Emergency guru focuses local efforts

WASILLA — Although he hopes the Mat-Su Borough won’t have to learn first-hand how prepared local responders are to handle a worst-case scenario event, Emergency Manager Tom Samyda believes it’s well prepared.

Samyda, who started in mid-December, should know. He’s the Borough’s point man on a host of emergency preparedness issues. As a former state emergency response employee, he’s seen the response plans of enough communities to be able to compare.

His job at the Borough includes:

• Helping update the Borough’s Emergency Operations Plan, the local handbook for disaster response.

• Taking Inventory of assets to find out where to get what may be needed if the worst happens.

• Helping oversee community readiness programs like Fire Wise and Community Watch.

• In the event of an emergency, running the Emergency Operations Center, freeing up the incident response team to be on the scene of the disaster.

• When floods have receded, fires snuffed out or other disaster resolutions, directing Borough efforts to pick up the pieces.

Samyda said that in the past, that last duty — disaster recovery — wasn’t delegated to a specific employee.

When he came on board, Samyda talked to the person who held the position after the 2006 floods, who told him, “People didn’t realize this went on for months and months, and I’m still dealing with this, and I’ve got to get back to my regular job.”

Samyda came to the Borough from the state’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, where he ran the state’s emergency operations center. He worked on the state end of the process, often receiving calls from local communities, including the Mat-Su Borough.

“It’s nice to be a little closer to the pointy end of the spear here,” Samyda said.

A Palmerite, he said not having to commute to Fort Richardson every day is also nice.

Before he was hired, Samyda said his current responsibilities fell to Dennis Brodigan, the Borough’s director of Emergency Services.

“To be able to manage the workload, he delegated out to wherever he could,” Samyda said. “The downside is the work was spread out,” with no clear focal point for a many projects.

Brodigan said he’s happy to have Samyda to focus those efforts.

With Samyda on hand to deal with the longer, more extended projects, Brodigan said he can get back to “the daily oversight of the administration of the entire Borough emergency services.”

That’s not a small job either, as the department is the Borough’s largest with 492 paid on-call responders and 30 full-timers.