has been working around the clock to make sure the city is as prepared as it can be while keeping up to date with the changing case numbers and guidelines from city, state and federal health officials.
I HAVE BEEN WITH THE CITY… in total, for almost three years. I did, at the beginning of the year, go to a part-time status for a while. I went up to the state of Washington when they first had their COVID response and did some work up there with them. As of July, I have been back full-time with the city.
[IN WASHINGTON, I] JUST… orchestrated the COVID response for a city outside of Seattle. So they had the first known case of COVID, and so we started to do all of their implementation of emergency plans there and how we were gonna deal with the COVID response since it was such a new thing.
[I’VE WORKED IN EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT] FOR… about, I would say, over 20 years. I started doing the emergency management side when I was in the military. So I was in the Navy for 14 years and then continued on after the Navy with emergency management.
WE’RE THE JACK OF… all trades. That’s what we do. We do a lot of pre-planning. We always think about what’s the worst thing that could happen to the city, what keeps people up at night, and we try to make plans to mitigate those so when something does happen, that we are able to have a good response. Whenever we have storms go through, we monitor weather, send out all the alerts, make sure we have plans in place if there’s a tornado that we can get the debris out of the city. We do training and exercises...we do grant writing, community outreach and public education. A lot of times we go out to the senior center. We’ve worked with a lot of our churches to do emergency preparedness training for them. So there’s never a moment when we’re not doing anything, even if there isn’t a pandemic going on.
THE PANDEMIC HAS BEEN… really crazy because a lot of times when we make plans for emergency management, it’s for things like tornados that come, it hits and then we do the response and recovery and then we’re done with it. COVID has been like a marathon of all marathons and the rulebook changes sometimes daily, hourly, weekly. So it’s been something that I don’t think anybody has really 100% trained for in the past.
ONE THING THAT REALLY DID HELP… us respond to the pandemic is, in 2019, we did continuity of operations plans for city departments. And what that does is it looks at what essential functions the city needs to continue to provide, even if we have something such as a power outage, things like that is what we were originally looking at. But those plans really came into place for the pandemic because we had a lot of people that couldn’t come into the office, we needed to institute teleworking. So having those in place already really helped us in our response to the pandemic because we already had an idea of what we needed to provide.
THERE’S A LOT OF… following and looking for any updates in local, state and federal guidance. It seems to be there’s a change in what people are thinking, how this virus is changing, so [we are] trying to stay up to date with that. We are monitoring case numbers, not only just in Southlake, we monitor counties and through the state of Texas and even looking at a global picture as what’s really happening. We look at ways we can still continue to keep our community engaged with us.
WITH CORONAVIRUS… first it was a big frenzy at the beginning on how we respond, putting things in place, but now it’s kind of become part of our daily life. So we have to look at it differently as each day goes on and what we can continue to do from a city standpoint for the community.
WE ARE DEALING WITH WEST NILE VIRUS… right now. With our mosquito traps coming back positive, [we’re] working with the county on that. It’s also another public health issue, and then we also have flu season coming up. So that’s something that we are also looking at. But then...usually August-September timeframe, we start looking at our winter response plan, so what the city’s gonna do if we have inclement weather in the winter and how we provide services and what teams we have in place for that.
IT’S NEVER A… dull moment here. The biggest thing is if we plan, plan, plan for the worst day and hope that our plans work when we go to use them and then after we have something happen, we go back and revise those plans to our real-world response and what really worked for us.
THE GOOD THING IS… a lot of our plans, we kind of have a base framework that we can go off of because it doesn’t matter what the disaster is going to be, we’re always going to do these basic things and functions. And then we tailor it to, ‘OK if it’s this type of disaster, how would we work this a little bit differently?’ And so we always have our base framework and we just update it as we go.
WE HAVE A REALLY STRONG NETWORK… for emergency managers. We are always networking with each other. We have weekly meetings with the state as a region to figure out best practices, who’s doing what, who needs help and everybody’s always willing to help...I’ve done emergency management in a lot of places but North Texas, there’s really just the collaboration and the teamwork is amazing.
WHEN COVID HIT, IT REALLY HAS BEEN… a whole city response. There’s been so much buy-in and the support from the community and everybody has been great.