Butler County first responders assist with Hurricane Milton relief efforts

For more than a week this month, Lieutenant Geoff Robinson of the Oxford Police Department took a break from his normal duties in the college town to travel to Pasco County, Florida. He didn’t go for vacation, though; he was there to provide support for other first responders helping residents impacted by Hurricane Milton.

Hurricane Milton made landfall in the evening Oct. 9 as a Category 3 storm, just two weeks after Hurricane Helene left a path of destruction up through North Carolina. Pasco County, home to more than 600,000 people north of Tampa, saw historic flooding which put roads under eight feet or more of water, and at least one location under 30 feet of water according to the Tampa Bay Times.

In the leadup to the storm, Butler County’s Incident Management Team (IMT) deployed Robinson and others to assist with the emergency response. The IMT is a force of roughly 50 first responders with emergency training which sends people to incidents ranging from large local concerts and football games to wildfires and hurricanes across the country.

Robinson became a part of the IMT more than a decade ago. The team has five focuses — planning, logistics, operations, finance and safety — and Robinson now serves as the operations section chief.

The IMT isn’t sent to disaster zones to man rescue boats or fly helicopters. Its work is much more focused on the big picture of relief. While deployed in Pasco County, Robinson said his team’s responsibility was to design the tactics and objectives to complete a simple mission: rescue people from water.

“We’re planning a day ahead … It’s really saying, ‘I need this many resources to accomplish the task,” Robinson said.

The IMT is part of the National Incident Management System (NIMS), a system created in 2004 to provide a framework for various governments, nonprofit organizations and private companies to coordinate responses to emergency situations. While deployed in Pasco County, Robinson said their team worked with a variety of local, state and federal partners to coordinate search and rescue operations.

One of the most important developments during the Hurricane Milton response, Robinson said, was streamlining the dispatch process for aid. Different water levels require different vehicles for rescue. Some people required airboats, while others could be reached in specialized trucks, but the emergency dispatchers didn’t have a formal set of questions to ask callers to send the right vehicles. The IMT worked to set up a list of five simple questions to determine the water level and what vehicles to send, shortening the average rescue time from three or four hours to just one hour.

“We really see our role as kind of being that backbone to help stabilize the incident alongside our partners from the local jurisdiction,” Robinson said.

While the storm surge caused issues in Pasco County, Robinson said another big concern was inland flooding of several rivers. Phil Clayton, the team commander for Ohio’s Butler County IMT, went with the team to Florida and said the river flooding was being described as a 500-year high.

Recovery from a disaster can take years. Clayton said the IMT focuses on a “30,000-foot view” of immediate rescue operations, and it left once the river flooding crested. The team left Pasco County with transition documents, though, and Clayton said they’ll keep in touch with local responders.

The IMT deploys when other governments put out a call through the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC). Under EMAC, which was signed into law in 1996, U.S. states and territories can request assistance from other jurisdictions during governor-declared states of emergency or disaster.

“Every bit of expense that is incurred by members for equipment, for personnel, for time … is reimbursed from the State of Florida to the State of Ohio,” Clayton said. The program has a net-zero impact.

For the Hurricane Milton response, Butler County’s IMT sent 12 people including Robinson and Clayton to assist with operations, logistics and planning. Roughly 60 first responders from across the county are involved in the IMT overall.

While every county in Ohio has an emergency management agency, Clayton said Butler County is the only one he’s aware of with a dedicated IMT which deploys to other states. The team is not a county requirement in state law, and its members have all pursued and been accredited in high-level training to prepare for a variety of disaster scenarios.

“We have a unique demographic of responders here that have sought out different trainings and higher level accreditations than maybe some of those in the larger counties … It’s kind of a coalition of the willing,” Clayton said.

The skills the IMT brings to disaster relief efforts apply to situations closer to home, too. The IMT pays attention to wind damage, large concerts in Hamilton and even Miami University football games. When the remnants of Hurricane Helene caused power outages in southwest Ohio, members of the IMT helped with the Butler County response, Clayton said.

“We take care of our home first,” Robinson said. “... We utilize a couple of the [IMT] people to help build the plans and help be an emergency resource, should some incident expand or something bad happen up here.”