In Iowa, they put out the call for help and Minnesota answered, deploying the state’s All Hazard Incident Management Team.

Eden Prairie Fire Inspector Scott Taylor was among the eight team members sent down to help out in Louisa County. It was the team’s first deployment since forming about three years ago.

“This is Minnesota’s first try at it, and we were very successful,” said Taylor.

The Minnesota team was sent down to the southeast corner of Iowa, primarily focusing on the small town of Oakville.

“The town was completely submerged,” noted Taylor.

The reason the Type 3 All Hazard IMT team was asked to go was because all of Iowa’s resources were capped because of flooding in Cedar Rapids and Des Moines, he added.

The small county of Louisa “needed a lot of help,” he said.

Through an Emergency Management Assistance Compact or EMAC between states, Iowa asked Minnesota to send a team.

Ulysses Seal, Bloomington fire chief and team leader, noted that the deployment went very well.

“But you know we’ve got good people so I wouldn’t have expected anything else.”

Seal said that each state or urban area has the ability to sponsor an All Hazard IMT. Minnesota’s team has about 60 people from various backgrounds.

Seal said, as states have these greater needs and suffer incidents that stress out their capabilities to respond, they’re going to ask for help more now than in the past.

“The states are growing the teams and I think all the states are becoming more and more interdependent with regards to response to these kinds of issues,” he noted.

All hazard

Like the name implies, the Type 3 All Hazard Incident Management Team is a way to apply a planning process to any type of disaster.

The Minnesota team formed about three years ago, and Taylor joined up during the second round of training: He described the training as taking the tenets from the National Incident Management System and then enhancing them.

Training is very intense, he noted, “They want to simulate what an actual event is.”

Eden Prairie has five members on the Type 3 All Hazard IMT:  Fire Chief George Esbensen, Assistant Fire Chief Rick Hammerschmidt, Police Chief Rob Reynolds, Taylor and Assistant Fire Chief Tom Schmitz. As part of their training a number of those members shadowed a Type 1 All Hazard Incident Management Team last year.

Taylor wanted to give credit to Eden Prairie’s City Manager and Council for supporting Eden Prairie’s emergency responders in this endeavor.

City Manager Scott Neal noted that for its investment Eden Prairie receives a group of emergency response providers “who’ve seen it all.”

“They’ve not only seen it all but they’ve done it all.”

Neal said the work offers a great base of experiences for them to have “that they learn from and they bring that base of knowledge back here.”

He said that it’s a great training opportunity that the city is reimbursed for.

The Eden Prairie Fire Chief had similar thoughts on the advantages to being a part of the team.

“There’s an inherent benefit to any jurisdiction that has a member or members on the team,” Esbensen said.

In Iowa

Taylor returned from his 10-day deployment July 3. His position on the team was safety officer.

His responsibility was to identify and put measures in place to mitigate any unsafe things that could take place, both with the team and the townspeople.

He also ensured they had a safe environment for the Urban Search and Rescue teams to work in.

They had three USAR teams come in, one from Minnesota and two from Iowa, he noted.

USAR’s task was to make sure no one was left behind and check the structural integrity of every building before they could let the public in.

Taylor worked with Department of Health “to find out what we had in the water.”

Answer: “a lot of contamination.”

As part of their work, they set up decontamination stations for the responders to use.

Once they let people back in, safety shifted to making sure those citizens had masks and gloves because of mold and spores growing.

When they left, a quarter of the town still had water in it, he noted.

Taylor noted that this was the first flood he’s responded to. But, he said his work shadowing a Type 1 team in Oregon was “very helpful to the work we did now.”

He said the idea behind the All Hazard Team is to be able to put a process in place that “will work for anything regardless of what it is.”

 “The system works really well.”