Are you part of WARN? Would you like more information about it in your state? What do you know about it, or have you even heard of it? How can we help spread the word?

My system is not now part of WARN. I am aware of it. I plan to get more familiarwhen I do my Emergency Response Plan. Any information you have will be helpfull.

Bob, I did a search in the documents search using state=colorado, and typing in the keywords "emergency response plan". The results were 25 documents, many being templates from states on how to fill out your ERP. I went to a training yesterday, in fact, where one of the topics was developing an ERP, and its definately something you need to have in place. The instructor asked the class, "Do things go wrong at 10 am on Monday?", to which the operators responded no, its either a holiday or when they are out of town and a new hire is looking after things. So, its important that when you are gone, whoever is looking after the shop knows what to do should the pump fail or a main break, or worse yet, there were a natural disaster like a tornado (Do you have tornados in Colorado?) They even suggest doing a table top "disaster" after you develop your plan so you can test it for weaknesses.

Hello, The system has been helful in our local communities and is expanding as time and town boards allow their operators to participate.

Thanks Steve. My hold up is me. Colorado Rural Water is a CoWarn partner and I will be working with them. However, due to a number of things it will be the end of September before I reestablish which way is up.
Bob
Yes, we have our share of tornadoes.

Our warn program in new yok can be accessed by going to this web site www.nywarn.org The program works well on all local and regional levels. The one big issue that should be resolved with your community is the insurance should be in place before proceeding. This applies for equipment but also employees due to workers compensation issues. Have a clean line of liabilitybefore some one recieves a injury.

To contact our Rural Water office in n.y. ask for PatScalara @ pscalera@ruralwater.org Pat is a regional chair as well as C.E.O. of our N.Y. office and she will refer you to our representative for more information.

We administer the WYOWARN in our state. We have model agreements on our web site at www.warws.com It has worked very well in our state. Almost all of our larger communities are actively participating and I am working with our smaller systems to understand what the WARN is. We do classes and table tops at our spring and fall conferences. If you are going to join a WARN it will be important for you to also get some training on NIMS/SIMS.

I'm interested in how your small systems are participating in WARN. In several states I have talked to, only the medium and large systems are signing up. I've heard a couple of different reasons for that, one being that the mutual aid agreement requires that the community receiving the support pay back the community that donated the service within 60 days? Is this true? Have you heard any feedback about this?

In Illinois, it seems like only the large systems are involved. I know that in Pennsylvania its also mostly large systems. I've also heard that the grant that established the WARN program is over and for some states there might be a fee started for any community that participates so that the program can be maintained. Have any of you heard anything like that?

To me, being a partner in the WARN program is a no brainer, we should all be helping each other out if we can, and I know we all feel a responsibility to help provide safe drinking water, whether that be in our own communities or in a neighboring community. So, why aren't more systems signing up?

I gave a talk about SmallWaterSupply.org to a group of Illinois Operators in September, and I asked the 50 or so people in the room, how many were a part of ILWARN. Not a single hand went up.

So, please give me your thoughts and also if you know of anything we can do to help get more systems interesting in WARN, please share that as well.

Steve,
Give Pat a call she knows who our rural water rep. is for the warn system and they can maybe write a small article for our news letter.

If you are reading this I went through the article you wrote for our magazine and it looks good. I will just include some opening remarks and a introduction.
Talk later
Greg