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With the
2006 Hurricane Season looming overhead, weather forecasters are promising
another eventful year. Last year, hurricane Katrina provided not only an
enormous amount of hardships and challenges to the southern states, but
also provided excellent training and information for Alabama Agriculture
emergency response personnel. We wanted to give you a brief overview in
this article of our agriculture plans and response capabilities.
Earlier
this year, the AL Dept. of Agriculture (ADAI) created a State Agriculture
Response Team (SART) to respond to agriculture emergencies and to
coordinate response efforts and communication with our agriculture
stakeholders. ADAI has many responsibilities to the citizens of Alabama,
such as food safety, plant health, pesticide & chemical safety, meat
inspection, and probably most notably, animal health. We are responsible
for all animal or agriculture emergencies and needs for Alabama,
particularly in an emergency or disaster. As you can imagine, trying to
coordinate the response and communication among all of our agriculture
partners becomes an enormous challenge, and this is the reason SART was
created.
ADAI SART
Resources
We have a
mobile Incident Command Post, with state of the art communications
equipment and technology on board, and supplies and systems necessary to
manage most any agriculture emergency. We have emergency response vehicles
and trailers that can be deployed to affected areas to assist with needs
ranging from a tornado strike to a poultry house fire to a hurricane
ravaged community to a foreign animal disease threat.
We are
working closely with all of our agriculture stakeholders to develop teams
and response capabilities at the county level that can deploy quickly.
These can assist with companion animal shelters and evacuation, livestock
and horse issues (emergency fencing, transport, sheltering, nutrition), as
well as a multitude of other tasks. Just so you can get an idea of the
scope of our partnerships, I’ve selected a few of them: (AL Cattlemen’s
Association, ALFA Farmers Federation, AL Poultry & Egg Association, AU
& TU Veterinary Schools, AL Veterinary Medical Association, AL Animal
Control, and many others).
As you can begin to see,
responding to an agriculture emergency requires a lot of coordination and
teamwork, and cooperation between all of our constituents to make any of
our efforts successful. If you would like more information about our
programs and plans, you may visit us on the web at www.ALSART.org.
Additional information and online training will become available soon.
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