The Baxter County Office of Emergency Management has not only been working with local emergency personnel, but they’ve also been in contact with state officials leading up to Monday’s eclipse. Director David Stults spoke with KTLO, Classic Hits and The Boot’s Heather Loftis.
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STULTS: we actually do it on a conference call with the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management, also known ADEM for the state. Yesterday at 2, we were kind of hearing the same things going on around the state that people were here probably, seeing, you know, kind of busy Thursday, Friday, a little bit Saturday morning. And then it seems like everybody’s, you know, kind of hunkering down for the weekend now that they got stocked up on all the essentials. I know we had a lot of sales going on, you know, outdoor sales and things, which is really cool to see a lot of people out, getting out, going to those things. For the most part, it looks like everyone’s hunkering down now and it’s just a calm before the storm, so to speak.
LOFTIS: David, you and your team and kind of plan for this as you would a Fourth of July weekend. That was kind of a common phrase that we heard all week from from officials and planning for this area to triple in size. a lot of people are questioning where are all the people, but it’s like you said, it’s the calm before the storm.
STULTS: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s kind of with these, it’s kind of hard to tell. I would say the only thing that’s different from a Fourth of July weekend, you know, we have that great fireworks show at ASU-Mountain Home, you know, if they’re a week, two weeks before the Fourth of July, but I would say the major thing that’s different is, you know, you don’t see, you know, we know there’s gonna be people there at those events. We just don’t know. We have no clue, really. And the traffic that we see throughout the day, it’s kind of hard to tell, unless you’re seeing a lot of out of state tags, you know, it’s kind of hard to tell if is this actually people that don’t live around here coming in to see this eclipse, or, you know, what exactly it is, you know, unless you’re driving to those campsites, the RV park, you know, driving around to our hotels, you know, that’s really what we’ve been using as a tall tale sign of influx of people is going to those areas, you know, where, of course, this is a big attraction around this time of year where people come in and, and stay for, you know, You know as we’re leading up to summer months and things like that, but this one is very unique very different to kind of get a feel for are we really getting a lot of people or is it just kind of normal track?
LOFTIS: Well, I’ll answer that campground question next because we’ve got Dylan Edwards with the Corps of Engineers, and he’s going to talk about the campgrounds here when we get done with you. But just your your final advice for local people as we prepare for totality coming up in almost 24 hours from now.
STULTS: I would just say to make sure you do have all those essentials. It looks like everyone’s been doing a good job of that. Make sure you got stocked up on fuel. Hopefully, you know, traffic and everything, especially for tomorrow after the event goes well. I would caution everyone just in case to prepare for delays, you know, prepare for traffic jams, things like that. The potential to not get where you need to go quick, fast and in a hurry. Also, you know, if you do need to call 911, absolutely do so. We got dispatchers on hand ready to take your call as well. Remember our non-emergent line that 870-425-2361 and we’ll just here to help.
LOFTIS: David, one last question for you. When you talk about the traffic jams, we’re all kind of sensing that we might have more of a traffic issue. The partial eclipse ends at 3:12 tomorrow. So kind of that 3:00 hour tomorrow, how will you and your team be staffed around the county to help with that traffic?
STULTS: So us and Mountain Home Police Department, having their own dispatch, we actually are going to have four of our dispatchers, two Mountain Home Police dispatchers. We’ll have our EOC going, which is Emergency Operations Center. We’re going to have six people able to take 911 calls, dispatch out calls for fire, law, and EMS. I think we’re going to do a great job. We’ll see what happens.
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