You can read the Ixonia Emergency Response Plan HERE which was created to "protect us" should a critical event occur at the WE Energies LNG plant to be built on North Road. Notice how little information is in this plan pertaining to resident safety and evacuation procedures. Notice how brief the entire safety plan is.
This incident response plan says exactly three things:
Evacuate to the parking lot / North Rd.
Call 911
Evacuate if needed
As a career incident response leader and someone that audits incident response plans, there is no additional detail in here that would provide guidance to WE Energies or a municipality in handling an emergency beyond these three steps (which are pretty obvious).
For a real emergency response plan, I would expect to see more detail around communications & obligations to report damages. This is the bare minimum guidance that I audit response plans for and this shows none:
2.3.2 Plan Elements Organizations should have a formal, focused, and coordinated approach to responding to incidents, including an incident response plan that provides the roadmap for implementing the incident response capability. Each organization needs a plan that meets its unique requirements, which relates to the organization’s mission, size, structure, and functions. The plan should lay out the necessary resources and management support. The incident response plan should include the following elements:
Mission Strategies and goals
Senior management approval
Organizational approach to incident response
How the incident response team will communicate with the rest of the organization and with other organizations
Metrics for measuring the incident response capability and its effectiveness
Roadmap for maturing the incident response capability
How the program fits into the overall organization
Why would this additional stuff be important to us? Let's say that the worst case really does happen ... WE Energies calls 911 and most likely their corporate Emergency Response team. Damage, possibly catastrophic damage, will occur to surrounding lands -- who is responsible for assessing that damage? who is responsible for reporting that damage to the municipality and nearby landowners? Who handles the insurance claims? the long-term regular updates?
Without having this explicitly written into the plan, we will be put into the very vulnerable position of needing to discuss actual property damages with our individual insurance companies, our town board, and WE Energies legal team during an emergency.
Be prepared to question your town elected officials, county government officials and WE Energies representatives about your concerns. Question your town supervisors (Perry Goetsch, Brian Derge, Peter Mark, Carl Jaeger) about this. Question the county employees and committee representatives charged with writing and approving this minimal plan. This document was approved by all three parties - yet is quite minimal. Thanks to our County Supervisor - Amy Rinard for making an official Freedom of Information Act request from the County for this document. Without her action, we may never have seen this document.
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